in the forest white flowers grow...

' A rose is a rose is a rose...' - maybe but this is the Burnet Rose, Midsummer night's white enchantress. I have this old bush and two new ones - this sometimes loses it's buds because someone bites their stems and they fall off. But not this summer. I have been poisoning those bugs with pyretrin and some summers are better. This year it even had a few flowers open in Midsummer night!

I never wanted roses, never even really liked them, but for a reason or another they do like it here: all my other efforts with maples and some bushes have ended to death... =(. Only roses survive!! And there are already some five or six different species.

 Here we have a lovely little spider in the rose... do they eat mead? Spiders? well...

 One of the most beautiful flowers i know - and i know some... - is germander speedwell, veronica chamaedrys - with little blue eyes it looks at the sky, paler and not so pretty as this tiny fellow! Those flowers though small are fine featured and delicate, and the blue has a nouance no other has!

And the little stars shining everywhere...

By the roadside there still is light to grow and bloom but under the great spruce very few plants survive.

 The white lupin is like a ghost or a spirit against the darkness of forest. A ray of light through the trees plays on the wood horsetail - equisetum silvaticum.

And here under a birch is a splash of wintergreen with tiny beautiful flowers!

A species o vetch - vicia - fills the ditch.

By the abandoned house lupins have seized the land...

The cranesbill grows all over old meadows and roadsides.

Thistle is a handsome and colorful plant! 

 A little blue butterfly has found a meadow vetchling  to feed. And a field of timothy - phleum pratense - is slowly swaying in the breeze...

The High Summer is Over!

Yes, the high summer is over - in the past you noticed it when the hay poles emerged on the fields - now it is those 'eggs' - not yet them but another sure sign is the willowherb (epilobium) blossoming. And the white clover (trifolium). We used to make garlands of clover and let them dry on the wall inside - the sweet scent floated around the house for weeks...

Sneezewort (achillea ptarmica) and yarrow (achillea millefolium) also open their flowers at this time to continue for perhaps two months until september. Their flowers are small and modest but if you have a big bunch of them in a vase they look really gorgeous!

 I ran after this admiral trying to get a better picture but this was the closest...

Ditch bank is a home of many plants including spreading bellflower (campanula patula), red campion (melandrium dioecum), northern dock (rumex longifolius) and different cow-wheats (melampyrum). It also seems to be delicious to this little butterfly...

Little birches by the road turn red because of the straight sun shine. 

This field has not been ploughed in some years and it has turned to a meadow with a lot of flowers growing.

Meadow buttercup (ranunculus acris) is opening yellow flowers through the summer from may to september and at midsummer meadows are full of it's beauty!

Wild lupins (lupinus) are growing everywhere but somehow just for a while: after some years they disappear to come back again someday. Lupin have three colors - white, mellow pink and deep blue.

 Many different thistles (cirsium) are also found - handsome purple flowers but on a closer look the stems reveal some frightful spikes!

Sorrel (rumex) has bunches of leaves you can use for a soup or eat with bread and butter - delicious they are! Sorrel is common on meadows and roadsides.

Ditches give humidity to sedge (carex), aöso in bloom now. And in the garden an old perennial has gone wild blossoming here and there...