Cherry Plum

The Cherry Plum (Prunus cerasifera) is the first of the Prunuses to flower.

This little tree is a cultivated species, but you find it quite often growing in the wild. It is often used as stock for fruit trees. Among the bushes that make hedges around fields and meadows, but also between the trees in a forest.

It flowers with a mass of pure white blossom. Every flower is pedunculated and has one stigma and about twenty stamen.

Like all Prunuses, the Cherry Plum has smooth greyish bark with slight horizontal stripes. In summer the little  plums appear, yellow, red or blue, round or oval, according to the subspecies. It is worthwhile to look out for a good tree. Sometimes the fruits are tasteless or sour, but in most cases they are sweet and perfumed.


 

Grey Willow

In March this bush is visible from far away. Before the leaves develop, the Grey Willow (Salix atrocinerea) covers itself in yellow catkins. Like most other Willows it needs water all the year round to flourish, so you will find it near a small stream, in a marshy forest or in a bog.

Here are the male catkins.

Dog Lichen

It is not a strange kind of moss, it is a lichen. Dog Lichen (Peltigera canina) is the result of a symbiotic relationship between a fungus and cyanobacter algae. It lives in woods, between mosses or on a rotting tree stump. This kind of lichens does not like dry weather, in summer it shrinks into something pale and grey. But in winther when it rains a lot it opens up and shows strong contrasting colours.

The blackish surface is the thallus, a mix of fungus mycelium and algae on the surface, exposed to sunlight. On this thallus grow the reddish brown apothecies that carry the fungus spores.



 

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