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.