FLOWERS: ROYAL PURPLE

Hedge Woundwort hiding in the grass at Filnore.  The flowers are really beetroot red rather than purple.  Check you've got the right one by crushing a leaf and smelling it.  Rather unpleasantly pungent, as one of my flower books says.

   

Flower buds of Creeping Thistle are also purplish but will change to pink when the flowers open.

Flowers of Tufted Vetch are a rich violet purple.  The plant scrambles up other plants by clinging on with tendrils at the end of each compound leaf.

This odd little character is Crow Garlic.  

Photo: Alan Watts

In spring it looks like chives as the green tubular shoots grow in clumps.  The flower heads at the top of long shoots are often not flowers at all but clusters of  bulbils, ready to start new plants vegetatively.   The photos below show: on the left a flower head still inside its papery sheath, and on the right a head full of bulbils already beginning to shoot.

By the time they drop to the ground they are already little clumps of new plants.