Leijpark013

@leijpark013 · 22 Nov 2021

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Leijpark013 Pied Snapdragon

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Published by Thierry P. Dinjens · 18 November at 17:30 ·
Occasionally we find a plant in the Leijpark that really can only have come here because of purchased seed. Seed that people have sown in their gardens because they would like to have a flowery garden. Totally fine of course. Every now and then that seed ends up in the great outdoors and so it could be that we encounter this exotic in the Leijpark: the Bonte Snapdragon.
This plant grows frequently in a number of wildspots in America. So is it an American plant? no. Motley Snapdragon is from home from a Moroccan. But as it goes in the world of traveling people, everything that people like ends up where it actually doesn't belong, but can thrive. And the Pied Snapdragon is a tough one. On vacant terrain, she does an excellent job and she is a real bee plant.
That 'snapdragon' part that we read in the name would refer to the shape of the flower that resembles a lion's mouth with the necessary imagination, where the palate of the snapdragon is the platform on which the many flying insects land, who come to candy nectar there. By the way, not every country looks a snapdragon in. In America, people talk about 'toad flax', which means as much as toad flax. Now the plant is not a family of flax, but it looks like young flax plants at the time when it has not yet blossomed. The Variegated Snapdragon, which can be found in our gardens, is therefore a breeding form of the flax snapdragon.
As already mentioned, it is a tough plant that defies little fertile soil here. In country of origin, Morocco, the plant has other enemies. There is one deer species all over Africa that is actually native there: the Barbary deer. This deer lives in Morocco, among other things, and during grazing, the animal also eats the Motley Snapdragon. The plant resists this and comes back on as hard. In the Leijpark it has no deer to fear, at most rabbits, but they will not have an easy meal on it; Motley Snapdragon can grow half a meter high.
Motley Snapdragon does not grow very long, between May and June usually (with later sowing it also blooms in summer) but her colourful color splendor makes her spectacular to see.
It often happens in a place like a city park that there are plants that you don't expect there. People take a lot of things on their shoes and many people will also be quite actively sowing in the park. The so-called 'guerrilla sowing '(sowing plant mixtures in nature or in the city as a statement against the petrification and scrap) produces this kind of beautiful picture. Some people are against the demise of our native nature due to the arrival of exotics, but a park is not a nature reserve. If you throw out everything that doesn't originally belong, there's little left of the park. The same goes for society, of course. Personally, I like 'as motley as possible', whether this is about flowers or people. That's why I love the Leijpark; all possible creatures are welcome there. It delivers the most wonderful images (and stories).