June 3, 2016

Two vetches


The first thing you see of Coronille minima is its colour. This is what you call yellow! This vetch is a mediterranean species and it has no English name.






It is a perennal plant that grows in dense clumps covered with yellow flower crowns. This year they are bigger as usual, it has rained so much that even in the arid places it prefers it grew bigger and bigger.







You nearly cannot see the leaves, there are so many flower heads! Every leaf consists of about a dozen small folioles, and they are thick, as if they are cut from a sheet of handicraft foam.

Apparently the same type of foam has been used to cut the leaves of another Coronilla, the Scorpion Vetch (Coronilla scorpioides) here below. They are the same greyish-green, but bigger and more irregular.





Its flowers are small and its fruits are long. In fact they look very much like a scorpions tail.







Here it grows in a cultivated field, but you can meet it also in a dry calcareous meadow.