Garden burnet

Sanguisorba minor, the salad burnet, is a tufted perennial herb of the family Rosaceae growing 20 to 60 cm tall from a woody rootstock. The leaves are pinnately compound with many small, rounded, deeply toothed leaflets arranged in neat pairs, forming an attractive ferny rosette that smells faintly of cucumber when crushed. The slender, reddish stems bear small, dense, rounded to oblong flower heads in which the inconspicuous greenish flowers lack petals; the upper flowers are female with feathery crimson stigmas while the lower are male with dangling yellowish stamens. It flowers in early summer. Native to Europe, North Africa and western Asia and naturalised elsewhere, salad burnet grows on dry, calcareous grassland, downs, banks and rocky places. The cucumber-flavoured young leaves are used in salads and as a culinary herb.