White frost

First rays of morning sun after a cold night.


An umbel of Burnet saxifrage (Pimpinella saxifraga) is covered in hoar frost.

Stinking hellebore

In a wood grows this strange protuberance, a sudden patch of color amidst dark green palmate leaves from last season.

It is the new sprout of a Stinking hellebore (Helleborus foetidus). Yes, it does stink, you'll discover the smell when you rub a leaf between your hands.

In February or March the sprout will have developed into a flowering stem with green, bell-shaped flowers. Not unlike the cultivated Christmas roses that are supposed to flower around Chrismas (but alas, not always do ...). It is from the same family.

Autumn colours

Trees change their colours now.

 



















Chlorophyll produces energy in a plant and gives it its green summer colour. When after summer there is less light and the days and nights get colder, cork cells form in the veins of leaves. Thus the transport of nutrients and water in the leaf is interrupted and it cannot make any more new chlorophyll. When there is no more chlorophyll in stock because it is all used up, the leaf loses its green colour. Other pigments, especially carotenoids who are yellow or orange, become visible. They have been there all summer, but only now you can see their colour.



 Some leaves of an Norway maple (Acer platanoides) are fallen in a shallow stream. In the green leaf below chlorophyll is still visible between the veins, elsewhere other pigments are dominating.













The changes in the metabolism in the leaf, diminishing light, and the fall in temperatures provoke chemical processes which result in other sets of pigments.


Here, in a Blackberry bush (Rubus fruticosus), red anthocyanids have emerged with the first frost.

Autumn flowers

Here are two tiny plants flowering now.

The Autumn squill (Scilla autumnalis) likes its surroundings dry and with only sparse vegetation. It is not common in the Dordogne, so you are not likely to stumble upon it. Moreover, it is very small, a big specimen may measure 10 cm. And only during two weeks it is in flower, and after this it is nearly invisible. Like other Squills that flower in spring it is a bulb, the greater part of the year subterranean. If you really really look for them you'll be able to find, after flowering, some grey-green, millimetre-wide leaves.


This year it was late, may be because of this summer's dry weather.
















Normally you find end of august, beginning of september, hundreds of small Spiral orchids (Spiranthes spiralis). At least if you look in poor, dry, calcareous meadows with sparse vegetation, an environment that is not very common. But this year I found only two flowering stalks, also much later than usual.


This is a portrait of the first one.



















A hundred meter further on was the second one. From this one here some flowers in detail. You can see it is a real miniature orchid. The blue in the background comes from a stone.

Three creepers

Glowing red leaves of creepers are now to be seen: Parthenocissus are climbing walls and hanging from trees. They are, like the grape-vine, from the family of Vitaceae but their small blue-black raisins are not edible. Basically, they come in three kinds.


The first one is the False Virginia-Creeper (Parthenocissus inserta). If you find a creeper outside a garden, probably it is this one. It garlands, and sometimes overgrows completely, trees. The leaves, now turning into flaming red, are divided into five separate leaves.












The real Virginia-Creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia) has about the same leaves but grows on walls, mostly cultivated. On this picture, taken when it snowed last winter, you see the small suction-pads it uses to attach itself to a surface.











Those two species have their origins in North-America, the next one, despite its name, comes from Asia.


It is inaptly called Boston Ivy (Parthenocissus tricuspidata). Not only it is not from Boston, also it is not an ivy. And where its scientific name suggests leaves with three points, they quite often have five or more. On this spring picture you see the young, undivided leaves which still have red rims.

Common Juniper

On hazy mornings in September the Common Junipers (Juniperus communis) are disguised as Christmas trees ahead of time. They are covered with spider webs, made visible by morning dew. The spiders like the Junipers because many small insects find enough to eat there. The berries are also edible for us, they have a particular flavour and a strong, sweet-bitter taste. Delicious in sauerkraut. (Yes, also the berries give their name to the dutch beverage 'jenever', which became 'gin' in english, but in modern jenevers nearly no juniper berry is to be found!)



Here is a female Juniper with ripe berries between the spider webs. They need nearly two year to ripen and turn into this blue colour.
















In april-mai the Juniper flowers. Here are some branches of a male bush, just starting to flower. Junipers have wind pollination, when you touch them the pollen disperses like a cloud of smoke.

Wild Carrot

Forgotten to mow... In this dry meadow Wild Carrots (Daucus carota) abound. Sometimes they grow as high as your shoulders. There is a vague smell of carrots, but the roots are yellowish white and inedible.


The yellow dots are Hawkweed Oxtongue (Picris hieracioides).













 




An umbel against a gloomy August sky shows the characteristic build of all Apiaceae. At the root of the umbel is a ring of small ramified bracts. Several dozen stalks carry smaller umbels, each with its own ring of bracts and a posy of tiny white flowers on stalks. The beginnings of fruits are visible as dark dots in the flowers.








In the centre, just above the stem, is a darker spot. In about half of all Wild carrots there are umbels with one ore more wine red central flowers.


Normally these flowers are uncompletely formed, but here above is one who even carries stamen.

