Eco Hvar

Hvar's Wildflower Treasures

Published in Environment

The wildflowers on Hvar are a year-round joy. Even in the depths of winter, there is hardly a week without colours brightening up the countryside, contrasting with the island's rocks and the variegated dark green of the woodlands. 

Hvar's Wildflower Treasures

When they are not flowering, the wild plants die back or merge into the background, coming to life again to mark the seasons with their colourful contribution. There is no end to the pleasure of walking around the fields and woodlands, looking at the endless range of plants, many of them tiny, which contribute in turn to the natural splendour of the island. The varied shapes of the plants are part of the attraction, and each season has some specially interesting specimens. These are two examples from the spring season.

The tassel hyacinth

In spring from April to June the tassel hyacinths come into their own with their very fine purple heads.

 
The tassel hyacinth (leopoldia comosa or muscari comosum) is one of the species known as grape hyacinths, and is sometimes called tufted grape hyacinth, hairy muscari or edible muscari. It has fertile flowers which are brownish-green, bell-shaped, and held outwards on stalks which are roughly the same length as the flowers themselves, or slightly longer. At the top of the plant a tuft of bright purple sterile flowers on long stalks spreads upwards. It belongs to the Asteraceae family in the Asparagales order.

As one of the synonyms suggests, the tassel hyacinth is edible, and is used for food mainly in Italy and Greece. In Italy tassel hyacinth bulbs are called lampascioni or cipolline selvatiche (little wild onions), in Greece they are volvoi. I have not yet met anyone who eats tassel hyacinth bulbs in Dalmatia, probably because they are bitter tasting and most Dalmatians seem to be addicted to sugar nowadays. The bulbs are boiled and then preserved in oil or pickled, and are considered to be an appetite stimulant, as well as being diuretic. In Greece they are traditionally part of the speciality vegetarian foods eaten during Lent. Reading the descriptions of how they are prepared, it all sounds like tricky hard work, so I shall content myself, at least for the time being, with simply admiring the beautiful flowers when they spread over the fields in springtime.

The tragopogon

I was fascinated for years by the exquisite round feathery seedhead which would suddenly spread all around the countryside in springtime. Finding out what it was proved to be a challenge. People used to tell me that it was a type of dandelion, but that didn't seem to fit the bill. I had never seen the plant in flower. So far as I could see it consisted only of a stem with a slim head of spindles (seen to the front left of the picture below) which opened out to form the magnificent globe of the seedhead.

I was resigned to never finding out. After all, its beauty was not affected by my not knowing its name. And as I am very bad at remembering names anyway, perhaps it was not worth while searching. Then I made a chance visit to Marinka Radež's art atelier in Dol, and happened to see a painting in progress of the very plant. And not just the seedhead which had entranced me for all those years, but there was also a flower which I had not been aware of. It turned out that the flower only comes out for a short while during the day. Either I had not recognised it as being on the same plant, or I had always missed it. Marinka did not know what the plant was called, but I had enough clues to narrow my search, and finally tracked it down through an excellent website called the seedsite.

Tragopogon flower, April 2015. Photo Vivian Grisogono

So it was that I identified the mystery feathered spindly globe as a tragopogon. Definitely not a dandelion (taraxacum), although both belong to the Asterales order in the Asteraceae family. The tragopogon is also called salsify or goatsbeard. One member of the species, which consists of over 140 different types, the purple salsify or tragopogon porrifolius, is edible, mainly the root which apparently tastes like oysters, but also young shoots and leaves.

Tragopogon flower, April 2015. Photo Vivian Grisogono

© Vivian Grisogono 2013

Related items

back to top
You are here: Home environment articles Hvar's Wildflower Treasures

Eco Environment News feeds

  • ‘At first, the idea does sound crazy’: meet the scientists trying to refreeze the Arctic

    Sea ice is melting fast, worsening the climate crisis, but a bold attempt to rethicken it is showing early signs of success

    ‘This would have been a wild dream a year ago,” says Andrea Ceccolini, standing on Arctic sea ice just a 4-mile snowmobile ride from the Inuit town of Cambridge Bay, northern Canada. To his left are sky blue ponds of meltwater created in the last few days by a sun that no longer sets in the high north summer. To his right, the sea ice is still a brilliant white, the light dusting of snow on top continuing to sparkle.

    “It’s incredibly different, the boundary – I mean, you can point to it,” he says. The difference is the result of a bold geoengineering experiment being conducted by Ceccolini’s company, Real Ice, funded by the UK government.

    Continue reading...

  • Half of world’s children exposed to at least three climate hazards, Unicef says

    Almost every child, including those from high-income countries, is now exposed to at least one hazard

    Half of the world’s children are exposed to at least three overlapping climate hazards threatening their health, education and survival, according to a Unicef report.

    Globally, children face increasing threats from heatwaves, storms, floods and droughts as the climate crisis worsens, with more than one billion facing at least three of these at once.

    Continue reading...

  • AI could help win ‘race against extinction’ of vital plants, say botanists

    Tech is helping to identify and save new specimens and could open ‘genomic goldmine’ of fungi data

    The rise of AI and digitisation could be a turning point in the “race against extinction” faced by botanists trying to identify and save vital plants before they vanish, according to a major report from Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

    New technology is enabling scientists to track how flowering times have shifted by weeks around the world, rapidly identify new specimens and even get crucial genetic data from 180-year-old fungus specimens, potentially opening a “genomic goldmine”. Digitisation and online access to millions of specimens that were until now only accessible in archives is also producing new insights, especially in the global south.

