The Mediterranean Thistle. Not the most glamorous of plants, I grant you, amongst the riot of colour in the Gozo countryside at the moment. It may not get much attention, but I like its combination of spikes and delicacy and I also very much like its Latin name, Galactites tomentosa, which sounds like a grisly punishment Jabba the Hutt would mete out to Han Solo. Also known variously as Boar Thistle and Purple Milk Thistle, it grows in all the countries around the Mediterranean Sea, the colour varying from white through to purple. Tomentosa refers to the dense woolly hairs which cover the stems and the underside of the leaves. It's indigenous to the Maltese Islands too, which merits a special mention.
But there's no missing this if you're wandering around Gozo, the Crown Daisy, Glebionis coronaria. Probably second only to the Bermuda Buttercup in proliferation, great carpets of it have sprung up on the hills. It smells of camomile and is used in Asian cuisine as a herb, flavouring soups, stir-fries and omelettes. It's pollinated by bees, flies, beetles and butterflies, and is also self-pollinating, which is a good thing considering the quantity of plants as you wouldn't imagine there's enough insects to go round them all. Every plant can have many flower heads, and each head contains 100-200 individual flowers (florets), each of which produce a seed when pollinated, which would account for its abundance. They adopt no particular dispersal method, the seeds sprout where they fall or are carried away into the soil by ants.
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Small clumps of Hedysarum coronarium, French honeysuckle, are out in all their showy splendour. It's a member of the Fabaceae family, peas and beans, and is used, ingloriously it seems, as a fodder crop. It's sweetly scented and is also used for honey production.
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The Crimson Pea, Lathyrus clymenum (the red and purple one in the picture, the yellow one is the ubiquitous Bermuda Buttercup). Another Fabaceae, the peas are cultivated on the Greek island of Santorini and prepared with onions and olive oil for use in a dish called fava santorini. It's another plant indigenous to Malta.
I don't know how much longer this will last, all this fecund abundance, the sun will bake them into submission I imagine in the next two months. Spectacular though, while it's all still here.