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Damasonium alisma
Damasonium alisma, starfruit, is a small flowering marsh plant of the water plantain family, native to Europe through to Siberia and now rare in Britain. It grows in shallow, open, acidic ponds and is hard to keep outside its natural wetland habitat.
Damasonium alisma, commonly known as starfruit, is a species of flowering marsh plant. Its native range includes parts of Great Britain, France, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, and Kazakhstan.
Damasonium alisma is native to the British Isles and was at one time commonly found in south and central England. Numbers have declined as a result of the loss of pond habitats. It was not recorded in the wild in 2006 and is classified as endangered within the United Kingdom. Seeds from the (extinct) Headley Heath population were germinated in undisturbed ponds managed by Surrey Wildlife Trust in 2013, and have grown there each year since (at least up to 2018).
Damasonium alisma grows in acidic ponds. In Great Britain it went into decline along with the village pond. It once grew in many English counties from Sussex north to Shropshire, but by 1900 was reduced to two ponds in Buckinghamshire and one in Surrey. It is gradually starting to make a comeback due to intense conservation efforts. It requires open, well-lit, shallow water to grow in and regularly churned-up mud for its seeds to germinate.
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Damasonium alisma by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
