Musk Thistle

This year meadows and fallow fields are indeed beautiful! Many wild flowers thrived after the rains of May and June and are abundant, and very often also taller than other years. Like this Musk Thistle (Carduus nutans) with pink-purple flowers, here photographied in a field left fallow for two years.

The undersides of its prickly leaved are covered in a spider-web like tissue, and the flowerhead sits in an involucre with also spider-web threads between its prickly points.

Rough Marsh-Mallow

No, this small Mallow does not grow in marshes. The Rough Marsh-Mallow (Althaea hirsuta) prefers dry meadows on poor soil. It is small and unconspicuous compared to the larger flowers that surround it.


All mallows have below the pink petals a calyx that sits on a kind of deep dish with star-shaped points. The Rough Marsh-mallow has straight hairs on its stem.

Difficult to believe that this tiny plant belongs to the same family as the lime tree. But the red and black firebugs know, they prefer to feed on all kinds of Malvaceae.

Viper's Bugloss

A field full of colours. The blue flowers on long stalks forming large groups are Viper's Bugloss (Echium vulgare). A 'weed' that grows nearly everywhere, in abandoned fields, roadsides, amidst garden  and other garbage, even in vegetable gardens. If the sunny weather continues and turns into a period of drought, the Viper's bugloss does not die but will go on flowering. You can pick them and put them in a vase; they keep well.

Like many other plants from the Borinagaceae family, leaves and stem, in fact all green parts of the Viper's bugloss, are covered with rough reddish hairs.