HelHSS

By HelHSS

Beautiful white

For the first time I saw a fumewort or a bird-in-a-bush (which one?) as white. The colour is not that common. Two of them is currently blooming in our yard, the rest are plain purples.This species is a native, old and wild spring ephemeral that is common in Southern Finland growing for examle in parks and courtyards.

Hyacinth-like flowering fumeworts protrude from the bare ground in the early spring - at the same time as the Eurasian-skylarks appear in the landscape. The people is said to have noted this connection since ancient times by giving the plant names referring to the skylark.

Next is a kind of story of the connection. I put a translation by google (with some corrections by me), hope you'll understand the point: 


The fumewort blooms when the Eurasian-skylarks lay their eggs, but have time to ripen their seeds before the skylark's offspring leaves its nest. The pollination of the fumewort is taken care of by the bee: as it sits lower than the outer petals of the flower, the inner petals surrounding the stamens and stems are squeezed downwards and the stigma is revealed. Pollen has fallen on the surface of a stigma into a ball to wait for an insect to visit - because, like most of its relatives, fumewort is not self-fertile. When a bee pushes its proboscis into the flower, licking the nectar from the back of the spur, it grabs the pollen from the stigma into the fur, then travels to the next flower. The bee-eater is often visited by a yellow-black-and-white mantle bumblebee, who simply bites a hole in the spur to gain access to the plant's necatr storage.

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