We like Springs and Yellow Things

All of the flowers in this post are in flower today.

All through the winter I have posted flowers and sometimes people leave comments about all the wonderful winter flowers that we have in the UK. Well, we  don’t have winter flowers, I was just trying to cheer winter up but today we do have flowers.

The trick is, not to look out of the kitchen window, then you don’t know that you are being pestered 🙂

First wild flower of the day and it is yellow, it’s a Taraxacum.

Don’t worry, if you read all of the way to the end of this post then you will know more than your mum about the Taraxacum. (Except for Sarasin of course because her mum will also read this post)

Another Asteraceae in flower now, this one is a Daisy.

The very, very beautiful and commonplace Bellis Perennis.

This next one absolutely brought joy to my heart. I missed you like I missed the warmth of the sun.

That is the Lesser Celandine. Now do you believe that it is Spring?

A Blue one.

A Speedwell, of the common-field variety. They are well established and they are here to stay.

Now I gave Mudface a bit of a hard time in my last post, on account of her love of mud.
It wasn’t really fair and so to make amends, yesterday I bought her a new toy.

It is a squeaky ball. Does she like it? Who can tell?

I am going to skip most of the stuff that we saw and we did but I have to show you a couple more flowers.

Red Dead-nettle, it is only a little weed but I find the colours absolutely charming.

The Tommies are coming up.

Okay that is it, one last thing.

Today I discovered something wonderful…. I can put Fizz up a tree and she doesn’t fall out.

No, that wasn’t it. I am never cruel to animals. I just put her in the tree for a minute to stop her pestering me.

This is it. Navelwort.

This is a new one for me and I love that.

It is a succulent, native to the UK and it flowers in May. I took dozens of photographs but I will bore you later. Also known as Wall Pennywort, I found it growing on a wall.

One other thing that I just have to tell you. I am getting along well with taming my Robin. He lands on my hand now and takes food. He has started following me around when I go out, only in the farm yard, he doesn’t go far afield. When I brought Fizz back today He was there to welcome us back singing and following.

He costs me a lot of worms but I don’t think that I have made a mistake. It is hard not to love this little animal.

Heck of a long post, it is going to get longer. Here is my wild flower. Take care my friends.

Taraxacum species, The Dandelions

It may be that the Dandelion you see most often is Taraxacum officinale, the Common Dandelion, however there are more than 230 species of Dandelion in the UK and the differences between them are small and very complex.

It is not possible to identify a Dandelion to species from a single photograph. Many different things have to be taken into account.

The character of the leaves for instance. Some species have alternate lobes and some are opposite and there are some species that don’t have lobes at all, some have a purple central rib and in some it is pale.

      When you understand the leaf you then have to cross reference that with all of the other parts of the flower. The pattern of teeth on the end of each floret for instance.

There are so many factors to take into account that identifying a Dandelion to species is a job for the experts. To us it is just a Dandelion, (Taraxacum species).

So can we even tell that it is a Dandelion?

Yes of course we can. Dandelions belong to the Asteraceae (Daisy) family and they have quite distinctive characteristics.

Like other members of the Asteraceae they have a composite flower head made up of many smaller flowers.

This next picture is of a Common Daisy (Bellis perennis) and shows the arrangement of central disc florets (yellow) and the outer ray florets (white), each “petal” and “disc” is a complete flower in itself and together they make the flower head that we call a Daisy.

A Dandelion has no disc florets. It is composed solely of ray florets.

This next Dandelion lookalike is quite obviously not a Dandelion because it has central disc florets and it is in fact the flower of Coltsfoot (Tussilago farfara)

The other easy to spot and important characteristic is that unlike other lookalikes there are no leaves on the flower stem and it is unbranched, each flower head is carried on a single, bare stem. that will rule out the Hawksbits and other pretenders like Cat’s-ears.

Dandelion (Single flower head on a bare stem)

Cat’s-ear (Multiple flower heads on a branched stem)
If you remain unsure then cut it. The Dandelion is the only yellow member of the Asteraceae with a hollow stem and it exudes a milky sap.

