Knotted Clover

Everybody knows white and red clovers but there are so many other species in Dordogne! Often they are not really remarkable, because they are not big and not spectacular. Her a little pinkish one in a meadow, Knotted Clover (Trifolium striata).





In the picture below you can see it has longish flower-heads with light pink flowers and slightly hairy leaves. The calyxes of individual flowers are reddish with stripes. The veins of the tiny leaves are nearly straight.






You cannot exactly call the Knotted Clover stunning, but seen from nearby, well, it has some charms.

It is proper to clovers that withered flowers stay on the developing fruit. Knotted Clover is no exception, here below you can see them as brown spots on the flower-heads after flowering.






The pointed lobes of the calyxes make the flower-heads look like little hedgehogs.






Here you can see it amidst other clovers, a yellow species that is much more common, Hop Trefoil (Trifolium campestre). The two species grow in meadows, the yellow one nearly everywhere and the pink one only rarely found.

Field Pepperwort

In a cereal field a little plant keeps very straight in the first sunrays of this May morning.





Field Pepperwort (Lepidium campestre) is a member of the Brassicaceae family that can be found in cultivated fields and more ruderal places on dry and poor soil, especially on limestone. Little plants are vertical, larger ones have branches that stick out like on a candelabra.





The flowers do not amount to much, they are small, just four petals around a flat round silicula that soon becomes much larger than the flower itself.





The fruits sont slightly winged and they have a small depression on top.