Soapwort

When you rub some flowers of this plant between your hand, you get a kind of foam and you can wash your hands with it. At least, Soapwort (Saponaria officinalis) can give you the impression you really got clean hands.

 

 

 

 

 

It is a plant that lives in large communities with lots of stalks wit bunches of pink flowers. You find them often on roadsides and edges of cultivated fields. It needs a not too poor soil and planty of place for the whole clan.

 

 

Already when it flowers, fruits develop.

But it happens that, after summer and after having been cut, Soapwort flowers again.

 

Great Willowherb

Not far from a stream, nearly in the shade of trees, grow some tall plants. They just begin to flower.

To find Great Willowherb (Epilobium hirsutum) you first have to find a stream, river or pond, because it needs water to flourish. It likes fertile soil, with humus or maybe nutrients brought with flooding.

It has a lot of small very pink flowers and conspicuous white, cross-shaped pistils. The stamens are rather understated by comparison.

The whole plant is covered in soft, velvety hairs that make it nice to the touch. Under the flowers, the growing fruits with a reddish tinge are already visible.

When the fruits ripen they burst open in four parts and from each part, small brown seeds with white feathery hairs appear. They will fly away.

Yellow-wort

Maybe the leaves are the most prominent part of this plant of the Gentian family.
 

They are glaucous and look like a kind of saucer pierced in the center to let through the stem.

But look at the flowers of Yellow-wort (Blackstonia perfoliata). Could be worse!

Ten yellow petals spiralling around each other get upwards fromù a nest of ten pointed sepals.

Early in the morning they are not yet open.

Yellow-wort grows in meadows and open spaces in woods on limestone. Generally some scattered plants, not big groups like here.

 

It flowers mainly in early summer. Now, in July, it makes fruits.

Still some weeks, and maybe a little heatwave, and you'll find only dried out stalks Between the dry grasses.