Every so often I get all excited about a new example of fasciation, a subject with which I am fascinated, as regular readers will know....
This one cropped up at the beginning of May, but I've only just got around to writing about it - I had a few days' holiday in the Peak District, and on one walk, I spotted some Petasites growing alongside the track.
This is Petasites hybridus, common name, hilariously, Butterbur. Very Harry Potter, don't you think?
It's one of those plants which may well have a place in a woodland glade, but isn't really sufficiently interesting to allow into your garden, particularly as it is a rampant spreader.
There is a "garden" species, Petasites fragrans (common name Winter Heliotrope) which, allegedly, smells of cherry pie. It's not a native, it was imported in the late C19th, and unfortunately it has also proved to be a rampant spreader, having escaped into the wild, and is now cheerfully making a bid to take over the south of the UK.
Interestingly, though, all the Winter Heliotrope, and most of the Butterbur, are male plants: they spread by underground rhizomes rather than by seed. Probably a good thing, bearing how invasive they are, merely from spreading sideways...
So, on balance, not something I would want to plant in any of "my" gardens, but it was quite nice to see a long stretch of it growing out in the wild, as it were.
And then...
I noticed....
Fasciation!
Fasciation really is all around us: once you start looking for it.
If you want to read more about it, just type the word into the Search box, top left of the screen....
On this example, you can see that the individual flowers have fused together to make one flat plate of a flower.
Very strange!
As I've said before, it's a spontaneous mutation, it's not infectious, it's purely cosmetic, it won't harm the plant, or affect its continued prosperity - it just looks a bit weird!
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