Plant 11.

Sour dock.

Here you see a photo of Sour dock.

I found this plant in the polder.

It was growing in the berm, next to other plants like cow parsley and the buttercup.

There it got enough sunlight, and the soil was humide.

Sour dock usually grows on sunny places.

It grows on humid woodlands, and sometimes also on open places in the forest. The areas where the sour dock grows, can look red because of this plant.

The plant can easily get 50 centimeters high, and some of them become even 100 centimeters.

Sour dock blooms in May, June and July.

When it blooms, it gets flowers. These flowers are a little bit green in the beginning,

and later on, they become dark red, a little bit like bordeaux.

The flowers become around 4 millimeters big.

The sour dock also has leaves. The leaves are green, and they have a smooth leave edge.

The plant loses all of it’s leaves and flowers in autumn, and in spring evereything blooms again.

The sour dock doesn’t have any fruits, and it isn’t used for medicines.

Plant 7.

Red clover.

Here you see a picture of the red clover.

I found the red clover also in the polder of Eemnes.

It was growing next to other plant and flowers; on the roadside.

The red clover can get 15-50 centimeters high and the stem is hairy.

The red clover I found is winterproof.

The clover is a two-year-old plant, which is sometimes used as a medicine for women who have menopausal

symptoms. Then they sometimes use red clover as a medicine, because it has isoflavones in it. That are a kind

of natural hormones that these women can use.

But after a medical research, they say that the red clover doesn’t really help that well…

 

The red clover has purple flowers which exist of a lot of parts.

Each flower has around 50 small parts/flowers.

The flowers bloom in from May/June until autumn.

These parts are white at the bottom, and purple at the top, I think this gives a nice effect.

Between these flowers, there are small green blades.

The red clover also has green leaves.

These leaves are 3 centimeters long and 1 centimeter wide. The leaves are hairy.

At the borrom of the stem, the leaves grow on a kind of branch, but at the top, they grow just at the stem itself.

The plant doesn’t have any fruits, except for their flowers of course.

But it doesn’t have berries or some things like that.

I don’t know have the plant reproduces. But I think it does by the wind, that the wind blows seeds away which

grow somewhere else to a new red clover.

Plant 5.

The Meadow Buttercup

Here you see the meadow buttercup.

I found this flower in the polder, on the roadside.

It was growing next to other polder-flowers.

There grow a lot of meadow buttercups along the way, and in the meadow as well, thence they are called like

that. They can grow there easily because the soil is humid.

The meadow buttercup occurs a lot in The Netherlands and in Belgium and other parts of Europe.

It is a multi-annual plant, that means that -when it’s getting colder- the flowers disappear.

But the roots stay under the ground and prepare themself the whole winter, to come back in spring.

The buttercup blooms from the beginning of April till September.

The meadow buttercup can become 1 meter high, but most of the time they stay around 40 centimeters high.

The meadow buttercup has yellow flowers. These flowers are yellow as butter, so that’s why that’s the name.

The flowers exist of 5 ‘leaves’, and 5 ‘underleaves’. These parts are round and smooth.

The flowers are 1,5 – 2,5 centimeters long and wide. And there is flour in the flower.

The meadow buttercup has some light-green hairy leaves on it. These leaves vary in size. They vary from 1,5

centimeter till 3,5 centimeter.

The buttercup I found is toxic, just as all the others. The buttercups are also toxic for the animals, but they

know that, so they don’t eat it.

The meadow buttercup reproduces most of the time by the wind. The seeds that are in the flowers are blowen

away by the wind to another place. Then, sometimes a seed goes into the ground, and then there come a new

buttercup.

The meadow buttercup doesn’t have any fruit or any special applications.