B R A S S I C A Rapa,
Common Turnip.
TETRAD YNAMIA Siliquosa.
Gen. C h a r . Cal. erect, partly cohering. Seeds
globular. Pod nearly cylindrical; the partition
prominent, awl-shaped. Glands 4.
Spec. Char. Root stem-like, orbicular, depressed,
fleshy. Radical leaves lyrate, ro u g h ; those of the
stem nearly entire, smooth.
Syn. Brassica Rapa. Linn. Sp. P i. 931. Sm. FL
Brit. 720. Huds. 289. With. 591. Hull. 148.
Relh. 262. Siblh. 2Q3. Abbot. 145. Mart.
Rust. t. 49, 50.
Rapa sativa rotunda. Raii Syn. 294.
F r e q u e n t about the borders of fields; but whether truly
wild, or the outcast of cultivation, is not always readily ascertained.
It is biennial, and flowers in April. The use of this
root as a winter fodder for cattle is sufficiently notorious, especially
in Norfolk and Suffolk.
The root is very fleshy and succulent, of a globose figure,
more or less elongated or depressed, white, often tinged externally
with purple or green, with a taper base throwing out
numerous fibres. Culture, in a soil not too rank, renders it
sweet, and far less acrid than when wild. The stem is upright,
branched, round, leafy and smooth. Radical and lower stem
leaves lyrate, jagged, dark green, rough ; the upper ones nearly
or quite entire, heart-shaped, clasping the stem, smooth, rather
glaucous. Flowers bright yellow, numerous, in terminal corymbs.
Calyx more spreading than is strictly proper to the
genus. Pods cylindrical, veiny, smooth.
Mr. T. A. Knight, so celebrated as a botanical physiologist
and cultivator, assures us the Swedish Turnip proves, by the
experiment of cross impregnation, rather a variety of this
than of B. oleracea, t. 969, he having never been able to obtain
any offspring betwixt any variety of the latter and either
the Swedish or English Turnip, but, on the contrary, he has
produced every gradation of appearance between the two latter.