Friday, 20 January 2012

Rosebay Willowherb

Rosebay Willowherb seeds, Epilobium angustifolium, on Orchid Bank. High Elms Country Park, 22 August 2011.
Rosebay Willowherb seeds, Epilobium angustifolium. High Elms Country Park, 22 August 2011.
A photo from last Autumn. Rosebay Willowherb is also called fireweed. Some say it is because the seeds blowing away from the vivid flowers look like smoke from a fire. Others, that it likes to grow where there has been a fire.

It is certainly an early urban coloniser. In London, after World War II, it grew in the craters where buildings had been blown up in the Blitz. Where I grew up, near Newcastle, we often saw it where rows of houses had been demolished.

The flower of this species is what the crab spider I posted recently was sitting on.

1 comment:

  1. Now, that is as pretty a composition of an apparently rampant plant as can be imagined.

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