River Water-Crowfoot

At the end of May the Dordogne was covered with millions of small white flowers from River Water-Crowfoot (Ranunculus fluitans). In shallow places it is rooted in the river bottom and the long smooth stems reach the surface. Often they are uprooted by the current and taken downstream.
 

After the heavy rain in the first week of June the water level has risen and the River Water-Crowfoot all but disappeared.















But now, after a few weeks of sunshine, the Dordogne has calmed down, and here it is again!


To the enjoyment of this Banded Demoiselle (Calopteryx spelendens), a damselfly. She is laying her eggs between the submerged stems.
















Plenty of swans find plenty to eat in the clumps of River water crowfoot. Here a couple is resting after feeding.

Yellow Goat's Beard

Only on sunny mornings the flowers of Yellow Goat's Beard (Tragopogon pratensis) do open.


Here is one with some visitors.



















Like other members of the family of Asteraceae, the Yellow Goat's Beard produces seeds with a fluffy umbrella to be carried away on the wind. The flowerheads have changed now into fuzzy tennis balls.














They are so large you can distinguish the small features of each umbrella. It has a seed for a handle, and the ribs are woven together with thin, spiderweb-like tissue.

Pyramidal Orchid

The Pyramidal Orchid (Anacamptis pyramidalis) is a species common to be found in Perigord. When they start flowering in may the flower heads are triangular in shape, but now, in June, they grow longer and longer.


They grow on roadsides and in hay meadows, and when you mow the grass the cut stalks give a sweet fragrance to the mown grass.

Field Poppy

The seeds of Field Poppy (Papaver rhoeas) need a loose soil to germinate. That's why they grow in cereal fields plowed last winter or early in spring.



The seeds can lay dormant for years in the soil, to explode into flower when circumstances are favorable.

Purple Orchid

All Purple Orchid (Orchis purpurea) flowers resemble puppets with dark red hats and all have reddish specks on white, but ...


...some prefer ample dresses,

 ...or wide pants with an ethnic pattern,

...while others prefer long, tapering sleeves,

...or hairy purple polkadots.

 Who's trying to tell you plants are not trendy?

Common Whitlow-Grass

This miniature plant, the Common Whitlow-Grass (Erophila verna) is not a grass but a member of the Brassicaceae, or Crucifer-family. Mustard and Cuckoo-flowers, other crucifers, are giants compared to it. It is even smaller than a normal-sized pine-cone, as you see in the picture below.



Even if it is easy to overlook, the Common Whitlow-Grass is not difficult to find. Just put your nose to the ground in a dry place at a roadside, or in the center of a sandy path, and more often than not there are thousands of it.

Spring Violets

This is a Sweet Violet (Viola odorata). The cold does not prevent it from flowering.






















There is another violet flowering early in march, the Hairy Violet (Viola hirta) you see here.
















They look very much alike. Mostly the Sweet Violet has flowers a bit earlier than the Hairy Violet, but not always. Mostly the former is darker in colour, and the latter slightly hairier, but not always. Leaves and flowers of the Sweet Violet are a bit rounder than those of the Hairy Violet, generally, but not always. The Sweet Violet mostly smells sweet, but is sometimes odorless. The Sweet Violet often has stolons, the other one never has. Most of the time you find the hairy one in slightly drier and sunnier places than the sweet one. Etcetera, etcetera. And there exists also an intermediate form, a crossbreed between the two.

Well, how to distinguish the two? You have to take into account a number of characteristics at the same time, and even then it is easy to be wrong.

But does it really matter?

Common Alder

The Common Alder (Alnus glutinosa) only grows on marshy ground. Often, in a valley, a ribbon of trees marks the course of a streamlet.



In winter tree fellers leave piles of trunks in their wake. Those of the Common alder are easy to recognize by their clear orange colour.

Soon the tree will flower, but now only last year's female catkins are visible, they look like small black pine cones. The new male catkins are already growing longer, getting ready for things to come.

Cranes

The cranes (Grus grus) are returning from the south!


A few dozen among the thousands circling and wheeling under a pale daytime moon, today.

Bird's Nest Orchid

Seven degrees below zero this morning; and the last snow does not melt.
What is this dead, brown, stalk between the fallen leaves and a patch of snow?
 

It is the remnant of a Bird's Nest Orchid (Neottia nidus-avis), a stalk with empty seed pods.

In May it looked like this. Also brown, but a bit more pale. It has no green at all, and that's why it can live under the shadowy canopy. It gets its nutrients from the roots of other plants, not from photosynthesis.












The Ivy (Hedera helix) in the picture lives also under the canopy, but it is still green when after the falling of the leaves the winter sun reaches the forest floor.

Common Bracken

A thin coating of frost, and look, the Common Bracken (Pteridium aquilinum) changes of color and mood.


From soft brown and grey ...

... to furry white and cool blue ...

... to a deep golden hue against night blue.

Winter color

Rather depressing, this rainy winter: grey and brown and black and grey again. And the sun does not show up at all ...


But look, brilliant green with gold, streaks of bluish grey with little pink specks. Mosses and lichens do their best to impart some colour to their surroundings.

Snow!

Snow, and sun ...


And what could be more black than a black dog against the snow?