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Tag Archives: Common centaury

Variations in pink and white

15 Sunday Aug 2021

Posted by sconzani in flowers, wildflowers

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British wildflowers, colour variation in flowers, Common centaury, knapweed, thistle, Yarrow

It fascinates me how many wildflowers vary from their standard colours, often changing from pink to white and vice versa. Here we have Centaury, usually pink but also commonly seen with white flowers; Knapweed, also usually a pinkish lilac, but I occasionally see a white variant; Thistles that are also usually pinky lilac but often flowering white hereabouts; and the usually white Yarrow, which I find growing with quite pink flowers in a local field.

210815 Centaury pink
210815 centaury white

210815 Knapweed pink210815 knapweed white

210815 thistle pink
210815 thistle white

210815 yarrow pink210815 yarrow white

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201/366 Small and white

19 Sunday Jul 2020

Posted by sconzani in nature, wildflowers

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

British wildflowers, Common centaury, Common mouse-ear, Eyebright, Fairy flax, Hedge bedstraw, white-flowered wildflowers

Many of the local wildflowers currently in bloom have small, white flowers. These are some of them …

200719 fairy flax

Fairy flax (Linum catharticum): this is the smallest, a tiny delicate plant that appears to shake and quiver even in the lightest breeze. It is also known as Purging flax as, in past times, herbalists prescribed it as a laxative.

200719 hedge bedstraw (1)
200719 hedge bedstraw (2)

Hedge bedstraw (Galium mollugo): not the bedstraw that was used to sweeten the smell of straw mattresses (which is the yellow-flowered Lady’s bedstraw), but its close cousin, which can be found scrambling along hedgerows, particularly on calcareous soils.

200719 common eyebright (1)
200719 common eyebright (2)

Eyebright (Euphrasia sp.): I didn’t know until I checked this plant on the Plantlife website that the various species of Eyebright are semi-parasitic, stealing the nutrients of other plants, like grasses.

200719 common mouse ear

Common mouse-ear (Cerastium fontanum): A type of chickweed, which many gardeners will know as a persistent ‘weed’, this little plant gets its mouse-ear name from its hairy leaves that grow in pairs on either side of the plant’s stem.

200719 common centaury (1)

Common centaury (Centaurium erythraea) is usually pink flowered (see the variations below) but many of the plants I see locally, like those above, have white flowers. The Plantlife website gives the fascinating information that centaury is ‘named after the centaur Chiron, who, according to legend, discovered its healing power and used it to cure himself from the effects of a poisoned arrow.’

200719 common centaury (2)
200719 common centaury (3)

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About me

sconzani

sconzani

I'm a writer and photographer; researcher and blogger; birder and nature lover; countryside rambler and city strider; volunteer and biodiversity recorder.

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