Stiff Eyebright

Stiff Eyebright (Euphrasia stricta) is a little plant that grows in dry limestone meadows.

Now, at the end of summer, it has only a few flowers left on top of its stalks, the other flowers already fructified.

Midsummer in this flowery meadow it was still surrounded by its hosts, certain grasses and leguminose plants. Hosts? Yes, Stiff Eyebright is a hemiparasite, it has chlorophyll but it feeds also on the roots of other plants. Often around it you see grasses and other plants that are visibly smaller and less developed because of this hemiparasitism.

The flowers are tiny, purple-striped and with a yellow spot on the lower lip. Leaves and bracts toothed.

Burnet Saxifrage

They are everywhere now, the elegant umbels of Burnet Saxifrage (Pimpinella saxifraga). In limestone meadows and fields it flowers abundantly. It does not need a rich soil, and if it is dry and poor it is even better.

The upper parts of it are glabrous, with thin smooth stalks. There are only a few leaves on the stalks, if any, and they are deeply incised. The important leaves grow in a basal cluster at ground level. They disappear mostly when the plant flowers.






Here some basal leaves. You should think they belong to another species because they are so different, green and rather luscious. But no, it really is Burnet saxifrage.







And this is an umbel in fruit, its rays all have about the same length. Many Apiaceae - plants of the umbellifer family - have a ring of little leaves or bracts at the base of those rays, but Burnet Saxifrage has no involucre.

Autumn will arrive soon, but Burnet Saxifrage will go on flowering for a while.