Monday, May 18, 2015

How wrong can I be?














When I came back from the Arnhem Pilgrimage last year I brought with me a couple of Dutch acorns. As I had had a problem with my fridge before I went I bought another when I returned. I used the veg box from the old one to plant the acorns in the last remnants of my compost bag in it.
In the spring I saw that there was a couple of plants growing, one was a very small cluster and the other what looked to be maybe of the doves foot family.
Our of idle curiosity I decided to let them carry on growing. Then I saw that in between the 'doves foot' there was another very finely leaved plant. 


















The leaf was little more than a slight green spike and the buds were around 3mm in size.
















After watching it for a few days, I decided that there was enough of it to snip off a strand to take macro shots.
The 'flower' if you could call it that seemed to be primitive. I got a few 3x pix and then came to what I thought would be the problem. What was it?
My trusty Octopus: Wild Flowers book, came off the shelf for what I expected would be a lengthy search. Lo and behold on the very first page of the white flower section there it was.  Procumbent Pearlwort, Sagina procumbens,   
Puzzle solved before I had relly started. Now I must wait patiently to see what the other plants are.

Now I have found out why it went smoothly.
The Octopus book had the old Latin name so I had to alter all the tags in Flickr and also the title names.
Trouble is that although the Octopus has good illustrations it is an old book almost 30 years old in fact. 




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