The flora of Périgord in South-West France is abundant and diverse. In this blog you can find, in pictures, brief encounters with several hundreds of wild flowers and plants as they grow here in French Perigord. Following the seasons other species are added. An index of scientific and English names you find below on the right.

Corine Oosterlee is a botanist and photographer and she offers guided Botanical Walks and other activities around plants and vegetation in nature in Perigord. Do you want to know more? On www.baladebotanique.fr you can find more information. For Corine's photography see www.corineoosterlee.com. Both websites also in English.

Enjoy!




May 4, 2009

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.