'Mountain Needle Sunrose'

The weather is really hot, the sun burns and scorches, plants turn yellow and brown.

Here a 'Mountain Needle Sunrose' (Fumana ericifolia, no English name known) begins to take autumn colours. This very small bush grows at ground level in sunny meadows and other open areas on limestone soil. In spite of the mountain in its name it prefers lowland or hills.

Now there are many rust-coloured fruits, with here and there still a flower.

To see the flowers you should start early, the flowering of this tiny Rochrose is ephemeral and after only a few hours the petals fall.

There exist other Needle Sunroses, but with this one the flowers have long pedicles that bow down after flowering.

Lamarck's Bedstraw

Lamarck's Bedstraw (Galium divaricatum) is too subtle to be seen easily. You look through a cloud of thin stems and very tiny fruits and what you see is essentially the grass that grows behind it. With a camera it is a bit more easy, you focus on the plant and the vegetation around disappears in an out-of-focus blurry.

It is a real Bedstraw, chaotic stems growing in every direction without any regard for the laws of gravitation. You don't know where the plant begins or where it ends.

The square stems have some verticillated leaves at the nodes. Very tiny course hairs give it a rough and scabrous feel when touched.

Concerning the flowers, they exist but you need a magnifying glass to see them, a flower measures half a millimeter maximum. A small reddish or pink bump on the young fruits, that's all. In theory they are star-shaped with four points, like other bedstaws, but this is theory as long as you can't see.

After flowering, the flowers at least respect gravity's laws, the small fruits hang down on short peducules, and this distinguishes Lamarck's Bedstaw from a near relation among bedstraws. Rather subtle, also...

Spotted Rockrose

Some cyclopic objects look at us.

They are petals fallen from a Spotted Rockrose (Tuberaria guttata).

It is a transient flowering. You can look for Spotted Rockrose and not find it, and yet a week later it is there in multitude.

Its favorite habitat is sandy and subnny and not on limestone soil. Here, in a poor meadow after haymaking it grows abundantly.

Many-seeded Slender Tare

This is a very tiny vetch, after flowering it is nearly invisible, unless you really look for it in a calcareous meadow. Many-seeded Slender Tare (Ervum gracile) has a rather long name for such a small plant. 

With some difficuly you can see it is infested by aphids. There were three or two flowers on every flower stalk but only one developed into a seed pod. In this species often the flowerstalk ends in a little point above the flowers or pods.


Two weeks ago it was still in full bloom, with slender curved tendrils.

Now the pods develop. They are a bit transparent and you can see there is a row of several seeds, yes, it is many-seeded for such a small vetch.

 

Dewdrups glisten in the morning sun on leaves, tendrils and seedpods.

 

 

 

Yellow Vetch

In a flowering meadow grows this Yellow Vetch (Vicia lutea) in large amounts. In fact it is not yellow at all, its flowers are white. It has tendrils to climb sunwards in grasses and other plants.

You can see there are many insect visitors. Like many other vetches it has black spots on its stipules. Those spots contain a sugary substance attractive to insects, especially ants.

Also Red Soldier Beetles (Rhagonycha fulva) are fond of Yellow Vetch. Many of them gather on it to meet a partner to mate.

Talking about nuptials, between the flower also hides a male Nursery Web Spider (Pisaura mirabilis) and he carries a parcel between its legs, his wedding present.

He is looking for a female to bring her a prey wrapped in silk. If he comes without a gift, she will eat him immediately without giving him time to make love to her. The present will keep her occupied while he couples with her, and with some luck he will get away with it !

Two vetches

The first thing you see of Coronille minima is its colour. This is what you call yellow! This vetch is a mediterranean species and it has no English name.

It is a perennal plant that grows in dense clumps covered with yellow flower crowns. This year they are bigger as usual, it has rained so much that even in the arid places it prefers it grew bigger and bigger.

You nearly cannot see the leaves, there are so many flower heads! Every leaf consists of about a dozen small folioles, and they are thick, as if they are cut from a sheet of handicraft foam.

Apparently the same type of foam has been used to cut the leaves of another Coronilla, the Scorpion Vetch (Coronilla scorpioides) here below. They are the same greyish-green, but bigger and more irregular.

Its flowers are small and its fruits are long. In fact they look very much like a scorpions tail.

Here it grows in a cultivated field, but you can meet it also in a dry calcareous meadow.

Dwarf Spurge

Dwarf Spurge (Euphorbia exigua) is the smallest Spurge in Dordogne. Some full-grown plants are not bigger than two centimeters. It grows in calcareous meadows, especially in spots where vegetation is sparse and the soil is visible.

The species is rather diverse. Often the plants are greyish green, but sometimes it is more yellowish green with a reddish stem, as here. This exemplar is really big, it looms large above the tiny 'Controversial Sandworts' (Arenaria controversa) around it.

This year it is abundant, maybe because of the rain. Here some individuals from a carpet of thousands, each one with its flower head.