Wayfaring Tree

 

Wayfaring Tree (Viburnum lantana) us a rather chaotic bush that can be found in dry spots on limestone soil. It grows in sunny places, but it prefers just a bit of shade, as here on the edge of a Downy Oak forest.

 

 

Now it has already made berries and they are nearly finished, difficult to find the last ones.

In the background green berries that never ripened, surrounded by brown leaves. When ripening, the berries turn from red into black. Often you find bunches with berries of both colours.

 

 

The flowers, in April, smell good and they are a beautiful creamy white. 

Those red soils are not limestone at all! In Dordogne you can find acidic soils just beside the limestone. That is why you can find typical limestone vegetation just a step away from typical vegetation for acidic soil. So there is an explanation for finding Wayfaring Tree in this image.

 

 

 

The leaves of Wayfaring Tree are a bit downy, maybe to protect them against drying out.

 

 

Even when it rains...

 

 

Round-headed Rampion

Many plants don't feel like flowering now after weeks of very hot and very dry weather. But Round-headed Rampion (Phyteuma orbicularis) took a different decision.

The plants are only tiny this year and not easy to spot on this dry, sunny slope. Notwithstanding their beautiful blue colour they hide themselves rather well.

A little Flower crab-spider choose a flower head as a lookout post for prey. When the photographer comes near, it tries to hide.

 

 

 

 

Some long and slender leaves at the base of a stalk of net yet twenty centimeters and some smaller ones on it, and this blue. That's all!

Soapwort

When you rub some flowers of this plant between your hand, you get a kind of foam and you can wash your hands with it. At least, Soapwort (Saponaria officinalis) can give you the impression you really got clean hands.

 

 

 

 

 

It is a plant that lives in large communities with lots of stalks wit bunches of pink flowers. You find them often on roadsides and edges of cultivated fields. It needs a not too poor soil and planty of place for the whole clan.

 

 

Already when it flowers, fruits develop.

But it happens that, after summer and after having been cut, Soapwort flowers again.

 

Great Willowherb

Not far from a stream, nearly in the shade of trees, grow some tall plants. They just begin to flower.

To find Great Willowherb (Epilobium hirsutum) you first have to find a stream, river or pond, because it needs water to flourish. It likes fertile soil, with humus or maybe nutrients brought with flooding.

It has a lot of small very pink flowers and conspicuous white, cross-shaped pistils. The stamens are rather understated by comparison.

The whole plant is covered in soft, velvety hairs that make it nice to the touch. Under the flowers, the growing fruits with a reddish tinge are already visible.

When the fruits ripen they burst open in four parts and from each part, small brown seeds with white feathery hairs appear. They will fly away.

Yellow-wort

Maybe the leaves are the most prominent part of this plant of the Gentian family.
 

They are glaucous and look like a kind of saucer pierced in the center to let through the stem.

But look at the flowers of Yellow-wort (Blackstonia perfoliata). Could be worse!

Ten yellow petals spiralling around each other get upwards fromù a nest of ten pointed sepals.

Early in the morning they are not yet open.

Yellow-wort grows in meadows and open spaces in woods on limestone. Generally some scattered plants, not big groups like here.

 

It flowers mainly in early summer. Now, in July, it makes fruits.

Still some weeks, and maybe a little heatwave, and you'll find only dried out stalks Between the dry grasses.

White Rock-rose

A patch of white flowers grows against the stone wall of an old quarry. They are runaways from the limestone meadow on top. Limestone meadows are the favorite habitat of  of White Rock-rose (Helianthemum apenninum).

In spring it produces a lot of white flowers. Sometimes it flowers again in autumn or even in summer, if a sudden thunderstorm brings rain.

Like many Cistaceae, White Rock-rose is a little bush well adapted to the environment it grows in, porous limestone soils that easily dry out. To prevent too much evaporation, the edges of its long leaves fold can unto themselves.

 
The flowers are easy to recognize, with their slightly crumpled white petals and yellow stamens like a paintbrush.

Fern-grass

Many grasses flower in May. Also this Fern-grass (Catapodium rigida) that shows off the little whitish stamens that cover its spikelets, as if somebody sprinkled them with sugar.

Grasses (Poaceae) are anemochores, they need the wind to disperse their pollen. Not that easy to take advantage of the wind if you are small and low on the ground.

Apparently, Fern-grass manages well, it flourishes notwithstanding its small size. It grows everywhere in arid spots where there is not much other vegetation. Like a limestone meadow on dry soil, between the gravel on a path, or, as here above, on a stone wall.

It does not really look like a fern.

More like a toothbrush. Its spikelets are in two rows both turned towards one side.

For a plant so tiny it is rather conspicuous, even between more colourful Trefoils you cannot not see it.