Oaks

Every Oak species has its own preferences concerning kind of soil and humidity. In Perigord dry limestone soils and deeper and more humid clay soils are often found side by side, so different kinds of Oaks are often neighbours.

This one is unquestionably a young Pubescent Oak (Quercus pubescens).

The photograph is taken yesterday in the first frost of this winter, on the edge of a wood on limestone soil. It still has living leaves, which is normal for a young tree, especially in a warm and sunny autumn as this year's. Moreover, Pubescent Oaks often keep dead leaves on their branches. The undulated leaves with ear-like lobes at their base are specific for this kind of Oak.

Here below are, among chestnut-leaves, oak-leaves with long lobes and deep incisions. They are fallen from a big Pyrenean Oak (Quercus pyrenaica). It grows ond the same acid soils as the Chestnut and does not like at all calcareous soils.

The Pyrenean Oak is easy to identify because of its leaves. They are deeply indented and often rather big, like the one in the right hand upper corner. Also the leaves are downy, but this you cannot see any longer on the fallen leaves.


The leaves here below have fallen on a deep clayey soil. It looks as if there are more than one species. Pubescent Oak but also leaves that look somehow different. They could be from a Sessile Oak (Quercus petraea).

This Oak you don't find often in Perigord. It has rather long and regularly shaped leaves that are cuneiform at their base, pedunculated. And yes, in the wood there are some big oaks with trunks that continue until high into the slender crown, typical for this species. Not easy to say with oaks, they hybridize easily between each other and there is a lot of variation.

Common Maidenhair Spleenwort

A typical Perigordin habitat for this small fern. The Common maidenhair Spleenwort (Asplenium trichomanes subsp. quadrivalens) has chosen as a place to live the ruins of a stone wall of an ancient farmhous, abandoned during rural depopulation in the former century.

It covers part of the wall with its drooping fronds.

Here it grows on an old treetrunk covered in mosses and ivy. The little fronds are glistening from rain.

Purple Dragon

Near rivers in Dordogne the soil is often marshy and unfit for agriculture. Farmers planted poplars, to dry out the soil and have some revenue from the fast-growing wood. So, along the Dordogne and the Vézère in some places you find big poplar plantations, the trees planted in neat rows. In this rather monotonous landscape you nevertheless can find a lot of wild plants. If the maintenance is not too scrupulous, even bushes and trees of other species start to grow. Here, the wood floor is carpeted with Purple Dragon (Lamium maculatum), a perennial plant with square stems and very green leaves that can cover very quickly a large surface.

It flowers nearly twelve months a year, at least when winter is mild and summer not too dry. Sometimes the leaves are dappled, the lower lip of the flower always is.

Soft Shieldfern

The fronds of many ferns keep green nearly all winter, sometimes even until spring. But to find this species in full splendour you 'll have to hurry because in a few weeks its fronds will be gone. This magnificent Soft Shieldfern (Polystichum setiferum) grows in a dark valley, not far from a small spring.

Its long fronds are supple and soft when touched. The frond is bipinnate, divided in small pinnae that are divided again in smaller pinnules. The pinnules are toothed and every tooth has a long soft point. In the image here below, taken in summer, a young fern is shown. The fronds are divided only once, and the pointed tooth on the pinnae are visible. (Or should you call them pinnules?). Characteristic for this species is the larger basal part of the pinna, like the thumb of a mitten.

 

Woodland Calamint

Here, two or three years ago a stand of hornbeams was cut down. The bracken ferns are still there, but in place of the trees a perfumed tapestry of purple flowers has developed.

The Woodland Calamint (Calamintha menthifolia) likes to grow on the verge of a wood where it finds a bit more sunlight as under the trees. It has a good smell, a bit like mint.

The leaves are also a bit like those of some mint species. Here, a young bug tries to hide itself under one of them.

Autumn is warm and sunny this year and the Woodland calamint does not yet stop making new flowers.

