Blue Lettuce

A hoverfly found something to eat in this fragile blue flower.



It's a Blue Lettuce (Lactuca perennis). It likes warm and sunny places, so you only find it on well-exposed hillsides and fields. The flowers open only when it is sunny.














The rosettes look like those of the common Dandelion, but the leaves are a bit more incised. Like those, and also like the garden lettuce it has a white latex.

The shadow of another insect.

Wild Madder

Here's another member of the family of Rubiaceae. In Perigord the Wild Madder (Rubia peregrine) grows nearly everywhere where there are trees and bushes. Here it found a fence to carelessly drape its garlands around.

The small yellow-green flowers are like stars.


















The verticillate leaves stay on in winter and disappear only in spring. Some black berries of last year have not yet been eaten by birds. No, it is not what you call a tidy plant!

Great Hedge Bedstraw

The Great Hedge Bedstraw (Galium mollugo) grows in hedges but also on roadsides and hayfields. After mowing the grass and some rain the white clouds will re-appear.

Like other bedstraws this one has tiny, star-shaped flowers. Insects search them for nectar.


















All bedstraws and other members of the Rubiaceae-family have verticillate leaves. In the Great Hedge Bedstrow they are now hidden under the great mass of flowers, but in spring they looked like this.

Crab spider

Flower crab spiders sit in wait on a flower to catch insects.


Here one of the two most conspicuous species, a Thomisus onustus on a Pyramidal orchid (Anacamptis pyramidalis). When it has chosen its flower it can sit here for days, its large front paws opened to 'receive' its prey: every day a fresh one. Because it does not flee but sits motionless it is easy to photograph.

Yellow Iris

In shallow streams and ponds those long, swordlike leaves emerge from the water. When back-lit the conductive tissues are visible, the separations between the superposed long vascular cells show as darker spots.



They are the leaves of the Yellow Iris (Iris pseudacorus). The spider has put its long legs into a prolongation of its long body to make itself less conspicuous.

The flowers look very much like the irises found in gardens.

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.