Common Tamarisk-moss

Winter is the time to look for mosses, now they show their beauty. For most of them you need a magnifying glass, but this one is rather large. The leaves of the Common Tamarisk-moss (Thuidium tamariscinum) are several centimeters long and are easy to recognize. They are flattened, and look like miniature fern fronds.



December hoarfrost gives everything that covers the wood floor, mosses and also the leaves of English Yvy (Hedera helix) a distinctive silver rim.

Wild Service Tree

The Wild Service Tree (Sorbus torminalis) is a small rather unassuming tree which goes unnoticed amidst the oaks and hornbeams that surround it. Often it is so much in the shade of other deciduous trees it does not even make fruits. But it can live without producing brown berries: from the roots new shoots find their way up.



Only at this time of the year you notice it is not a very rare species, when it shows its splendid golden-brown autumn colour.

Daisy Fleabane

An American feeling at home here. In November, it still has a flower left among the old empty flower heads. The Daisy Fleabane (Erigeron annuus) grows in uncultivated areas and waste lands and flowers from summer until winter really begins.

Traveler's Joy

It climbs trees, hedgerows and steep rocks, and its long creepers fall down like curtains. At this time of the year its leaves are turning from green to yellow and white.



Traveler's Joy (Clematis vitalba) does not get its name because of its beautiful flowers. Where cultivated Clematises have brightly colored petals, those of Traveler's joy are small and pale green.

But in winter it shows fluffy white balls that stay on until the first snow covers them.










Like in other Ranunculaceae, in each flower several tiny oval seeds develop, and each seed ends in a long white protrusion. When the seed is ripe long white hairs make the fruit look fat and fluffy.

Grape-Vine

Among the fallen leaves of big trees a pinkish red one...

Look upwards. Contrasting with the yellow autumn leaves, high up in a fifty year old tree, there are more.


Once upon a time somebody had a vineyard here, and since then the trees have grown, and the long creepers of the Vine (Vitis vinifera) went up with them. Maybe there are even grapes for the birds ...

Small scabious

Thousands of lilac flowers on thin stems about forty centimeter high move in the wind. At the end of summer the Small scabious (Scabiosa columbaria) flowers in meadows and at roadsides.

After flowering each flowerhead changes into a tiny hedgehog. Each seed has five black thorns and a papery collar.

Herb robert

Robert Herb (Geranium robertianum) has small pink flowers you can find from early spring to late autumn in shadowy places along footpaths, among stones and in woods.

Its leaves are as long as wide and have a typical not completely nice smell if you rub them between your fingers. Often they are tinged with red.















The fruits have the form of a stork's bill. When the seeds are ripening, the bill dries out and releases the seeds hidden at its base.

Dwarf elder

A Rose chafer (Cetonia aurata) feeds on the flowers of a Dwarf elder (Sambucus ebulus). This beetle does not eat the nectar but the pollen and stamen and also other parts of the flower and even fruits. Before appearing as an adult it has lived for several years underground, in a dead trunk, or even at the bottom of a flower pot, as a fat white worm, feeding on rotten wood and compost (never on living plant parts). Despite its name the Rose chafer seems to be very fond of Dwarf elders and can be found there as long as it flowers in july and august.

The Dwarf elder forms often big groups more than a meter high on fertile soil. It is a cousin of the Common elder but is not a shrub but a perennial plant. It has the typical Elder smell, but more pungent. Frankly, when in autumn the branches die it stinks!



Often flowers and fruits are present at the same time, as can be seen here.

Maidenhair fern

A calcareous rock, a vertical surface above a pond or streamlet, even if the available sunlight is scarce, the Maidenhair fern (Adiantum capillus-veneris) feels at home.

It has very thin, black stalks, and its fronds end in small, fan-like leaves.

Limestone fern

This small unobtrusive fern grows at the foot of a slope, near the edge of a wood. Its fronds of a beautiful clear green emerge from a long underground rhizome. It is a Limestone fern (Gymnocarpium robertianum).




