The flora of PĂ©rigord in South-West France is abundant and diverse. In this blog you can find, in pictures, brief encounters with several hundreds of wild flowers and plants as they grow here in French Perigord. Following the seasons other species are added. An index of scientific and English names you find below on the right.

Corine Oosterlee is a botanist and photographer and she offers guided Botanical Walks and other activities around plants and vegetation in nature in Perigord. Do you want to know more? On www.baladebotanique.fr you can find more information. For Corine's photography see www.corineoosterlee.com. Both websites also in English.

Enjoy!




August 25, 2013

Cut-Leaved Germander


Since nearly a year this field full of Wild Carrots (Daucus carota) is a truffle field. Last winter the farmer planted young oak trees grafted with mycelium of the precious truffle mushroom. To protect the young trees from hungry roe and deer he covered them in plastic webbing. Long ago, when Perigord still was a wine region, the field has been a vineyard, and later on tobacco was grown on it, until the seventies or eighties of last century. And after that, the field has been left fallow and was overgrown with junipers for years.


The farmer has cleaned up and plowed and the seeds, hidden in the earth for long years, came to the surface. They are the seeds of 'weeds' that grew in the vineyards and tobacco fields, sometimes species that became rare since. Now they found a soil loose enough to germinate.











For this reason you can find exceptional annual 'weeds' in this new truffle field. Like this small Cut-Leaved Germander (Teucrium botrys) with laciniated slightly velvety leaves.














This one has no upper lip and its stamina stick out, just like other gamanders