Cut-Leaved Germander

Since nearly a year this field full of Wild Carrots (Daucus carota) is a truffle field. Last winter the farmer planted young oak trees grafted with mycelium of the precious truffle mushroom. To protect the young trees from hungry roe and deer he covered them in plastic webbing. Long ago, when Perigord still was a wine region, the field has been a vineyard, and later on tobacco was grown on it, until the seventies or eighties of last century. And after that, the field has been left fallow and was overgrown with junipers for years.


The farmer has cleaned up and plowed and the seeds, hidden in the earth for long years, came to the surface. They are the seeds of 'weeds' that grew in the vineyards and tobacco fields, sometimes species that became rare since. Now they found a soil loose enough to germinate.











For this reason you can find exceptional annual 'weeds' in this new truffle field. Like this small Cut-Leaved Germander (Teucrium botrys) with laciniated slightly velvety leaves.














This one has no upper lip and its stamina stick out, just like other gamanders

Creeping Germander

A long summer without any rain gives dry meadows and open spaces a burned look. There are virtually no green leaves. The Creeping Germander (Teucrium chamaedrys) is used to this. By preference it grows in a sunny spot on porous calcareous soil that does not retain much rain water. It has already finished flowering and the brown calices are still on the plant.


But some pink flowers can still be found. The flower has no upper lip, so the stamina are pointing upwards in the open.

The tiny leaves look like rather stylized miniature oak-leaves.

Woolly Thistle

On uncultivated land overgrown by white Wild Carrots and yellow Hawkweed Oxtongue a marvelous plant shows its colours. It is a Woolly Thistle (Cirsium eriophorum) nearly two meters high.

It needed two years to grow so big. The first year the plant made a leaf rosette at ground level, with a long root that penetrates deep into the soil to enable the plant to find water, even in a dry summer like this year. The big three-dimensional leaves are deeply divided and have soft prickles that go above or below the leaf surface.

The second year the thistle made a stem and flowers. Every flower head contains dozens of small tubular purple flowers. The flower head consists of bracts that are connected by a kind of woolly fleece, or better, a fabric like a  thick spider web. In the picture a small green bug and a whole family of blackish-brown beetles visit the flowers.