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.


 

White frost

First rays of morning sun after a cold night.


An umbel of Burnet saxifrage (Pimpinella saxifraga) is covered in hoar frost.

Stinking hellebore

In a wood grows this strange protuberance, a sudden patch of color amidst dark green palmate leaves from last season.

It is the new sprout of a Stinking hellebore (Helleborus foetidus). Yes, it does stink, you'll discover the smell when you rub a leaf between your hands.

In February or March the sprout will have developed into a flowering stem with green, bell-shaped flowers. Not unlike the cultivated Christmas roses that are supposed to flower around Chrismas (but alas, not always do ...). It is from the same family.

Autumn colours

Trees change their colours now.

 



















Chlorophyll produces energy in a plant and gives it its green summer colour. When after summer there is less light and the days and nights get colder, cork cells form in the veins of leaves. Thus the transport of nutrients and water in the leaf is interrupted and it cannot make any more new chlorophyll. When there is no more chlorophyll in stock because it is all used up, the leaf loses its green colour. Other pigments, especially carotenoids who are yellow or orange, become visible. They have been there all summer, but only now you can see their colour.



 Some leaves of an Norway maple (Acer platanoides) are fallen in a shallow stream. In the green leaf below chlorophyll is still visible between the veins, elsewhere other pigments are dominating.













The changes in the metabolism in the leaf, diminishing light, and the fall in temperatures provoke chemical processes which result in other sets of pigments.


Here, in a Blackberry bush (Rubus fruticosus), red anthocyanids have emerged with the first frost.