You have really to bend down to see its finely incised fronds. If you turn a frond (carefully, it is fragile!) you notice the sores, masses of spores, in regular rows on its backside.

Greater knapweed

Greater knapweed (Centaurea scabiosa) can survive in dry places. Its purple flowers contrast with the yellow grass.

Like with other members of the Daisy family (the Compositaea), what looks like a flower is in fact a flower head which contains several individual florets. Those are surrounded by a number of bracts which form an involucre. Here below those are visible as brown-edged scales under the flower head.











In Greater Knapweed all florets are tubular, those on the outside are somewhat larger. The ants enjoy!

Hart's Tongue Fern

The black stripes in this picture taken into the light are the spores of Hart's Tongue Fern (Asplenium scolopendrium). They grow as a brown, velvety, mass which contains thousands of them, on the backside of the fronds.

Hart's tongue Fern doesn't like dry places, horizontal surfaces and sunlight, so it grows on slopes in the shadow of trees, often near a small stream or source.

In spring young fronds emerge from between the old ones.

Blue Lettuce

A hoverfly found something to eat in this fragile blue flower.



It's a Blue Lettuce (Lactuca perennis). It likes warm and sunny places, so you only find it on well-exposed hillsides and fields. The flowers open only when it is sunny.














The rosettes look like those of the common Dandelion, but the leaves are a bit more incised. Like those, and also like the garden lettuce it has a white latex.

The shadow of another insect.

Wild Madder

Here's another member of the family of Rubiaceae. In Perigord the Wild Madder (Rubia peregrine) grows nearly everywhere where there are trees and bushes. Here it found a fence to carelessly drape its garlands around.

The small yellow-green flowers are like stars.


















The verticillate leaves stay on in winter and disappear only in spring. Some black berries of last year have not yet been eaten by birds. No, it is not what you call a tidy plant!

Great Hedge Bedstraw

The Great Hedge Bedstraw (Galium mollugo) grows in hedges but also on roadsides and hayfields. After mowing the grass and some rain the white clouds will re-appear.

Like other bedstraws this one has tiny, star-shaped flowers. Insects search them for nectar.


















All bedstraws and other members of the Rubiaceae-family have verticillate leaves. In the Great Hedge Bedstrow they are now hidden under the great mass of flowers, but in spring they looked like this.

Crab spider

Flower crab spiders sit in wait on a flower to catch insects.


Here one of the two most conspicuous species, a Thomisus onustus on a Pyramidal orchid (Anacamptis pyramidalis). When it has chosen its flower it can sit here for days, its large front paws opened to 'receive' its prey: every day a fresh one. Because it does not flee but sits motionless it is easy to photograph.

Yellow Iris

In shallow streams and ponds those long, swordlike leaves emerge from the water. When back-lit the conductive tissues are visible, the separations between the superposed long vascular cells show as darker spots.



They are the leaves of the Yellow Iris (Iris pseudacorus). The spider has put its long legs into a prolongation of its long body to make itself less conspicuous.

The flowers look very much like the irises found in gardens.

Spurges

Now roadsides and fields are flecked with yellow. The big greenish yellow spots are often made by Spurges. They are easily recognized by their colour, white milk and the form of their inflorescences. Here are three of the about twenty-five species that grow in Périgord. Their flowers are special. They grow in umbels andd consist of a female capsule and a number of male stamen on a stem, accompanied by several round or cornered glands, and this surrounded by two big coloured bracts. And from this contraption sometimes emerges another 'flower' of the same construction.



Several weeks ago the Wood Spurge (Euphorbia amygdaloides) started flowering. It likes to grow under deciduous trees. In the picture above you can see the red capsules already beginning to ripen.














The Cypress Spurge (Euphorbia cyparissias) above grows where it is dry and stony, and also elsewhere.

And this is the Yellow-headed Spurge (Euphorbia flavicoma) who has of course yellow flower-heads. Like most other spurges.

