Oaks

Every Oak species has its own preferences concerning kind of soil and humidity. In Perigord dry limestone soils and deeper and more humid clay soils are often found side by side, so different kinds of Oaks are often neighbours.

This one is unquestionably a young Pubescent Oak (Quercus pubescens).

The photograph is taken yesterday in the first frost of this winter, on the edge of a wood on limestone soil. It still has living leaves, which is normal for a young tree, especially in a warm and sunny autumn as this year's. Moreover, Pubescent Oaks often keep dead leaves on their branches. The undulated leaves with ear-like lobes at their base are specific for this kind of Oak.

Here below are, among chestnut-leaves, oak-leaves with long lobes and deep incisions. They are fallen from a big Pyrenean Oak (Quercus pyrenaica). It grows ond the same acid soils as the Chestnut and does not like at all calcareous soils.

The Pyrenean Oak is easy to identify because of its leaves. They are deeply indented and often rather big, like the one in the right hand upper corner. Also the leaves are downy, but this you cannot see any longer on the fallen leaves.


The leaves here below have fallen on a deep clayey soil. It looks as if there are more than one species. Pubescent Oak but also leaves that look somehow different. They could be from a Sessile Oak (Quercus petraea).

This Oak you don't find often in Perigord. It has rather long and regularly shaped leaves that are cuneiform at their base, pedunculated. And yes, in the wood there are some big oaks with trunks that continue until high into the slender crown, typical for this species. Not easy to say with oaks, they hybridize easily between each other and there is a lot of variation.

Common Maidenhair Spleenwort

A typical Perigordin habitat for this small fern. The Common maidenhair Spleenwort (Asplenium trichomanes subsp. quadrivalens) has chosen as a place to live the ruins of a stone wall of an ancient farmhous, abandoned during rural depopulation in the former century.

It covers part of the wall with its drooping fronds.

Here it grows on an old treetrunk covered in mosses and ivy. The little fronds are glistening from rain.

Purple Dragon

Near rivers in Dordogne the soil is often marshy and unfit for agriculture. Farmers planted poplars, to dry out the soil and have some revenue from the fast-growing wood. So, along the Dordogne and the Vézère in some places you find big poplar plantations, the trees planted in neat rows. In this rather monotonous landscape you nevertheless can find a lot of wild plants. If the maintenance is not too scrupulous, even bushes and trees of other species start to grow. Here, the wood floor is carpeted with Purple Dragon (Lamium maculatum), a perennial plant with square stems and very green leaves that can cover very quickly a large surface.

It flowers nearly twelve months a year, at least when winter is mild and summer not too dry. Sometimes the leaves are dappled, the lower lip of the flower always is.

Soft Shieldfern

The fronds of many ferns keep green nearly all winter, sometimes even until spring. But to find this species in full splendour you 'll have to hurry because in a few weeks its fronds will be gone. This magnificent Soft Shieldfern (Polystichum setiferum) grows in a dark valley, not far from a small spring.

Its long fronds are supple and soft when touched. The frond is bipinnate, divided in small pinnae that are divided again in smaller pinnules. The pinnules are toothed and every tooth has a long soft point. In the image here below, taken in summer, a young fern is shown. The fronds are divided only once, and the pointed tooth on the pinnae are visible. (Or should you call them pinnules?). Characteristic for this species is the larger basal part of the pinna, like the thumb of a mitten.

 

Woodland Calamint

Here, two or three years ago a stand of hornbeams was cut down. The bracken ferns are still there, but in place of the trees a perfumed tapestry of purple flowers has developed.

The Woodland Calamint (Calamintha menthifolia) likes to grow on the verge of a wood where it finds a bit more sunlight as under the trees. It has a good smell, a bit like mint.

The leaves are also a bit like those of some mint species. Here, a young bug tries to hide itself under one of them.

Autumn is warm and sunny this year and the Woodland calamint does not yet stop making new flowers.

Bastard Toadflax

A very small plant is hidden in short dry grass. Bastard toadflax (Thesium humifusum) is only a few centimeters high and nearly invisible except for some miniature flowers like tiny white stars.

If you really search for it between the tangle of grass and mosses you'll find a pivotal root from which radiate several flowering stems. The yellow-green leaves and stems are a bit rounded, like those of a succulent plant (but probably you need a magnifying glass to see this).

Bull Thistle

End of season.

The remaining flowers of af Bull Thistle (Cirsium vulgare).