A Rose chafer (
Cetonia aurata) feeds on the flowers of a Dwarf elder (
Sambucus ebulus). This beetle does not eat the nectar but the pollen and stamen and also other parts of the flower and even fruits. Before appearing as an adult it has lived for several years underground, in a dead trunk, or even at the bottom of a flower pot, as a fat white worm, feeding on rotten wood and compost (never on living plant parts). Despite its name the Rose chafer seems to be very fond of Dwarf elders and can be found there as long as it flowers in july and august.
The Dwarf elder forms often big groups more than a meter high on fertile soil. It is a cousin of the Common elder but is not a shrub but a perennial plant. It has the typical Elder smell, but more pungent. Frankly, when in autumn the branches die it stinks!
Often flowers and fruits are present at the same time, as can be seen here.
After flowering each flowerhead changes into a tiny hedgehog. Each seed has five black thorns and a papery collar.
Its leaves are as long as wide and have a typical not completely nice smell if you rub them between your fingers. Often they are tinged with red.
The fruits have the form of a stork's bill. When the seeds are ripening, the bill dries out and releases the seeds hidden at its base.
You have really to bend down to see its finely incised fronds. If you turn a frond (carefully, it is fragile!) you notice the sores, masses of spores, in regular rows on its backside.
Like with other members of the Daisy family (the Compositaea), what looks like a flower is in fact a flower head which contains several individual florets. Those are surrounded by a number of bracts which form an involucre. Here below those are visible as brown-edged scales under the flower head.
In Greater Knapweed all florets are tubular, those on the outside are somewhat larger. The ants enjoy!
Hart's tongue Fern doesn't like dry places, horizontal surfaces and sunlight, so it grows on slopes in the shadow of trees, often near a small stream or source.