Hairy Bittercress

Hairy Bittercress (Cardamine hirsuta) likes human intervention. It prefers places where the soil is tilled or worked, as a vegetable garden or a corn field after harvest. Its leaves are not bitter but slightly spicy, like Watercress (which, by the way, belongs to the same botanical family of Brassicaceae). When in winter the weather is soft during a week or more, it immediately starts growing leaves and flowers.

So this winter it flowers and grows all the time since November.

The little plants even got the occasion to grow bigger and to make fruits. The fruit is a siliqua much longer than the flowers.

Snowdrops

In this deciduous forest Snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis) are flowering since christmas.

Beautyful, but a bit too early...

The reddish twig is from a Yellow Dead-nettle (Lamium galeobdolon subsp. montanum), a perennial plant that often has some leaves even in winter. They turn red when it gets colder.

Gypsyflower

Take care! They stick! In your socks, on dog's hairs, on other plants, on your jeans... And if you try to have a look from nearby, they also attach themselves to you pullover or even your hairs. And it is not easy at all to get rid of them.

Those small rounded seeds have small spines, and every spine ends in five very tiny hooks, just visible in the picture. This is really good natural velcro!

Gypsyflower (Cynoglossum officinalis) is very unusual in Dordogne, so you don't risk to meet and touch it by chance. It grows in uncultivated lands if they are not too poor, and it needs warmth and sunshine. Now, in winter there are only dead stalks with the fruits that are left because no victim approached them. And, here and there, a rosette of leaves. It is a bi-annual plant, the rosettes of one year produce flowers the year after.

The flowers are wine red or purple, often with visible veins, and they open in summer (rarely again in october, like in this picture).

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.

Calendars 2016

   

Wild flowers and plants from Perigord at your home...

  Also a perfect gift!

 

 

 

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.