Bladdered leafy green

You can eat the leaves fried in Crete, mixed into risotto in Italy or in a cold soup (or chickpea stew) in Spain. And that's just the uses that make it into Wikipedia.

For me, it was a garden treat at Birregurra back in early November. I have to admit I was admiring the balloon-like flowers rather than the leaves. I didn't think they looked particularly edible.  

Silene vulgaris, noting that 'vulgaris' means common and is often applied to that have some practical use, is in the carnation family, Caryophyllaceae. The family is most easily recognised by the leaves being in pairs opposite one another on the stem which is often swollen at this point. 

There are some 500 species of Silene, all from the Northern Hemisphere and mostly around the Mediterranean and further north in Europe. Silene vulgaris, the Bladder Campion (campion being a name applied to a few members of the carnation family, presumably a variant of 'champion'), is from the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia. 

The coastal subspecies, martima, which is the one widely grown, flourishes in paddocks and disturbed areas in its natural habitat and seems to stick mostly to gardens in Australia.

A second variant, subspecies vulgaris, turns up more often as a naturalised (that is, from elsewhere but surviving on its own) plant in southern Australia. It's declared as a declared noxious weed in South Australia.

If you are wondering how that flower works, the swollen bladder is an expanded sepal tube - that is, the layer outside the petals. The five petals are poking out of the bladder, with a few small frilly bits, 'scales', at the point where they emerge from the tube (just visible in the picture above...).

Plants with odd flower shapes often attract many and varied common names. In this case, alternatives to the Bladder Campion are: bird's eggs, blue root, bubble-poppy, cobwell, devil's rattlebox, maiden's tears, rattlebox, rattleweed, sea pink, snappery, white bottle and white hen.

Most of those names make sense, however I didn't check the colour of the roots to see if they were blue. There is a blue-grey hue to the whole plant, in a certain light. Along with plentiful seed, root fragments (e.g. when ploughed up) are one of the ways the weedy subspecies will spread through disturbed land.