Wednesday 9 September 2015

Yellow Saxifrage

One of the things that never ceases to surprise me is the way that one can find a single specimen of a plant growing very happily all by itself, with not another of its species anywhere near. So it was with this wildflower, which I think is yellow saxifrage Saxifraga aizoides. It was growing beside a small burn on a bank of coarse gravel dumped when the burn was in flood.

Equally alone, appropriately, was the small ant feeding on one of the flowers. If one checks pictures of yellow saxifrage on the internet, ants or other small insects are not infrequently seen feeding, so there must be something that attracts them, and some purpose to that attraction, like pollination.

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