Flowering plants on New Year’s Day

This video from Arizona in the USA says about itself:

Winter wildflowers in Tucson

Deserts and canyons around Tucson are bursting into bloom in mid-February. Video by the Star‘s Doug Kreutz.

As this blog reported earlier:

Between December 25 and January 4, plant lovers will be looking everywhere in the Netherlands for flowering plants. We wonder how many different plants are still in bloom and which flowering plant will be most numerous.

Now, the results of this count are in. The Dutch FLORON botanists report today (translated):

During the first edition of the End of the Year Plant Hunt organized by FLORON a total of 383 different wild or feral plants were observed flowering. A remarkably high number for this time of the year.

This is about a quarter of all wild plant species of the Netherlands.

The three most frequent species were daisies (seen 346 times), annual meadow grass (323) and dandelions (296). Other frequent species: common groundsel, chickweed, shepherd’s-purse, red deadnettle, white dead-nettle, yarrow and orchard grass. Among the less frequent species, some were remarkable; like Hieracium amplexicaule and wallflower.

Winter flowering plants of Texel island: here.

The Brassicaceae plant family boasts a stunning diversity of fruit shapes. But even in this cosmopolitan company the heart-shaped seed pods of the Capsella genus stand out. An estimated 8 million years ago Capsella embarked on a different evolutionary pathway from its close relatives Arabidopsis and Camelina: here.