Spurges

Now roadsides and fields are flecked with yellow. The big greenish yellow spots are often made by Spurges. They are easily recognized by their colour, white milk and the form of their inflorescences. Here are three of the about twenty-five species that grow in Périgord. Their flowers are special. They grow in umbels andd consist of a female capsule and a number of male stamen on a stem, accompanied by several round or cornered glands, and this surrounded by two big coloured bracts. And from this contraption sometimes emerges another 'flower' of the same construction.



Several weeks ago the Wood Spurge (Euphorbia amygdaloides) started flowering. It likes to grow under deciduous trees. In the picture above you can see the red capsules already beginning to ripen.














The Cypress Spurge (Euphorbia cyparissias) above grows where it is dry and stony, and also elsewhere.

And this is the Yellow-headed Spurge (Euphorbia flavicoma) who has of course yellow flower-heads. Like most other spurges.

Spider orchids

This is why they are called Spider Orchids:

 

The group is considered to consist of several species. They differ in form of the flower, colour, height, flowering season and a number of other points. But there are many intermediate plants. Are they different species or just different variations of the same?

Sometimes their names add to the confusion. This one is the Early spider orchid (Orchis aranifera), but it is not yet in flower now.





To have a species, there must be at least a 'barrier' between it and other species. In space: the plants don't grow in the same neighbourhood. Or in time: they flower in different seasons. Or they don't have the same pollinator. Or they are not fertile between them. Or ... The only fact that two populations, or two plants in a population, look different, is not enough.

Are they several species with hybrids between them, or variations of the same species? We don't really know.

Here are two representatives flowering now



This one, let's call it Western Spider Orchid (Ophrys occidentalis) grows often in groups, sometimes on roadsides nearly on the tarmac.
















The Small Spider Orchid (Ophrys araneola) has tiny yellow-banded flowers and is more solitary.

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.