🪻🌿 🐝 🌱 ✨ // campanula & green metallic sweat bees // gouache on hot press paper // part of my native pollinators series
Tiny sweat bees are underlooked native pollinators. These solitary little guys nest in the ground and pollinate an incredibly wide array of native wildflowers and food crops, including squashes, melons, blueberries, and cranberries. They also love the bright purple bells of wild campanula!
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Herbs and Spices of Teyvat: Liyue
Liyue is a region characteristic by its impressive geography, mainly its towering mountains and canyons that carve the land of Geo. This, apart from incredible landscapes, it creates a multitude of microclimates, in which an incredible diversity of flora can grow. And some of these, the people of Liyue have made use of them for their cooking.
Some of the more known ones are the Jueyun Chili, the Violetgrass, and the Qingxin.
The Jueyun Chili, obtained from the Jueyun Chili Plant (Capsicopunica graveolens) is a punicoid bush found wild in the northern lowlands of Liyue, but is cultivated elsewhere. Their fruits, especially their seeds and the oils the fruit secretes, have an extremely spicy, almost burning hot smell, due to high concentrations of capsaicin, and the reason why it is used in a lot of dishes in the local cuisine. This compound is however clearly meant to dissuade mammals like humans from eating it, as its dispersers are pigeons, immune to capsaicin.
The Violetgrass (Campanulocatena scandens) is a lithophytic labiate plant that can be found all across Liyue. Despite this distribution, and its very pleasant fragrance, it is not very commonly used. This is because obtaining it is not an easy task. As a lithophyte, it grows exclusively on rock crevices in walls, cliffs and other of the most inaccessible places of this very mountainous region. However, whoever manages to get a hand on some of these hard to acquire flowers, will be paid a good price for their effort.
The Qingxin (Qingxinia aspilus) is a rare, highly sought after plant in the region. This ground creeping berberid has very specific growth condition requirements, and thus can only be found at the highest peaks, where its underground rhizome helps the plant survive the intense cold. The part of the plant that is used are its sweet, almost translucent flowers, as the rest of the plant is bitter.
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Campanula incurva
Plants in Campanula are often called bell flowers, and the name of their genus means "little bells", but the flowers of Campanula incurva are more urn-shaped. Often, the flowers come in shades of purple, but ours are white. Native to Greece, and belonging to the family Campanulaceae.
-Brian
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Plant of the Day
Thursday 24 August 2023
Providing a long flowering display in summer is the clump-forming Campanula lactiflora (bellflower). Here the purple flowering species and white flowered Campanula lactiflora ‘Alba’ are naturalised on the edge of a tree canopy.
Jill Raggett
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