Corncockle - Agrostemma githago
Medium to tall, greyish, hairy, erect plant. Leaves narrow, lanceolate, pointed. Flowers pinky purple, 30 to 50 mm, with long leaf like sepals much exceeding the 5 petals, borne on long, slender stalks.
A weed of cornfields, occasionally in waste places.
May to August.
Annual.
Widespread but quite uncommon in Britain.
Rare in Leicestershire and Rutland. In the 1979 Flora survey of Leicestershire it was found in 2 of the 617 tetrads.
It was on the 2011 VC55 Rare Plant Register (Jeeves, 2011) but is not on the current RPR (Hall & Woodward, 2022) because records are on introduced plants
Leicestershire & Rutland Map
Enter a town or village to see local records
MAP KEY:
Yellow squares = NBN records (all known data)
Coloured circles = NatureSpot records: 2025+ | 2020-2024 | pre-2020
UK Map
Species profile
- Common names
- Corncockle
- Species group:
- flowering plant
- Kingdom:
- Plantae
- Order:
- Caryophyllales
- Family:
- Caryophyllaceae
- Records on NatureSpot:
- 29
- First record:
- 01/07/1998 (John Mousley)
- Last record:
- 03/06/2025 (Pugh, Dylan)
Total records by month
% of records within its species group
10km squares with records
The latest images and records displayed below include those awaiting verification checks so we cannot guarantee that every identification is correct. Once accepted, the record displays a green tick.
In the Latest Records section, click on the header to sort A-Z, and again to sort Z-A. Use the header boxes to filter the list.