Bastard Toadflax

A very small plant is hidden in short dry grass. Bastard toadflax (Thesium humifusum) is only a few centimeters high and nearly invisible except for some miniature flowers like tiny white stars.

If you really search for it between the tangle of grass and mosses you'll find a pivotal root from which radiate several flowering stems. The yellow-green leaves and stems are a bit rounded, like those of a succulent plant (but probably you need a magnifying glass to see this).

Bull Thistle

End of season.

The remaining flowers of af Bull Thistle (Cirsium vulgare).

Carline Thistle

In a dry calcareous meadow or an open space in an oak wood you can find a small thistle with candelabra-like branches.

It is the Carline Thistle (Carlina vulgaris.

Late in summer spider webs covered this meadow, also the Carline Thistle.

The thin leaves are prickly and are covered with white hairs. The flower heads with many tubular flowers are surrounded by pale yellow bracts, shimmering like fresh straw.

Even after flowering it is beautiful. Until far into winter the bracts are visible on the plant, so it looks like it keeps on flowering. During rain they close, and when it is dry again they open up, liberating the seeds with parachute-like plumes to disperse.

Oregano

Oregano (Origanum vulgare) smells really good. In fact, you can use it as a kitchen herb, like its cultivated cousin.

Like mint, basil and many other perfumed and edible plants, Oregano belongs to the Lamiaceae family. All Lamiaceae have opposed leaves, rectangular stems and bisymmetrical flowers.

Oregano is very common. In some places the flowers of a dirty pink colour form big patches, like here along a path.

Wild Angelica

Between meadow and streamlet there is a strip of dense vegetation.

They are all plants that like a place with a wet soil. Between others you see here Hemp agrimony (Eupatorium cannabinum) with pink flowers and the white umbels of Wild Angelica (Angelica sylvestris).

A Silver-washed fritillary (Argynnis paphia) finds nectar in the Wild Angelica flowers.

A little fly, a bumblebee and a bug are really busy on its fruits. What do they find there?

Sickle Leaf Spurge

Another plants that accompanies agriculture.

In cereal fields on dry calcareous soils you can find this small Sickle Leaf Spurge (Euphorbia falcata). Like all Spurges it has a white sticky latex that comes out when you break a stem or leaf. Because agriculture without herbicides and fertilizer has disappeared, it has become rare in Perigord, but in some places you can still find Sickle Leaf Spurge.

Spurge flowers are small and green or yellow, in this case well hidden inside heart-shaped bracts.

White Lace Flower

Early morning in summer, a light fog.

Times ago local farmers grew tobacco in this field, but it has been abandoned for many years. Since then some woody plants had time enough to grow big, like those Junipers  (Juniperus communis). Between the Junipers wild flowers found a good spot and they flower in abundance. Unusual amounts of them grow here, purple Creeping Germander (Teucrium chamaedrys), yellow Jenny's Sronecrop (Sedum rupestre) and White Lace Flower (Orlaya grandiflora).

For the White Lace Flower 2014 has been a very good year. Now the flowering season is nearly over and little fruits covered with little hooks can be found in every spot where a month ago the plants were in full bloom.

Here and there a single umbel in flower can still be seen.

Common Andryala

In this cereal field grow many wild flowers.

In this corner the orange poppies jump to the eye, and also a mass of yellow flower heads. Two plants that like ruderalized spots, like this field that has been laboured but that has not been tidied up since.

The plant with yellow flowers is the Common Andryala (Andryala integrifolia). It flowers through summer with many lemon-coloured flower heads.

Stalks and leaves are covered with felt-like hairs.

Single Yellow-head

Normally it is not a single flowerhead you find where the Single Yellow-head (Inula montana) grows. It is a quite conspicuous plant with its luminous yellow flowers.

Even this year, when the grass in the calcareous meadows that are its favourite spot, has grown quite high and dense.

Its stems and leaves are covered in grey hairs that give them a velvety look.

