English Ivy

A row of poplars under a dull grey winter sky. All trunks are covered in a thick layer of English Ivy (Hedera helix).

English Ivy is a creeper that covers the forest floor or climbs into trees (and other objects). It attaches itself with small roots on the bark of the tree. This does not hinder the host tree, because the Ivy is not a parasitic plant, it only uses the tree as a prop. (To be sure, when the English Ivy is very tall, the tree risk breaking its branches under the weight, or not receiving enough sun rays on its leaves.)

At the end of autumn there is not much to eat for insects. When in November the English Ivy is in bloom with lots of small yellowish flowers rich in nectar, bees and hover-flies know where to go.

After flowering, berries develop. Now they are still green but dering winter they ripen and turn black. The branches that carry fruits and flowers do not climb or creep, they stand upright. The leaves on those fertile branches are lozenge-shaped.

The leaves on the other, creeping, branches have a different shape, they have three or five lobes with nerves of a lighter colour. In cold periods in winter they often turn reddish.


 

Lesser Duckweed

Lesser Duckweed (Lemna minor) is a small plant that lives in still waters. In summer it can cover the whole surface of a pond. In winter you can find it also but not in large quantity.





It floats on the water thanks to its round thallus with small air bags. It has a simple construction: a small round disk with some roots attached to it. In the tropics sometimes flowers develop, but in tamperate regions like France flowering seldom happens. To reproduce itself the plant makes more thalluses, and that's enough apparently.

Hawkweed Oxtongue

Some spider webs, a row of yellow flowers.

An abandoned field colored yellow and white as you can find nearly everywhere. Two very common plant species flowering from the end of summer until the first frost, and even after. Between the white umbels of Wild Carrots (Daucus carota) you see the yellow flower heads of Hawkweed Oxtongue (Picris hieracioides).










No, it is not a Hawkweed, (a plant of the same family with also yellow flowers) nor an Oxtongue (a succulent greenhouse plant). The yellow flowers are of the same type as a dandelion, composed of some tens of ligulate flowers.













Like dandelions the ripe fruits carry little fluffy parasols that fly in the winds.

Cut-Leaved Germander

Since nearly a year this field full of Wild Carrots (Daucus carota) is a truffle field. Last winter the farmer planted young oak trees grafted with mycelium of the precious truffle mushroom. To protect the young trees from hungry roe and deer he covered them in plastic webbing. Long ago, when Perigord still was a wine region, the field has been a vineyard, and later on tobacco was grown on it, until the seventies or eighties of last century. And after that, the field has been left fallow and was overgrown with junipers for years.


The farmer has cleaned up and plowed and the seeds, hidden in the earth for long years, came to the surface. They are the seeds of 'weeds' that grew in the vineyards and tobacco fields, sometimes species that became rare since. Now they found a soil loose enough to germinate.











For this reason you can find exceptional annual 'weeds' in this new truffle field. Like this small Cut-Leaved Germander (Teucrium botrys) with laciniated slightly velvety leaves.














This one has no upper lip and its stamina stick out, just like other gamanders

Creeping Germander

A long summer without any rain gives dry meadows and open spaces a burned look. There are virtually no green leaves. The Creeping Germander (Teucrium chamaedrys) is used to this. By preference it grows in a sunny spot on porous calcareous soil that does not retain much rain water. It has already finished flowering and the brown calices are still on the plant.


But some pink flowers can still be found. The flower has no upper lip, so the stamina are pointing upwards in the open.

The tiny leaves look like rather stylized miniature oak-leaves.

Woolly Thistle

On uncultivated land overgrown by white Wild Carrots and yellow Hawkweed Oxtongue a marvelous plant shows its colours. It is a Woolly Thistle (Cirsium eriophorum) nearly two meters high.

It needed two years to grow so big. The first year the plant made a leaf rosette at ground level, with a long root that penetrates deep into the soil to enable the plant to find water, even in a dry summer like this year. The big three-dimensional leaves are deeply divided and have soft prickles that go above or below the leaf surface.

The second year the thistle made a stem and flowers. Every flower head contains dozens of small tubular purple flowers. The flower head consists of bracts that are connected by a kind of woolly fleece, or better, a fabric like a  thick spider web. In the picture a small green bug and a whole family of blackish-brown beetles visit the flowers.

Musk Thistle

This year meadows and fallow fields are indeed beautiful! Many wild flowers thrived after the rains of May and June and are abundant, and very often also taller than other years. Like this Musk Thistle (Carduus nutans) with pink-purple flowers, here photographied in a field left fallow for two years.

The undersides of its prickly leaved are covered in a spider-web like tissue, and the flowerhead sits in an involucre with also spider-web threads between its prickly points.