Pagina 47 - Juliana_Book_eng

47
Images and Texts.
This hairless and about 30 cm high perennial herb has a thick, hollow stem, and
dark green, shining, shallowly toothed cordate leaves. The perianth is single.
The petals are golden yellow, shiny on the inner side and mostly greenish on
the outer side. The fruits are follicles with seeds that swim and thus spread
around.
The species thrives all over Slovenia in wet meadows, forests, amongst shrubs
and along waters. The general distribution is circumpolar, extending to North
America, northern and central Europe and northern Asia.
Like the majority of genera from the family of buttercups, the marsh marigold
is toxic, for it contains saponins and alkaloids. When picked, it may cause inflammation and blisters on human skin.
As marsh marigold is well-known by most people, it has retained a true treasury of folk terms, such as yurek,
kureshnitza, St. John’s flower, and many more …
Campanula cespitosa Scop. – Tufted Harebell
The generic name in Latin means ‘little bell’, due to the bell-like flowers.
Campanula cespitosa was described as a new species by the naturalist I. A.
Scopoli in 1772 in his work Flora carniolica. He apparently found it in the
Carniolan Alps above Kranj and in the vicinity of Idrija. This bellflower is thus
one of the plants which have the typical locality in Slovenia.
It can be recognized by the characteristically barrel-shaped corolla. Scopoli
further wrote that the plant has “elongated little bells, whose orifice is not very
wide”.
It thrives in crevices, on scree and gravel banks, from the lowlands to the
subalpine belt. It is particularly common in the Alps, but it can also be found in
the prealpine and Dinaric regions.
The general distribution extends to the Eastern Alps, while in the southeast it reaches as far as Gorski Kotar in Croatia.
Centaurea scabiosa L. subsp. scabiosa – Greater Knapweed
Two subspecies of the greater knapweed can be found in Slovenia. The leaves
of the typical subspecies (Centaurea scabiosa subsp. scabiosa) are hairy and
matt on both sides, with oval to oval-lanceolate segments, less often entire. The
scarlet red tubular flowers are arranged in heads, the marginal ones longer than
the central ones. The plant grows in dry meadows and pastures, amongst shrubs
and in open forests, from the lowlands to the montane belt.
The other subspecies is Fritsch’s Knapweed (Centaurea scabiosa subsp.
fritschii) whose leaves are hairless and shiny on the upper side, with lanceolate
or linear-lanceolate lobes (exceptionally entire). The plant grows in dry
meadows and pastures, on scree and in open forests from the lowlands to the
montane belt.
The distribution of both subspecies in Slovenia is not exactly known, but it seems that the former subspecies, which is
distributed all over Europe and in Asia, is rarer than the latter.
Cephalaria leucantha (L.) Roem. & Schult. – Common Pale Round-
head
More than two centuries ago, our flora was thoroughly studied by the naturalist
Balthasar Hacquet. In the mountains above the Trenta Valley he discovered a
new Scabiosa species, which he eventually named Scabiosa trenta. Then the
plant mysteriously disappeared. It was searched for by many botanists, but to
no avail.
The Trieste botanist Muzio de’ Tommasini brought this unsolved enigma to the
attention of his young friend Julius Kugy. Hacquet’s drawing on a yellowed
piece of paper sent Kugy on a legendary journey to the Julian Alps. He looked
for the mysterious plant, but found instead the Kingdom of Goldenhorn
(Zlatorog).
The enigma was finally solved by the Austrian botanist Anton Kerner, who examined the specimen in the herbarium
kept at the Carniolan Provincial Museum in Ljubljana. Hacquet had not found a new species, but the already known
Common Pale Round-head, which prospers in Karst woodlands and in sunny rocky terrains in the submediterranean
region. The ‘Scabious of Trenta’ was a relict from the warmer interglacial periods, when Karst vegetation penetrated