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!




October 31, 2010

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.