    Continue reading...

  • The bat that weighs the same as a teaspoon of salt – and the biologist who rediscovered it

    The short-tailed roundleaf bat was feared extinct until scientist Iroro Tanshi found one in Afi sanctuary in Nigeria, and set out to protect the only confirmed roosting colony

    Just after sunrise, a cacophony of whoops and chatter can be heard over the verdant forests of the Afi mountain wildlife sanctuary. Nestled within the Cross River rainforest in south-east Nigeria, and spanning an area about the size of central Paris, the steep sanctuary is a haven for endangered gorillas, drill monkeys, the grey-necked rockfowl – and the short-tailed roundleaf bat.

    The Nigerian biologist Iroro Tanshi remembers the moment she first spotted the endangered bat in 2016, during a field expedition for her PhD research. “We were trapping near a roost that night, so we caught a lot of bats,” says Tanshi. But, she adds: “This looked very, very different. Big-eared.” She promptly turned to her identification guide, which revealed that the tiny furry creature she was holding between her fingers was Hipposideros curtus, better known as the short-tailed roundleaf bat, last recorded in the wild in the 1970s.

    Continue reading...

  • Spanish households save €10 a month thanks to renewables expansion, report finds

    Thinktank says decoupling electricity from gas prices has also helped shield Spain from hikes caused by Iran war

    Spanish households save €10 a month on electricity bills because of wind turbines and solar panels installed in the last five years, a report has found.

    Typical energy bills would be 19% more expensive if electricity costs were still as tightly coupled to gas prices as in 2021, according to Ember, a climate thinktank. It found Spain’s “strategic” expansion of renewables since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 has shielded Spanish households from the latest rises in fossil fuel prices caused by the Iran war.

    Continue reading...

  • Country diary: A revelation among the ‘clints and grikes’ of my limestone seat | Mark Cocker

    Wharfedale, Yorkshire: On the trail of a wood warbler, I find a suite of woodland plants rising up from a fascinating land formation – limestone pavement

    Grass Wood is a magnificent fragment of ancient woodland owned and exceptionally well managed by the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust. It is home to some lovely plants, including lily of the valley and herb paris. What became my defining revelation about the place and, in truth, about this whole area was down to a wood warbler.

    It is among my favourite birds, so getting to see the individual singing just off the trail required me to enter the trees, rise up a short bank, and then sit for a long time on a rocky ledge. Slowly it dawned on me that the platform on which I rested, while carpeted in moss, was also incised into a tessellated pattern. From these narrow cracks in the limestone arose a suite of woodland plants. It was dense with ash seedlings, ferns and sedges, as well as linear thickets of dog’s mercury, but there – unmistakably where my hand rested – were strips of flowering herb paris.

    Continue reading...

  • ‘The Antarctic is the last frontier’: the quest to save Shackleton’s Endurance

    Amid fears the wreck will be more accessible to explorers – and new species – as the climate warms, conservationists want to create the region’s first underwater protected area

    The harsh temperatures, treacherous currents and shifting pack ice of the Antarctic’s Weddell Sea, which crushed and sank his ship, Endurance, in 1915, led Ernest Shackleton to describe it as the “worst portion of the worst sea in the world”.

    For more than a century, the inhospitable conditions, which present a challenge even for modern icebreaker ships, helped to protect the lost wreck, which was discovered in 2022, its structure still largely intact.

    Continue reading...

  • Plantwatch: Russian dandelion offers solution to global rubber shortage

    Scientists are returning to a wartime solution that may be more sustainable than the traditional rubber tree

    There is a global shortage of natural rubber and dandelions may be coming to the rescue. In the second world war there was such a severe shortage of rubber that the Allies used the Russian dandelion, Taraxacum koksaghyz, from Kazakhstan. Soviet scientists found the dandelion roots produced enough white milky latex to make natural rubber, but when the war ended producers returned to the traditional rubber tree, Hevea brasiliensis.

    But the demand for rubber is now increasing, with rubber trees suffering from a fungal disease and the impacts of extreme weather caused by the climate crisis. So, scientists are looking again at using dandelions, with the added benefit that they grow in temperate climates, are a sustainable crop that do not need pesticides and lots of water, and don’t lead to the deforestation common in tropical rubber tree plantations.

    Continue reading...

  • Trump wants to put a $75m coal terminal in this liberal California city. Residents aren’t having it

    Residents of West Oakland, which suffers from toxic waste and high pollution rates, rally against a coal export facility

    West Oakland, a California neighborhood known for its rich history of Black activism from the Pullman Porters’ union to the Black Panthers, might not seem like the site of the country’s next great coal project.

    But that’s exactly what the Trump administration is pushing for – with the injection of $75m to build a sprawling coal export terminal in the nearby port of Oakland.

    Continue reading...

  • ‘Like a horror movie’: Coogee’s regulars think twice about swimming after shock shark attack

    ‘Saddened, stunned, surprised and haunted’ is how one surfer describes the mood at the popular Sydney beach two days after Leah Stewart was bitten by a great white

    Under a clear blue sky on a Monday morning, Coogee beach in Sydney’s east is quiet.

    A few swimmers have ventured into the ocean pools at the northern and southern ends of the beach. Most others sit on the sand, looking towards the water.

    Continue reading...

Eco Health News feeds

Eco Nature News feeds

Copyright © 2026 Eco Hvar. All Rights Reserved. Developed by Orion Informatika.