Grey Knight

Mushrooms are not plants. They do not have photosynthesis but are saprophytes, which means they get their energy from dead organic matter and not from sunlight. Photosynthetic organisms fix carbon from the air, heterotroph organisms like mushrooms need carbon already fixed by other organisms. Like plants they have cell walls, but those contain chitine instead of cellulose. Mushrooms are part of the large kingdom of Fungi, together with yeast and moulds and other, mostly small and monocellular organisms.



You can find the Grey Knight (Tricholoma terreum) until the first frost around pine and fir trees, and they are edible (actually, they taste good!).















Here is part of a fairy ring of Grey Knights. A tree is in the centre of the ring, and around it underground the mycelium spreads, with the spore-carrying mushrooms, the flowers of the mycelium, above ground. In the circle a lot of plants cannot grow, because the mycelium spreads poisonous substances or covers the roots of other plants. At the outside of the circle, out of reach of the mycelium, grasses grow normally. When the mushrooms disappear, the ring will still be visible.

Wet

Fallen leaves in a pond; reflection of nearly empty branches.

Car

Looking for a vintage car?


Seems you've found it ...

Black Bryony

In the West of Africa and some other tropical regions yams, the roots of some plants of the family of Dioscoreaceae are staple foods. The only member of this family in France, the Black Bryony (Tamus communis) also has a big root but it is not edible at all.


Roadsides and bushes are decorated by garlands of red-orange berries of this vine.

















The grey rag you see in the picture above has been green and glossy, a few months ago.

Common Blue

In a warm autumn this butterfly flies until november. At sunrise thousands of Common Blues (Polyommatus icarus) sit waiting for the first rays of sunlight to come to life after a cold night.


When it is asleep you cannot see where its name comes from: the bright blue of the upper side of the wings.
















Oops! Bad luck! A crab spider!

Spiral Orchid

Most orchids are visible in spring and summer, only the Spiral Orchid (Spiranthes spiralis) is flowering now in poor grasslands with sparse vegetation. A lot of plants have their flowers and leaves arranged in spirals, but in many species it is more difficult to discern this pattern.






















The spiral Orchid is small, about a decimeter, and its flowers are only a few millimeters.

Field Eryngo

Those prickly leaves that scratch your ankles while you are walking through a meadow are Field Eryngo (Eryngium campestre).


It is easy to recognise, the wax coating that protects the leaves against summer heat gives the plant its typical green-bluish hue.

It looks like a thistle, a prickly plant with flowers in heads. But no, it does not belong to the family of Asteraceae like other thistles (and the dandelion and the daisy), but to the Apiaceae. Members of this family have flowers in umbels, as you can see in wild carrots and fennel.


In the Field Eryngo the stalks under each flower have so much shortened you don't see them any more. Bracts form a ring under the flowers.

Horseshoe Vetch

In a dry and sunny spot grows Horseshoe Vetch (Hippocrepis comosa).


Early in the morning, flowers still asleep, crowned with dewdrups ...


















... and later in the day, wide awake.

Meadow Clary

The Meadow Clary (Salvia pratensis) is a sage but not one you would like to use in the kitchen; it has no fragrance. Its flowering season is nearly over now, the last stalks in bloom will soon be mowed and turned into hay together with the grass in the meadows where it grows.

This Killer Bug (Rhinocorus iracundus) lays in wait for its prey, another insect, between the flowers, and then uses its long rostrum to suck out this prey.














It seems to prefer the Meadow Clary. But why? Yes, its brilliant red goes well with the dark blue of the flower, but that's not enough of a reason. And there are not more insects to be found on Meadow Clary then on other flowers. So why?

Three grasses

With most grasses the flowering takes only a few days. Today it is difficult to find just one flowering panicle, but a week ago everywhere those yellow anthers moved in the wind.


It is Upright Brome (Bromopsis erecta), a grass growing in plenty in calcareous meadows.

To see Quaking Grass (Briza media) in flower, one also has to wait for another a year. Here a young grasshopper sits between the spikelets.













 

But the Yellow Oatgrass (Trisetum flavescens) is in full bloom. Now its delicate spikelets are rather white than yellow.
















Yesterday evening in this meadow the evening sun did bring out the colors of those tree grasses. Pink-purplish for the Quaking Grass and yellow for the Upright Brome, mixed with the silvery panicles of the Yellow Oatgrass.