Spider orchids

This is why they are called Spider Orchids:

 

The group is considered to consist of several species. They differ in form of the flower, colour, height, flowering season and a number of other points. But there are many intermediate plants. Are they different species or just different variations of the same?

Sometimes their names add to the confusion. This one is the Early spider orchid (Orchis aranifera), but it is not yet in flower now.





To have a species, there must be at least a 'barrier' between it and other species. In space: the plants don't grow in the same neighbourhood. Or in time: they flower in different seasons. Or they don't have the same pollinator. Or they are not fertile between them. Or ... The only fact that two populations, or two plants in a population, look different, is not enough.

Are they several species with hybrids between them, or variations of the same species? We don't really know.

Here are two representatives flowering now



This one, let's call it Western Spider Orchid (Ophrys occidentalis) grows often in groups, sometimes on roadsides nearly on the tarmac.
















The Small Spider Orchid (Ophrys araneola) has tiny yellow-banded flowers and is more solitary.

Purple Toothwort

They are back, the Purple Toothworts (Lathraea clandestina)!



Flowers are like humans, sometimes...

(See also here, two years ago)

LWJ

A participant on a botanical walk took them together as 'Little White Jobs', those tiny white annual plants that flower in early spring. They look very much alike, and are all members of the family of Brassicaceae. More often than not they grow with thousands together. Often you find all four species in the same place. However, each of them has its own favourite habitat.

This is part of a large colony of the smallest of them, the Common Whitlow-grass (Erophila verna). A really large individual plant would measure about 5 cm. It grows in a dry place, the center of a cart track.













The Perfoliate Penny-Cress (Kandis perfoliata) is somewhat larger. It varies in height from two to fifteen centimeters on a rich soil. It grows on roadsides and fields, everywhere where the soil is dry and calcareous and has been disturbed, for exemple by animals.

Wall Whitlow-Grass (Draba muralis) grows, not surprisingly, on stone walls or other rocky places. When it starts to flower it is very small, but the it grows longer and longer, until the seeds are ripe. (In the picture you may notice some Common Whitlow-Grass.)












Hairy Bittercress (Cardamine hirsuta) is less choosy about its substrate and it also supports a more fertile soil. After winter, sometimes it gives a greyish hue to fields waiting to be tilled. You also find it as a weed in vegetable gardens. It is the biggest of the four species, and in amild winter already starts to flower in december.

Male Orchid

Most orchids - at least here in France - are perennial plants. They survive during the winter with tubercules in the soil. The Male Orchid (Orchis mascula) has two, one fresh and whitish, to nourish the plant this spring, and one greyish and wrinkled, a remnant from last season. During the coming season a new one will develop for 2012.



Since a few days, the first leaves have developed. In a month the plant will flower, and at the end of summer the newly formed seed has blown away, the leaves disappeared, and the plant has resumed its long sleep under the cover of fallen leaves.

Witches' Butter

In winter, on a wet day, sometimes you see something coloured like egg yolk up in a tree. It is a mushroom, Witches' Butter (Tremella mesenterica), a yellow gelatinous mass (no, it is not like butter) on a dead branch in an oak tree. In this picture the branch is covered in green lichens.



If it were a plant and not a mushroom you should call it a saprophyte ('phyte' from 'plant'), living on dead organic material, but mushrooms are not plants but part of the kingdom of fungi.












The Witches' Butter lives in an indirect way from dead wood, it is a parasite and lives on the mycelium of another mushroom that grows in the dead branch.

Primroses

Primroses grow mostly under trees and start flowering in March, before the new leaves of deciduous trees develop.



This is the very first primrose of this year, a common Cowslip (Primula veris) with small, dark yellow flowers. It grew all alone in a very grey and brown chestnut-wood, and it looked quite out of place and out of season.













Often you find primroses in larger groups, as here. You notice some dark yellow Cowslips and a lot of pale Common Primroses (Primula vulgaris).















The flowers of the Common Primrose are larger and have shorter and less upright stems.All primroses have clear green, cockled leaves.
















Intermediate forms between the two species are quite common. Here you see one.