Earlier today I blogged about Bristly Ox-tongue and its interesting name... time for another one.
Along the riverside we find clumps of Perforate St John's Wort (a herbal treatment for depression). This pretty wild relative of the Hypericum that you sometimes find in gardens is quite at home on the rougher areas of the reserve. This one gets its specific name because of the leaves. If you hold one up to the light you will see that it has hundreds of tiny holes through which light will pass - hence Perforate!
Fascinating St John's Wort fact number two... is that it is parasitized by another plant. Common Broomrape is often found closeby and lives off the root system of its host. It then produces a brown flower spike that, to be honest, look dead even before it dies!
A family which probably gets it's name from Greater Broomrape - Orobanche rapum-genistae. Which of course is a parasite of broom.