On our walks and hikes around Hesteyrarfjörður and its surrounding environs, I came across a lot of diverse plants and flowers. Although there aren't many tall trees in Iceland, there are a lot of low-lying shrubs and plants. I was impressed by their ability to survive in such harsh conditions, and figure that most of them must have a hibernation period (as either adult plants or as seeds) during the winter months, with a very quick growing and reproduction cycles during the warmer spring and summer
I tried to name the plants in my images by consulting a couple of specialist websites which list Icelandic flora, but came up short on about half of them. It's most likely that I took images of the plants at different stages in their cycles when compared to the images on the other websites, or that I was simply crap at identifying them - a bit of both, I think!
In the end I decided not to label any of them and just post the pics of the pretty flowers and plants for you to enjoy.
So go ahead - enjoy!
Click on images to enlarge
5 comments:
Amazing shots!
Thanks Mory!
Hello Icelandic photo-takers! I was browsing for some plant biologist eye-candy and really enjoyed your photos. The "alien" plant is a kind of sphagnum moss, while the white cottony flowers are cotton grass of some kind (Eriophorum sp. ). The weird black berries are Empetrum nigrum, crowberry, a very widespread species and the flowering vine with woody stems is actually a really, really, really small dwarf willow tree! If you are interested in identifying the rest I can reccomend Fjällflora, by Mossberg and Stenberg-- in Swedish, but a comprehensive and incredibly beautifully illustrated guide to the plants of Iceland, Svlabard, and Fennoscandia.
terveisin,
Raakel
raakel: welcome to our blog and thank you so much for your plant identification and your book recommendation.
When I was trying to identify the plants back when I wrote this post, I could find some descriptions and names, but not all of them, so I gave up!
That book would have come in very handy!
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