are the long strappy leaves part of it? my initial thought on the flowers was it was a small flowered sunflower. but if the strappy leaves belong to it I'm nor certain.

Hi, I agree with Sbg, I would have said sunflower, but those strappy leaves look more like millet to me, Derek.

Yes, the long strappy leaves belong to the same plant as the flowers. I don't think they're sunflowers, since they're only one inch across. Millet is a component of bird seed, however, the descriptions of millet I've found on the Internet don't seem to have any flowers.

Millet is a grass, so, no, you're right, it doesn't flower like that. With respect, can you track down from those yellow flowers, and see just what leaves are attached? Those strappy ones really do look like a grass leaf, and, as said above, the flower looks like a tiny species of sunflower (helianthus).

Cannabis plants grew up under my mum's bird table once, so I potted up three. One I put in the garden where the slugs ate it, another failed somewhere else, and the third I planted in an indoor planter in the police station at Waterlooville where it grew to 2ft tall and wide and no one noticed it for 2 weeks! That was outside the governors' offices, too. (I can live with the consequences of this admission, I think, it was several years ago!)

Thank you, Hortum, you sent me in the right direction. I traced the flower plants down to the roots and found more flowers that I recognised, also the leaves were different from the strappy ones (the flowers at the top had hardly any leaves). The strappy leaves possibly are Millet, but the flowers? They are almost certainly Corn Marigold, escapees from a nearby wildflower garden. I didn't recognise them because the flowers were 5 feet off the ground, probably (I think) because they were struggling through the tall grasses, trying to get to the light. So, problem solved!

Interestingly, I too had Cannabis growing in the same place last year, although it never flowered. I didn't recognise it at all, until a neighbour pointed it out. At first I didn't believe him, because I thought Cannabis was unlikely to grow in Scotland, particularly during the cold wet summer of 2011. But Hortum's story suggests that it really was what I was growing.