Dandelions secrete latex, not very much in the wild varieties but scientists have developed cultivars for the production of rubber and there are tests being carried out today with tyres made of Dandelion rubber.

At the base of each flower there are a series of down turned bracts. These are sometimes mistaken for sepals but remember that this is a flower head and not an individual flower, each ray floret has it’s own sepals at the base which will eventually become the parachute that will carry the seed.

Let’s look under the bonnet.

Each “petal” is a whole flower. It has all that is required to make a flower, a corolla (fused petals) male reproductive parts and female parts too and an ovary that will become a seed.

So what are all of these pointy bits coming out of the flower? They look like styles but they are covered in pollen, so that would make them stamens, right?

These are the styles, the female part of the flower and they are covered in pollen that they picked up from their own anthers.

I have to do a drawing to show you how this works. The anthers develop first and they produce pollen on the inside, The style grows through the middle of the anthers and collects the pollen. The style has two receptive surfaces that are pressed closely together, the pollen collected on the outside does not affect them. So the style carries the pollen.
This is the best photograph that I can find to show you the anthers on a Dandelion.

Dandelions produce a lot of pollen.

Strangely all of this sexual stuff is not really necessary, most Dandelions are capable of asexual reproduction and their seeds do not require second party fertilisation but it is fun.

With 230 plus species in the UK you can pretty well find Dandelions in flower at any time of year, they don’t all flower at the same time, however there is a season.

April is the best time to look for Dandelions, the fields are full of them.

By May they will be spent.

You will never see a Dandelion with some petals and some seeds, the transformation seems to be instant and total, they close as a flower and when they open again they are a seed head.

The seeds are called achenes and the parachute is called a pappus and the parachute is actually made from modified sepals of the tiny flower called a ray floret. Between the seed and the parachute is a stem called a beak. The whole of this structure has grown from the style that both distributed and collected pollen for the flower.

These are the Dandelion clocks of our childhood, you can tell the hour by the number of breaths it takes to disperse the seeds. They are not firmly attached so it is usually early.

The Dandelion weed is without doubt one of our most beautiful wild flowers.

I am not really sure why it hasn’t been modified and cultivated for the garden. Dandelions are a very good weed to have in the garden, they have a very deep tap root that draws nutrients up to the surface and makes them available for other, more fancy, flowers. They also attract pollinators.

Dandelions are the food plant for at least twelve species of moth and many other invertebrates. They are rich in nectar as well as pollen and are an important food source for bees.

They are also good for us to eat, all parts of the Dandelion are edible.

There is something that I should tell you about this beautiful and useful wild flower, it has a wicked side.

If you pick a flower and chase your sister with it then she will scream and run away because if you can successfully touch her with the flower then she will be fated to wet the bed. (Dandelions are a lot of fun)

The common French name for a Dandelion is “Pissenlit” and “lit” is the French word for bed. There is some logic in this, Dandelion root has been used in herbal medicine as a diuretic and it does indeed make you piss en lit.

Our own common name Dandelion is derived from another French name “Dent de Lion,” meaning Lion’s tooth and that is a reference to the shape of the leaf.

The Germans call it Pusteblume (Blow Flower)

BTW In case you wondered, that lump that you sometimes see in the centre of a new flower is just ray florets that haven’t opened and expanded yet.

Taxonomy:

Kingdom: Plantae

Order: Asterales

Family: Asteraceae

Genus: Taraxacum

Wildflowers in the Spring 🙂

If Botanists used Public Lavatories…

Relax, it’s not toilet humour…. or perhaps it is.

Before I became a botanist I did sometimes use Public Conveniences and often they would be less nice than I would have liked.

Quite often there would be graffiti on the walls, sometimes it would be quite explicit in it’s nature.

This morning I wrote a post about Bellis perennis (Pretty Forever) and I did some sketches to illustrate the composition and particularly the different male and female parts of the flower. Something about my pictures, maybe the colour, reminded me of toilet doors and I just thought….

Well if botanists peed, what would they draw on the walls?

(We don’t)

Bellis perennis, The Common Daisy

Bellis perennis, the name translates from the Latin, Bellus meaning Pretty and perennis meaning perennial or forever.

