After visiting the fantastic type location of Pinguicula mundi Blanca, Jamilena, Ruiz Rejon & Reg. Zamora, we continue our trip heading south to meet one of the biggest Pinguicula species in the world: Pinguicula vallisneriifolia Webb.
Roads are long and sinuous in the Sierra de Segura, and not always in a good state. We move foward as we can across conifer forests and alpine moores where we find some marvellous orchids (that I'll show in another topic) and then we go down inside gorges of various rivers. We scan at every moment landscapes to descover stations the butterwort with vallisneria leaves: Pinguicula vallisneriifolia Webb. The research of the first station has been long and fruitless until at a curve of the road, a chalky spring and its small associated bog were revealed to our eyes:
We are far from the vertical calcareous cliffs we are used to see on pictures available on internet. But I take my binoculars and scan this location to see some lovely violet flowers of the butterwort. We cross as we can the river on wood log and big rocks to reach the plants.
Surprisingly, the butterworts at this place don't grow on solid calcareous rocks as I saw before on pictures. Here plants grows between between calcareous stones:
in thin sand:
a dripping wall:
or in an amphibious way!
Flowers are really variable, with a typical color:
a darker color, without any vein here:
to really white colored flowers.
This population has characteristic very wide summer leaves:
And just before leaving this station, one more picture of a part of this population:
And we return to the car searching for more locations of this beautiful species.
Regards
Aymeric
