Here’s the third part of our series on wild flowers in Canton Zug. Maybe there will be more? It depends on Mother Nature! [ Note: Mother Nature has been giving us almost daily showers, to the extent that the wheat in the field near us is sprouting green and roots while it is stil in the head of the wheat. Disaster for the farmers! ] [ Additional note (11 August): The farmer gave up - he cut all the wheat AND the wildflowers and after a few more days of rain, collected all the material. I expect that it went to a biogas or similar facility. Now the field, almost to the river and the trees, is stubble about 5 cm (2 inches) high. ]

A Damsel Fly - most of them here seemed to have dark blue wings and irridescant blue bodies

A small yellow daisy that was hard to focus on

My mother called this a "Nicotine Plant" when she saw one that was 3 meters (10 feet) tall in my garden in South Africa... I suspect that it is related to tobacco?

This is another yellow spike, similar to the smaller one, but not the same thing.

Small Yellow Flowers in a Bunch

These are two blue spikes with the red hearts that we saw before, but from a distance, the combination looks purple

This vine has small violet flowers and small violet fruits, but I could not get a clear shot - the next day the vine had been cut down by a hedge trimmer!

These light purple flowers are pushing up through some purple fuzzies - two weeks later they were all pink instead of purple - why?

Sometimes Purple Sometimes Pink

Cheers! I hope you enjoy the pictures, and please come back, we might even have some more in the future!

Jimmy Craig Hesser

 

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Zug Wild-Flowers – Part 3

 

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Hi there!

Here are some more pictures of our wild flowers. Please enjoy!

These little white stars are probably related to the blue ones from before

Blue Climbing Clover? Maybe - but the flowers are totally different from clover

Two more purple fuzzies, and here, you can see the structure of the flower (along with my boot!)

What would a field be like in Europe without Poppies!

Blackberries (real ones, not electronic!) climbing through the hedge, looking for the sun

A small white flower close to the ground under the hedge

Small Light Blue Flowers Forming a Carpet

Purple Clover (I think it is also called "red clover")

Small white spikes on big bushes - this one is about 2 m (6' 6") tall

White Clover - How many leaves?

Stay tuned, there are still more to come!

Jimmy Craig Hesser

I told you earlier (see “Radioactivity?“) that there are a number of wild flowers that grow in the areas where they are allowed to flourish. In Switzerland, the practice goes so far as to mow around the wild flowers, even in the lawns, when the flowers are blooming and seeding. I go to essentially the same area with the dogs 2x per day, and I was surprised with the variety I found there – below is a little gallery that shows what all we run across there – most of them, I do not know the names for, but some I recognise from my childhood in North Carolina, and a few from other places that I have lived.

In most of the other places, there were a number of different kinds of flowers that bloomed during the year, but they usually bloomed with only three or four kinds at a time. Often, various flowers with the same colors bloomed at roughly the same time – I was told that this helped the bees to find the maximum amount of flowers of the “major brands” that were in bloom. Here, it seems like everything is blooming at once! I have seen that different flowers bloom earlier or later, but now (before we started to have some heavy rains) there were between 15 and 20 different flowers all blooming at the same time. It makes for some really nice scenery!

Anyway, here are the ones I managed to get haldway decent pictures of – it’s not always easy with my telephone to get it to focus on the thing I want to record!

A Small Yellow Spike with Queen Anne's Lace

This small blue star is low-set and only started coming out after mid-summer

This hot air balloon is a different kind of flower!

Small white flowers that bunch together

I call this one the purple fuzzy - it has problems with the rain, the petals all stick together

Swiss mountains in the background above ripening wheat

These blue spikes with red hearts are really beautiful, but a little "sticky" to touch.

Classical Wild Daiseys

Queen Anne's Lace

Queen Anne's Lace - See Why It's Called That?

So, there we have the first batch! I remember some pictures that I took that I don’t see here, so there should be some more photos later on! I also found that there were too many pix for one post, so I split them up into three posts- stay tuned for the rest!

I hope you enjoy the pix –

Jimmy Craig Hesser

After my scare from the multiple-leafed clovers (see Radioactivity if you didn’t read it already), the wild grasses and flowers grew up around and over the clovers to the extent that I hardly see any clover leaves at all these days. But I did find one in our little garden behind the apartment. :D

What struck me a few weeks ago is the astounding diversity of the flowers along the little path I take with the dogs when we go walking. I grew up in North Carolina, and our neighbourhood was almost surrounded by woods (not orderly enough to be a forest), consisting primarily of scrub pine, dogwood, hickory nut and oak trees, with a few other things thrown in for variety now and then (cedars, other kinds of pines, holly, etc.).
We had flowers there in the spring and summer, but the real display was when the dogwood trees (Cornus florida) bloomed – all at the same time, creating a white forest that lasted for about 2 weeks. But we did not have much in the way of flowers on a continuing basis – more poison ivy (Toxicodendron radicans) and regular ivy (I thought this was native to North America, but Wikipedia says no) and such!

I counted over 15 different flowing plants (excluding grasses, bushes and trees) on our little wild path. I tried to take some pictures but they are not great – the rain in our area makes getting good pictures with the flowers open a little difficult! Anyway, take a look in a few days, I should have them posted!