Isopyrum

See here Isopyrum (Isopyrum thalictroides) just beginning to flower. Like many other plants, this year it has an early start. You should think yourself lucky when you can take its picture, it is a very rare species in Dordogne. Well, it may be overlooked sometimes, so small and ephemeral it is.

Everything about this plant is delicate, its fragile stems, the finely ciselated leaves, and the flowers like a small Wood Anemone. It grows exclusively in humid and not too sunny spots under trees, with a predilection for the bank of a small stream, like here. In some weeks everything of this plant will have disappeared from sight and only its roots will lie dormant until next spring.

Two-leaf Squill

In this picture is clearly visble whence comes its name : Two-leaf  Squill (Scilla bifolia). And it always a pleasure to find it somewhere in a wooded valley.

Hairy Bittercress

Hairy Bittercress (Cardamine hirsuta) likes human intervention. It prefers places where the soil is tilled or worked, as a vegetable garden or a corn field after harvest. Its leaves are not bitter but slightly spicy, like Watercress (which, by the way, belongs to the same botanical family of Brassicaceae). When in winter the weather is soft during a week or more, it immediately starts growing leaves and flowers.

So this winter it flowers and grows all the time since November.

The little plants even got the occasion to grow bigger and to make fruits. The fruit is a siliqua much longer than the flowers.