Purple Toothwort

They are back, the Purple Toothworts (Lathraea clandestina)!



Flowers are like humans, sometimes...

(See also here, two years ago)

LWJ

A participant on a botanical walk took them together as 'Little White Jobs', those tiny white annual plants that flower in early spring. They look very much alike, and are all members of the family of Brassicaceae. More often than not they grow with thousands together. Often you find all four species in the same place. However, each of them has its own favourite habitat.

This is part of a large colony of the smallest of them, the Common Whitlow-grass (Erophila verna). A really large individual plant would measure about 5 cm. It grows in a dry place, the center of a cart track.













The Perfoliate Penny-Cress (Kandis perfoliata) is somewhat larger. It varies in height from two to fifteen centimeters on a rich soil. It grows on roadsides and fields, everywhere where the soil is dry and calcareous and has been disturbed, for exemple by animals.

Wall Whitlow-Grass (Draba muralis) grows, not surprisingly, on stone walls or other rocky places. When it starts to flower it is very small, but the it grows longer and longer, until the seeds are ripe. (In the picture you may notice some Common Whitlow-Grass.)












Hairy Bittercress (Cardamine hirsuta) is less choosy about its substrate and it also supports a more fertile soil. After winter, sometimes it gives a greyish hue to fields waiting to be tilled. You also find it as a weed in vegetable gardens. It is the biggest of the four species, and in amild winter already starts to flower in december.

Male Orchid

Most orchids - at least here in France - are perennial plants. They survive during the winter with tubercules in the soil. The Male Orchid (Orchis mascula) has two, one fresh and whitish, to nourish the plant this spring, and one greyish and wrinkled, a remnant from last season. During the coming season a new one will develop for 2012.



Since a few days, the first leaves have developed. In a month the plant will flower, and at the end of summer the newly formed seed has blown away, the leaves disappeared, and the plant has resumed its long sleep under the cover of fallen leaves.

Witches' Butter

In winter, on a wet day, sometimes you see something coloured like egg yolk up in a tree. It is a mushroom, Witches' Butter (Tremella mesenterica), a yellow gelatinous mass (no, it is not like butter) on a dead branch in an oak tree. In this picture the branch is covered in green lichens.



If it were a plant and not a mushroom you should call it a saprophyte ('phyte' from 'plant'), living on dead organic material, but mushrooms are not plants but part of the kingdom of fungi.












The Witches' Butter lives in an indirect way from dead wood, it is a parasite and lives on the mycelium of another mushroom that grows in the dead branch.

Primroses

Primroses grow mostly under trees and start flowering in March, before the new leaves of deciduous trees develop.



This is the very first primrose of this year, a common Cowslip (Primula veris) with small, dark yellow flowers. It grew all alone in a very grey and brown chestnut-wood, and it looked quite out of place and out of season.













Often you find primroses in larger groups, as here. You notice some dark yellow Cowslips and a lot of pale Common Primroses (Primula vulgaris).















The flowers of the Common Primrose are larger and have shorter and less upright stems.All primroses have clear green, cockled leaves.
















Intermediate forms between the two species are quite common. Here you see one.

Fire Bugs

On sunny afternoons in winter they emerge from their hiding-places in the soil: the Fire Bugs (Pyrrhocoris apterus). They are real bugs, but don't have a bad smell. Those colourful insects  are easy to find because they live in groups.



Here a colony on the bark of a Lime tree. They are vegetarians with a preference for the seeds of Malvaceae, like Hollyhock and Mallows. The Lime also belongs to the Malvaceae.

Maritime Pine

In the Landes region they grow in millions, for industrial use, in monoculture. But in Dordogne they mostly grow together with other species. You'll find the Maritime Pine (Pinus pinaster) with deciduous trees like chestnuts and oaks, wherever the soil is not too calcareous.



Its long slightly curved trunk mostly has no branches until the crown high up.

In young trees the bark is grey, but later on it is more colored, going from reddish to purplish blue, with deep crevices between the scales.
















Everything on this tree is big, not only the trunk. The needles are long, more than 10 cm, and the cones are at least as big as your hand. The scales are closed in wet weather, but when it is dry they open so the winged seeds can disperse.