Common Cudweed

It is not exceptional at all when a plant adapts itself to a life near us, humans. Agriculture created possibilities for many wildflowers. The tilling of the soil at regular intervals eliminates competion from other plants for space, food, water and light and softens up the soil so seeds can germinate and form roots more easily.

Common Cudweed (Filago pyramidata) grows in agricultural fields, in fallow lands and in habitats that resemble those. Apparently it has some resistance against herbicides and fungicides commonly used in cereal fields because they are quite common. For that matter, the harvested field here is organic.

Common Cudweed is a rather stiff plant with at the end of every candelabra-shaped branch a round head with small yellow flowers.  It is grey-green, stalks and leaves are covered in felt-like hairs that protects them against drying out and maybe also agains predator insects.

Like all plants of the Composite (Asteraceae) family it has composite flower heads. In this case they are doubly composite. Whzat you see is a round ball with small yellowish pointed structures.

 

 

Every yellow point is a flower head of about 5 mm lenght with some tubular flowers surrounded by green bracts and spiderweb-like hairs that give it a felty appearance. Twenty or thirty of those flower heads for a round ball wuth at its base two or three larger bracts.  And every plant can carry dozens of those balls. How many flowers produces Common Cudweed? May be hub=ndreds, with also hundreds of seeds to give it a good chance for dispersal and survival.

This makes it different from the 'real' messicoles, plants from arable fields completely adapted to cereal cultures, with a life cycle with the same periodicity as cereals and not many seeds, often the same size as wheat so they can be harvested and sown with them.

 

In a field left fallow for a year many different plants grow. Between the Fescues (the long blond grasses) you can see yellow Saint-John's-worts and also big tufts of Common Cudweed.

Here, Common Cudweed has dried out even if it is surrounded by a lot of still green plants.  Why is it already nearly dead? I don't know. The field is dry and poor, destinated to become a truffle plantation. Also this year there were weeks with a lot of rain but also weeks with very hot and dry weather, and many plants grew faster and taller than usually. Maybe Common Cudweed has made already his seeds and now it has decided its season is over before summer. We cannot ask it.

 

Black Spleenwort

After a year and a half, here again plants portraits from Perigord in this blog.

 

Ferns are spore plants. In their life cycle very small plantlets called prothalli develop from spores. The prothallus does not look at all like a fern as we know it. Structures for sexual reproduction, also very small, grow in its surface and after fecundation the sporophyte, the 'real' fern, the plant we recognize easily as such, begins to growis born. If the fern is mature it begins to produce spores and the cycle can start again.

Most ferns need humidity in the prothallic stage, without moisture there cannot be fecundation. No problem in mointainous areas with shadowy slopes and lots of water flowing over rocks, but here in Dordogne where water seeps away through porous limestone it can be more complicated.

So Perigord is not especially rich in ferns. But especially in wooded valleys there are beautiful spots full of ferns. Like here below, on an old path where the remains of the stone walls that bordered it once are still visible.

 

Here we see many 'tongues' of Hart's Tongue Fern (Asplenium scolopendrium), in the centre on top of the 'wall' a bunch of simple divided fronds of a Polypody (Polypodium sp.) and a bit more to the right smaller and thinner fronds of another fern, Black Spleenwort (Asplenium adiantum-nigrum).

Here is its portrait in spring when the new fronds emerge. Black Spleenwort (Asplenium adiantum-nigrum) has black stems and twice-divided pinnate fronds.

 

It grows in deciduous woods, especially Oaks and Hornbeams, but also in mixed forests with Sweet Chestnut, and sometimes it accepts places where there is sunshine during a part of the day.

 

It does not need much soil, a hole in a wall is enough! To grow, Black Spleenwort prefers places not completely horizontal, but generally it does not want complete verticality.

 

This elegant and subtle fern is never more than half a meter high. 

 

 

Besides a forest track under Downy Oaks, Black Spleenwort has grown into a big colony. In May some of last year's fronds were still present but they turn yellow and will soon be gone.