Cuckoo Flower

The Cuckoo Flower (Cardamine pratensis) appears just a bit earlier than the cuckoo and it grows under trees or along a walking track, in a grassy not too dry spot where it can get some sunshine. Here it brightens up a little wood near a small stream.

It belongs to the Brassicaceae family, like kale, rape and also most of the little white flowers you find now everywhere in flower (see Little white jobs). The four petals are slightly veined. 

You have to hurry to see it in flower, its season is short !

Sun Spurge

Sun Spurge (Euphorbia helioscopia) behaves according to its name. Its green-yellow umbels always turn towards the sun and it flowers at the first sunny day at the end of winter.

Here are two tiny little specimens in a dry meadow.

The bracteoles make a kind of saucer on which sit flowers of the same pale green colour.

The plants here below are much bigger, they grow on richer soil in a rapeseed field. Each carries several umbels. Many leaves have already fallen off, and the long reddish stems are visible.

The flowers are visited by busy small insects.

The flowers are characteristic for spurges, they look a bit strange.

In this enlargement you can see cyathiums, structures with glands. In Sun Spurge a cyathium looks like a small basket with four eggs sitting on its rim. In the middle of the eggs you can see a bunch of stamens with pollen. From each cyathium emerges a short stem with a kind of slightly flattened ball. This is the female 'flower', and it carries three styles. The big darker green ball below is a female 'flower' that is growing out into a fruit that contains ripening seeds.

Here a seed got stuck between two bracteoles. The pale spot on top of the seed is an elaiosome, a tasty appendix especially designed to attract ants. They are wild about it and they carry them with the attached seeds to their nest to feed their larvae. The seed is not eaten and germinates next year.

Cut-leaved Dead-nettle

Square stems are spreading on the soil in a corner of a vegetable garden or in a field. They carry small dented leaves with a purple tinge.

Cut-leaved Dead-nettle (Lamium hybridum) looks very much like its slightly bigger brother Red Dead-nettle, but the stems of this last one are more or less upright. Both spiecies grow in the same kind of environment. But, because one of them (the red) is much more common as the other one (the cut-leaved) there is a difference in their respective requirements. If not, both species would be common or one of them would disappear.

Hidden between the leaves there are tiny pink flowers.

Isopyrum

See here Isopyrum (Isopyrum thalictroides) just beginning to flower. Like many other plants, this year it has an early start. You should think yourself lucky when you can take its picture, it is a very rare species in Dordogne. Well, it may be overlooked sometimes, so small and ephemeral it is.

Everything about this plant is delicate, its fragile stems, the finely ciselated leaves, and the flowers like a small Wood Anemone. It grows exclusively in humid and not too sunny spots under trees, with a predilection for the bank of a small stream, like here. In some weeks everything of this plant will have disappeared from sight and only its roots will lie dormant until next spring.

Two-leaf Squill

In this picture is clearly visble whence comes its name : Two-leaf  Squill (Scilla bifolia). And it always a pleasure to find it somewhere in a wooded valley.

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.