Dwarf elder

A Rose chafer (Cetonia aurata) feeds on the flowers of a Dwarf elder (Sambucus ebulus). This beetle does not eat the nectar but the pollen and stamen and also other parts of the flower and even fruits. Before appearing as an adult it has lived for several years underground, in a dead trunk, or even at the bottom of a flower pot, as a fat white worm, feeding on rotten wood and compost (never on living plant parts). Despite its name the Rose chafer seems to be very fond of Dwarf elders and can be found there as long as it flowers in july and august.

The Dwarf elder forms often big groups more than a meter high on fertile soil. It is a cousin of the Common elder but is not a shrub but a perennial plant. It has the typical Elder smell, but more pungent. Frankly, when in autumn the branches die it stinks!



Often flowers and fruits are present at the same time, as can be seen here.

Maidenhair fern

A calcareous rock, a vertical surface above a pond or streamlet, even if the available sunlight is scarce, the Maidenhair fern (Adiantum capillus-veneris) feels at home.

It has very thin, black stalks, and its fronds end in small, fan-like leaves.

Limestone fern

This small unobtrusive fern grows at the foot of a slope, near the edge of a wood. Its fronds of a beautiful clear green emerge from a long underground rhizome. It is a Limestone fern (Gymnocarpium robertianum).




You have really to bend down to see its finely incised fronds. If you turn a frond (carefully, it is fragile!) you notice the sores, masses of spores, in regular rows on its backside.

Greater knapweed

Greater knapweed (Centaurea scabiosa) can survive in dry places. Its purple flowers contrast with the yellow grass.

Like with other members of the Daisy family (the Compositaea), what looks like a flower is in fact a flower head which contains several individual florets. Those are surrounded by a number of bracts which form an involucre. Here below those are visible as brown-edged scales under the flower head.











In Greater Knapweed all florets are tubular, those on the outside are somewhat larger. The ants enjoy!

Hart's Tongue Fern

The black stripes in this picture taken into the light are the spores of Hart's Tongue Fern (Asplenium scolopendrium). They grow as a brown, velvety, mass which contains thousands of them, on the backside of the fronds.

Hart's tongue Fern doesn't like dry places, horizontal surfaces and sunlight, so it grows on slopes in the shadow of trees, often near a small stream or source.

In spring young fronds emerge from between the old ones.

Blue Lettuce

A hoverfly found something to eat in this fragile blue flower.



It's a Blue Lettuce (Lactuca perennis). It likes warm and sunny places, so you only find it on well-exposed hillsides and fields. The flowers open only when it is sunny.














The rosettes look like those of the common Dandelion, but the leaves are a bit more incised. Like those, and also like the garden lettuce it has a white latex.

The shadow of another insect.

Wild Madder

Here's another member of the family of Rubiaceae. In Perigord the Wild Madder (Rubia peregrine) grows nearly everywhere where there are trees and bushes. Here it found a fence to carelessly drape its garlands around.

The small yellow-green flowers are like stars.


















The verticillate leaves stay on in winter and disappear only in spring. Some black berries of last year have not yet been eaten by birds. No, it is not what you call a tidy plant!