“Pretty Forever” you may know it as a Lawn Daisy. The common name Daisy is a corruption of “Day’s Eye” and is a reference to the way that the flower closes at night and opens in the Day.

       

Native to the UK and Europe it is widely naturalised in most temperate climates including the Americas and Australia.

Flowering time is often given as from May to September but here in the UK it is one of those flowers that can be found at any time of the year when it is reasonably mild. I will put it down as February to November but do not be too surprised to see it outside of that season. There are many more flowers in the warm summer months.

There are many flowers that look like Daisies so how do you recognise Bells perennis?

It is the only UK “Daisy” with a leafless flower stem.

        The leaves are all at the base of the flower. They are spoon shaped, sometimes round and they are slightly toothed.

Behind the flower head are the bracts. These serve to enclose and protect the developing buds.

Now we come to the difficult bit to explain.

A Daisy is not a flower. It is a flower head or inflorescence made up of dozens of little flowers. Each of the yellow bobbles in the centre is a whole flower in itself and is called a disc floret. Each of the petals is also a flower in itself, a different kind of flower called a ray floret.

Starting with the petals, how can a single petal be a flower?

I have done a sketch to try to explain. Each petal is a whole flower, the petal itself is the corolla, a name we use when the petals of a flower are fused together. At the base of the corolla there is an ovary, where the seed will develop and coming out of the ovary are the stigma, the female parts that collect pollen. A Daisy’s ray floret is a female flower.

If you look closely at this next photograph you will be able to see the stigma of the ray floret at the base of each petal. (Click to enlarge)

The yellow disc florets in the centre are hermaphrodite, they have both male (anthers) and female (Stigma) parts. This time the corolla is fused into a tube that surrounds each little flower.

The disc flowers open from the outside first and the youngest flowers are in the centre.

Many of our common wildflowers are like this. They are members of the Asteraceae family, sometimes called the Composite family Sunflowers are composed in a similar way to a Daisy but other members of the family like Dandelions and Thistles are missing the disc florets and only have ray florets. Common Groundsel only has disc florets.

Taxonomy:

Kingdom: Plantae

Order: Asterales

Family: Asteraceae

Genus: Bellis

Species: Bellis perennis

Wildflowers in winter.

I think that if we understood our own world better then we might understand our own selves a little bit better and that this is why botanists write on toilet walls (even though they don’t need to pee)

Is reproduction love or power?

Too late to ask me, I am old and I don’t care 🙂 Take it up kids.

Animal Magic

“Just like that”

It’s your destiny

The Swallows have fledged, or at least they are fledging. They are still in the nest today but they have been out and they can fly.

It has taken me a few days watching and all that you get are a couple of short video’s but for me, my understanding and the pleasure that I got from watching them makes a few days just a drop in the ocean. It was time well spent.

Anyway you should be glad that you don’t have to watch the whole twenty hours of video, that I now have to sort and delete from my machine to free up space.

Here are the best bits.

Yesterday morning there were five birds on the nest, there were five birds on the nest and then there were four birds on the nest. I had missed the very first flight and only realised when number five returned to the nest.

This first video starts with the mother calling for them to leave the nest, there is a little comic interlude of the way that they follow flies, their little heads bobbing in unison and in the last bit the second bird to approach the nest is the returning chick. Does he bring food back or do the others just think that he has?

This next video shows them leaving the nest and returning. They spent most of the day fluttering around inside the little alley way that has become their home and by the end of the day they were all settled back on the nest but this is fledging. Today I think that they have ventured outside and seen the blue sky but they still return to the nest.

These birds have made me think a lot about nature as a whole thing and about life and death in the wild. The caterpillars that I am trying to raise are falling to the parasitoid flies that these Swallows depend on for food and survival. The parents have done a really good job of raising them given the wet weather we have been having. I have often looked out in the pouring rain and wondered how they are managing to raise a brood and now this, flight.

I am so in in love and in awe of them and so damned jealous.

I am jealous because they get to eat those delicious crunchy flies, or perhaps because they can raise offspring in a matter of weeks and not the 26 years it usually takes us. Maybe I am jealous of something else altogether…..