Curry Plant

High temperatures in November and December incited many plants to start a second flowering. This little bush, the Curry Plant (Helichrysum stoechas), shows some yellow flower heads. Stems and leaves are greyish because they are coverd with short silky hairs.

It is a mediterranean species and it loves sunshine and drought, so in Perigord you only find it on south-exposed hillsides on calcareous soil.

Last summer's withered leaves are still visible. If you rub a flower between your hands a strong kitchen smell appears. Yes, it smells like curry!

Will the night frost stop the flowering?

Great Mullein

A kind of cabbage, those big leaves in apparent disarray?

No, they are the winter leaves of Great Mullein (Verbascum thapsus). And they are not edible at all, they are covered with hairs.

An enlargement of two square centimeters of leaf surface. The rounds forms are droplets of dew and you can see the veins and also the hairs with star-like ramifications.

Leaves in a rosette at ground level. This morning they were covered in ice crystals; maybe the star-like hairs help to protect the plant against frost.

And this is what comes out of the leaves in summer. The flower stalk of Great Mullein can grow as high as one meter or more.

There are many flowers and they are yellow. They do not open in an orderly fashion frow below on the stalk to the top (or the other way round), but they start flowering somewhere in the middle, or even in several places at the same time.