Greater Butterfly Orchid

If you want to see this beautiful orchid in flower, you'll have to hurry. The flowering period of the Greater Butterfly Orchid (Platanthera chlorantha) is nearly over.

Here is one, maybe the last of this year, hidden between grasses.

Carrot Burr-Parsley

A cultivated field on poor and stony soil. There are not much cereals, but wild flowers are abundant.

The farmer did not use much fertilizer and weedkiller and that's why here grow plants that have disappeared elsewhere.Like the Carrot Burr-Parsley (Caucalis platycarpos), that flowers and produces fruit before harvest and the arrival of hot and dry summer months.

Here, in the last rays of the evening sun, some umbels with fruits covered with small hooks.


 

Amethyst Broomrape

At this time of the year broomrapes emerge everywhere. They are plants without chlorophyl with whitish or reddish stems and sometimes a touch of purple. As their name indicates already, they are parasitic plants, not only on broom, but also on other species. Every species of broomrape has its own preferences concerning its host.

The Amethyst Broomrape (Orobanche amethystea) grows on Field Eryngo (Eryngium campestre). To the left two broomrapes, and at the right a leaf of the eryngo.

The flowers are tubular with a trilobed lower lip. On the top of the upper lip you see  small glandular hairs.

Quaking Grass

In May, grasses flower everywhere. The stamens flutter in the wind like little flags. Here is the Quaking Grass (Briza media).

Nottingham Catchfly

In a grassy spot on a woody roadside those elegant little flowers grow. They are Nottingham Catchfly (Silene nutans). Here they are pink.

Normally they are white, but quite often you find pink, or even wine-red flowers, as you see here below. A mixture of tender colours on slender stalks.


 

In daytime the flowers look wilted. That is because Nottingham Catchfly flowers at night, in the morning the petals fold back and curl.

The sun rises, we are going to sleep...

Exhibition

 

 

Exhibition 

"Photographies d'une naturaliste" 

from 2 May until 14 June 2014

 

In gallery Phi2 in Villamblard about thirty of my pictures are on show.

You'll find macro's, plant pictures and also some landscapes.

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Opening hours gallery: Friday and Saturday 10h-12h et 15h-18h, at all other times, please contact 06 82 81 13 74 (english spoken).
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  Galerie Phi2

 55 rue Gabriel Reymond
24140 Villamblard
Tel : 06 82 81 13 74

Violet Limodore

Strange purple asparaguses grow out of the soil. You find them in a dry oakwood with sparse trees, on dry calcareous soil, or even in a truffle orchard. What is it? A wild orchid, the Violet Limodore  (Limodorum abortivum).

From its underground rhizome new sprouts emerge. In a few weeks they will make large circles of deepn purple stalks carrying big purple flowers.

The flowers only open in really good weather. On dark and rainy days they do not open at all. Often the plant is cleistogamous, it pollinizes itself with its own pollen before the opening of the flowers. Sometimes the Violet Limodore makes flowers that don't even get above ground and never see daylight.

Rue-leaved Saxifrage

On an old stone wall grows between the mosses a very small reddish plant. It is the Rue-leaved Saxifrage (Saxifraga tridactylitis).

It has a short life, in a few weeks it has grown from seed, now it flowers and soon the seeds will disperse and after that the plant will die.  There are many such tiny plants. In the picture below you see on the same wall between three Rue-leaved Saxifrages another species, the Common Whitlow-grass (Erophila verna).

Blackthorn

The Blackthorn (Prunus spinosa) also has a mass of white blossom. Now the first buds open, well before the leaves.

The flowers of the Blackthorn are smaller as those of the Plum. They sit an nearly black branches. In autumn this bush produces small blue fruits.

Generally it is a bush of less than 1.50 m high. The Blackthorn is invasive, new branches develop from the spreading roots, and it can overrun a large surface. End of March edges of woods, hedges ant left-over pieces of land can be covered in white blossom like snow. The Blackthorn has - not surprising - big black thorns, and where they grow in dense stands they are literally inpenetrable.