I still owed you a gallery of my latest visit to Abisko. You can enjoy the rainbows, clouds and splashes of sun here (or find it on the right of my blog). 

Orchid

Summer is gone and all flowers are fading. It could be a sad event, if the beauty of summer would not be replaced by the warm colours of falling leaves.

Wintergreen, or – in beautiful Latin – Pyrola minor

But still, still it hurts a little bit to say goodbye again. Luckily there is this post bringing back the memories, with some delicate beauties from the subarctic flora (and even more nice summer pictures in the picture gallery).

Mountain avens’ fluffy seeds

For me, there is another reason why I need to remember these flowers. If I want to be efficient next year in the field, I need to know as many plant species as possible. Every summer I remember plenty of plant species names in the field, building a nice and useful internal database over the season. But every year in winter, my freshly gained summer knowledge slowly fades away again.

Red campion or Silene dioica

And every following summer, I have to dig deeper than I thought possible into my foggy memories to bring back the names that looked so familiar the year before. That is why I will try to keep their memory alive this winter.

Woodland geranium – Geranium sylvaticum

I decided on the purchase of a program that will help me remembering my plants. It promises a 95 percent retention rate, which would be totally awesome. I can imagine myself strolling through the mountains already, tirelessly orating species names, while an assistent hurries behind me carrying my backpack and madly writing down the ever-growing list of species my brain is producing.

I can live with a little less heroic scenario as well, of course, but I would love to have a little bit less moments of ‘wait, I am sure I knew the name of this one last year!’ and long periods of trying to find back that one page in the book again.

My personal favourite, the Holy Ghost or Angelica archangelica.