Curry Plant

High temperatures in November and December incited many plants to start a second flowering. This little bush, the Curry Plant (Helichrysum stoechas), shows some yellow flower heads. Stems and leaves are greyish because they are coverd with short silky hairs.

It is a mediterranean species and it loves sunshine and drought, so in Perigord you only find it on south-exposed hillsides on calcareous soil.

Last summer's withered leaves are still visible. If you rub a flower between your hands a strong kitchen smell appears. Yes, it smells like curry!

Will the night frost stop the flowering?

Great Mullein

A kind of cabbage, those big leaves in apparent disarray?

No, they are the winter leaves of Great Mullein (Verbascum thapsus). And they are not edible at all, they are covered with hairs.

An enlargement of two square centimeters of leaf surface. The rounds forms are droplets of dew and you can see the veins and also the hairs with star-like ramifications.

Leaves in a rosette at ground level. This morning they were covered in ice crystals; maybe the star-like hairs help to protect the plant against frost.

And this is what comes out of the leaves in summer. The flower stalk of Great Mullein can grow as high as one meter or more.

There are many flowers and they are yellow. They do not open in an orderly fashion frow below on the stalk to the top (or the other way round), but they start flowering somewhere in the middle, or even in several places at the same time.

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Oxeye Daisy

At last the cold came in, but the Oxeye daisies (Leucanthemum vulgare) are not that happy. A very soft month of November persuaded them to make flowers as if it were spring.

See here the result of one night below zero.

Blue Fleabane

There are still many flowers. In the soft golden light of an autumn afternoon they show at their best.

Here, Blue Fleabane (Erigeron acer) makes a spot of soft colours in a neglected grassland.

Most of the plant is done in pinks and reds and purples, only the tubular flowers in the centre of the flower heads are yellowish.

Narrowleaf Hemp-nettle

Next to French Bartsia grows a plant with really purple flowers.

There are a lot of them and they are what you call visible. Narrowleaf Hemp-nettle (Galeopsis angustifolia) is also a follower of agriculture.

It flowers after harvest between the cut cereal stalks and flowering can go on until the first frosts. If the farmer does not plough his field of course.

Seen from nearby the flower is exquisite.

French Bartsia

You need some chance to find French Bartsia (Odontites jaubertianus). It flowers only at the end of September and you can't call it exactly conspicuous. And it does not grow on the side of a walking path, it prefers less accessible spots like agricultural fields or wastelands. And when it does not have flowers, it really looks very much like other Bartsias.

It is endemic in France, it only grows here. It was thought that French Bartsia had disappeared from the Dordogne département. But no, at the boundary of a harvested field of cereals it still grows in crowds. Here a few dozens of plants, a bit hidden in the vegetation around it.

It looks very much like  Yellow Bartsia, the same rather stiff reddish stems with small opposite leaves. Maybe French Bartsia is a bit stockier. There are French Bartsias with pale yellow or salmon pink flowers, sometimes mixed with plants with darker yellow and orange tinted flowers. This is normal, French Bartsia comes in two tones.

Probably because its forebears, Yellow Bartsia and Red Bartsia, have different colours. It is an allopolyploïd. Which means that, a long time ago during hybridization, the new species kept or even doubled or quadrupled all the chromosomes of its two ancestors. We think it has the possibility to show any of those colours and that every plant 'chooses' its colour according to circumstances.

The flowers are slightly more closed than those of other Bartsia species. Also a bit hairier, but you need a looking-glass to see that.