Chickweed Bloom - Digital effect
by Debbie Portwood
Title
Chickweed Bloom - Digital effect
Artist
Debbie Portwood
Medium
Mixed Media - Photography - Digital Art
Description
This is a macro view of a Chickweed bloom. They are so pretty close up. They are only 5-8mm in size the on that is just beginning to open is probably only a couple of mm in size. I converts to 0.1968503937 of an inch. VERY TINY!! I gave the background a soft texture and a soft white frame. This version has a digital watercolor effect. It is in a square format so it is smaller than most other images. Will look beautiful in your home or workplace or as any of the other great products sold on this site.
(WIKIPEDIA)
Stellaria media, chickweed, is an annual flowering plant in the family Caryophyllaceae. It is native to Eurasia and naturalized throughout the world, where it is a weed of waste ground, farmland and gardens. It is sometimes grown as a salad crop or for poultry consumption.
Description
Chickweed is a hardy annual which flowers throughout the year in northern Europe, in mild weather. The stems are terete and glabrous with a lax and sprawling growth habit, up to 400 mm (16 inches) long and 1 mm (0.039 inches) in diameter, with a line (very occasionally 2 lines) of hairs running straight down its length, alternating sides at the nodes. The petioles are 5 to 8 mm long with hairy margins. The leaves are green, hairless, oval and opposite, 6 to 25 mm long by 3 to 10 mm wide with a hydathode at the tip.
The flowers are small, about 1 cm in diameter, with 5 bifid white petals, 1-3 mm long, nestled inside the larger (3-5 mm long) sepals. These sepals have long, wavy (villous) hairs on their outer (distal) sides and are oval in shape, and usually 5 in number. There are often only 3 stamens but sometimes more (up to 8) and 3 styles. Many publications state that chickweed sometimes has no petals at all, but this may be due to confusion with lesser chickweed, which used to be considered a subspecies but is now considered to be a species in its own right.
The flowers quickly form capsules. Plants may have flowers and capsules at the same time.
Taxonomy
The name Stellaria media was published by DomÃnique Villars in Histoire des plantes du Dauphiné in 1789. It has accumulated a huge number of synonyms since then, as well as many putative varieties and subspecies, very few of which are accepted today.
The name Stellaria is derived from the word 'stella' meaning 'star', which is a reference to the shape of its flowers; media is Latin for 'between', 'intermediate', or 'mid-sized'.
It is sometimes called common chickweed to distinguish it from other plants called chickweed. Other common names include chickenwort, craches, maruns, and winterweed.
Identification
Chickweeds have a line of hairs along one side of stem.
Chickweeds are recognisable by the line of hairs down the stem. The species most likely to be confused with chickweeds are mouse-ears (Cerastium), however, mouse-ears are hairy all over (leaves and stems).
Common chickweed can be differentiated from lesser chickweed by the presence of white petals on the former and from greater chickweed by 3 stamens present compared to 10 found in greater chickweed. Water chickweed has petals longer than the sepals.
Distribution
The sepals have very long hairs
Seeds MHNT
Stellaria media is widespread in Asia, Europe, North America, and other parts of the world. There are several closely related plants referred to as chickweed, but which lack the culinary properties of plants in the genus Stellaria
Uploaded
April 15th, 2023
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