Tassel Hyacinth

This crab spider does not make a web, but sits in wait for its prey on a flower. When an insect visits, in search of nectar, it is jumped upon and killed. Here she (yes, it is a she, males are much smaller) choose a Tassel Hyacinth (Muscari comosum).

The Tassel Hyacinth is now in flower on roadsides and in meadows. It is a bulbous plant, like the hyacinths that grow in gardens. On the picture below you can see it has two kinds of flowers. Below are the purplish-brownish fertile flowers. The top of the plant is attractive to insects (and spiders) due to the strong blue color of the infertile flowers.

Unfurling

In most vascular plants the young leaves are folded or they form a cylinder that unrolls. Ferns are different, their fronds are uncurling spirals. Now is the time to look for them. The following two should be easy to find.


The Tongue Fern (Asplenium scolopendrium) grows on steep and stony slopes in the shadow of trees.
















And the Common Bracken (Pteridium aquilinum) covers the forest floor under oaks and chestnuts.

Two Bee Orchids

Here are the smallest orchids to be found around Trémolat, only a few centimetres high. Take care where you are walking! They grow both in dry places with sparse and short vegetation. In a clearance in a open oak wood, but also in the kind of field which does not look beautiful at all and where people burn their rubbish or exercise their motor bike.

Both are from the genus of bee orchids, so called because the flowers look like bees sitting on a flower. At least, male bees from some species think the resemblance striking; they try to copulate with the flowers and thus take the pollen from one flower to the other.



The first one is the Yellow Bee Orchid (Ophrys lutea).


















And here you see the Dark Bee Orchid (Ophrys sulcata).

Those mediterranean species have their northern limit in this part of France. Maybe because they can’t stand a colder climate, maybe because their pollinators can only survive in milder weather.

Male Orchid

It rains too much this month!

Here an insect is seeking shelter in a Male Orchid (Orchis mascula). Orchid flowers have, like other monocots, three sepals and three petals. The dorsal sepal and two petals folded together serve as an umbrella over the head of the fly. It is sitting on the third petal, a lip covered with darker specks to show the way to nectar, but it is not interested at all in food. The other two sepals are folded outward.

Male orchids typically grow in deciduous woods, and the flowers appear just before the new leaves on the trees prevent sunlight reaching the wood floor. Despite their strong purple color they are easy to overlook. The orchid leaves are dark green with brownish purple spots.

Chalk Milkwort

In general wild flowers of the same species are all the same color. Not here, this medley of white and blue in ameadow is Chalk Milkwort (Polygala calcarea) and it is a truly wild plant.






















The small flowers are well provided with adornments. The white frilly petal serves as a landing strip for butterflies and bees which have to put their proboscis between to blue wings to get nectar.

Western Spider Orchid

Since end of March there are flowering orchids in Trémolat. Here is the earliest, a Western Spider Orchid (Ophrys occidentalis). It is a small pale green plant, only 10 or 20 cm high. It is easy to crush it when you are looking for it.



On its velvety lip it has a clear spot, the mirror, which makes it look like a spider. At least, that’s what we humans think. Some bees believe it is another bee, sitting on a green flower. It even has eyes!

Great Horsetail

 A lot has changed since a hundred million years ago, but not those aliens.




They are sporophores of the Great Horsetail (Equisetum telmateia). During the Cretaceous several kinds of vascular plants already existed. (Not here in Dordogne, the greater part of modern France was below sea-level.) Like the dinosaurs most of them have become extinct or, at least, have changed a lot, but not the Equisetum-family. Today you can find horsetails which look virtually the same as their ancient ancestors.



The sporophores of the Great Horsetail do not have any chlorophyll. Later this spring the green, vegetative stems of this plant will appear.

Purple Toothwort

What is it ... purple under the poplars?


A mass of flowers amongst last year’s fallen leaves. It is the Purple Toothwort (Lathraea clandestina). A parasite living on the roots of poplar trees.















It is an underground plant, you see only flowers and, sometimes, the ends of branches coming above ground. Flower buds appear from between white scales.

Pine Processionary

Now the Pine processionaries (Thaumetopoea pytiocampa) get wanderlust. They leave the cotton candy, high up in a pine tree, where they have lived all winter, and descend to the wood floor, linked together, one after another.
 

