With light blue lip flowers creeping zen green now in bloom. You will mainly find this plant in moist forests and grasslands, but not on clay soils. It usually remains quite low, but the flower stems extend higher. She looks like brunel, but the flowers are close together at the top of the stem. Creeping Zenegreen has fairly large bracts between the flowers that protect the flower below. If you look closely, you will see that the upper lip of these lip flowers is very small. The lower lip is a lot larger and extends as a signboard for pollinators, the dark veins show the way to the entrance. Creeping zenegreen forms creeping shoots and can therefore spread quickly. The ovoid leaves are green all year round: the old name is ‘sindegreen‘ and ‘sin’ means ‘always, every day.’
The very rare midwife road is an outsider. While all other toads and frogs go to the water to reproduce, the midwife toad remains on land, croaking in front of the entrance to its day shelter, like a hole under a stone. But you can’t actually call it croaking, the call sounds like a soft whistle or bell. Fwiet-fwiiet-fwiet. Midwife toads like a stony surface and in the Netherlands only occur naturally in South Limburg. There are also urban toads: released toads that have established themselves in urban areas. In April the first ‘klingelkes’ started calling and this will continue until the end of the summer. With their musical call, the males entice the females to lay eggs. My husband carries it on his back for a few weeks. Hence the name: not midwives but real midwives!
Text: Nienke Lameris, Nature Today
Photos: Jan van der Straaten, Saxifrage; Edo van Uchelen, Saxifraga
