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.