Slowly the procession moves forward until it reaches a place where the earth is loose and warmed by the sun. There the caterpillars get together and dig in with rythmic movements, and start pupating underground.











Do you need to be an intelligent insect to show social behaviour like this? Not if you follow some simple rules of thumb. Like:

(1) When the days get longer and warmer, leave your nest and head for downwards.
(2) Cling to the tail of a colleague.
(3) If you can’t find a free tail, walk to a place where the earth smells better because it is warm and loose.
(4) If you cannot find a better smelling place, stop walking and start making rythmic lateral movements.
(5) If you discover a colleague that makes rythmic lateral movements, do the same, as close to him/her as you can, even if that means you have to release the tail you followed.
(6) If it gets dark (because you are covered with earth, or because the sun has set), stop moving.

No need to think, no need for a leader, no management problems...

Lesser Celandine

We need some spring ...


... and here's the Lesser Celandine (Ranunculus ficaria)!

Corn Salad

Today I found at the roadside enough of greens to fill a small salad bowl. It was Corn Salad (Valerianella locusta), the wild cousin of the Lamb Lettuce or Corn Salad you can buy in the supermarket. It is easy to find, the little rosettes of a very clear green grow in gardens and cultivated fields, where in autumn the grains germinate when it is getting colder. Only in winter you can eat the leaves, after the formation of flowers in spring they are tasteless.



Corn Salad belongs to the family of Valerianaceae which is characterized bij the forked branches. In the picture you see the resulting symmetry.

Lichens

The lichens below are alliances between two very different organisms, fungi and green algae. The fungus collects water and minerals for both, and the algae make high-energy nutritients via photosynthese. To stay alive the fungus needs algae, but the algae are very well able to live without a fungal partner. Lichens grow very slowly, that’s why you find them mostly in places where they don’t need to compete with other plants. Like here on a branch of a tree, or on a rock, where other plants just can’t survive. In the air or in the surface of a rock they find enough minerals to grow, and they can stay for months without any water; in dry conditions their biological activity stops temporarily.



Lichens are classified according to their forms. A classification according to the combination of fungal and algal partners should be more appropriate, but many lichens are not yet well described, and maybe there exist more combinations of fungi and algae as we know. In the picture left a fruticose lichen, and down and right a foliose one.







Fragments of lichen, small clusters of fungus and algae, are blown away and start growing wherever they find circumstances to settle. This is the most common way to reproduce for a lichen. The fungus as well as the alga also has a way to reproduce while exchanging genetic material. The new fungus growing from the fungal spores has to find an algal partner to form a new lichen.

Catkins

Temperatures are just above zero, but since last week the first Hazels (Corylus avellana) are in flower. The bushes got a light yellow hue, caused by hundreds of drooping male catkins, each several centimeters long.






















Today I found some female flowers too. Mostly they start flowering about two weeks after the male flowers, maybe to avoid fertilization with pollen from the same bush. But here the lapse was much shorter.


The female flowers are tiny, consisting of only millimetre-long sticky red pistils.

Common Dogwood

It’s the winter sun that gives the branches of the Common Dogwood (Cornus sanguinea) their colour. A red pigment, anthocyanin, is formed under influence of light and cold. It protects the twigs against the harmful effects of sunlight.























Dogwood is very common among the scrubs in dry and calcareous areas. It makes patches of colour in a wintery landscape, as you see when you look with nearly closed eyes.

Tor Grass

In the calcareous meadows where you can find lots of orchids you can also find a lot of Tor Grass (Brachypodium rupestre). It grows in large clumps and you can recognize it because it is coarser than the other grasses that surround it. In winter it is pale yellow, not as grey as other grasses.



Today an icing of frost enhances its beauty.


















Last summer its clear, light green stood out.

Butchers Broom

Just before Christmas I found at the market these prickly green branches with red berries. It is called Butchers Broom (Ruscus aculeatus) but False Holly would be a better name because it is used as a substitute for the real thing. However, no need to buy it, to pick some branches from the woods does no harm. Today, after decorating homes for the holidays, there is enough left. It is a small shrub with stiff and straight branches, growing in the shadow of deciduous trees.

When you have a good look, you can still find some small greenish flowers. They are seated in the center of a leaf, or so it seems. But this false holly has no leaves, they are cladodes, branches flattened into an oval shape. It looks a little bit like asparagus which belongs to the same family and has also cladodes.