Destinations
2025
- Morocco
- Extremadura
- Crete
- Menorca (April)
- Lesvos
- South of Salamanca
- Picos de Europa
- Algarve & Alentejo
- The Gambia
2026
... where there are many holiday photos to enjoy.
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Photospot: rue-leaved saxifrage
Saxifrages have star quality. Wild saxifrages we associate with alpine or arctic habitats. Some are beautiful or spectacular. Many are grown as garden flowers.
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ID tipsTiny, white flowers, 5-petalled. Green stems and leaves, soon turning red. Zig-zag stems. Fingered leaves, stickily hairy - see below. |
Chasing pavements
Yet one widespread saxifrage is unglamorous and overlooked. Rue-leaved saxifrage can be found in natural places like limestone pavements, but you're more likely to see it — if you make the effort to look for it — in high street pavements.
It likes lime - but that can include old mortar, gravelly car parks or even cement. The grid-like pattern above is moss-covered cement between granite blocks at Norwich's Riverside development. Rue-leaved saxifrage — mostly with red leaves here — is abundant.
Other saxifrages
The UK's other common saxifrage is meadow saxifrage, which grows in well-drained, 'unimproved' (= unfertilised) grassland. Sloping road verges like this one often suit it. Frettenham, Norfolk, 4 May 2014. |
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More nature notes . . . . . . . . . . . Photographs on this page by Chris Durdin.
The tiny white flowers soon turn to seedheads - as on this one, like most on this page photographed on 1 May.
What's in a name
Saxifrage means stone breaker (in French casse-pierre), though whether that's an assumption from species that grow in rock cracks or of medicinal use for tackling kidney stones is unclear.
Scientific name: Saxifraga tridactylites. Tridactylites means three-fingered (though leaves can be 5-lobed and basal leaves spoon-shaped).
The photo above shows how rue-leaved saxifrage can also grow in disturbed ground. This minute plant, growing with early forget-me-not, is on an area at Center Parcs in Breckland that is harrowed annually to encourage rare and scare arable plants. 18 April 2014
Growing companions
This rue-leaved saxifrage (white flowers, on the right) is growing with wall speedwell.
An urban mix: the rue-leaved saxifrage is growing out of procumbent pearlwort (even more overlooked as a plant than the saxifrage) and with a buddeia seedling behind.
Pyrenean saxifrage - growing near Gèdre, Honeyguide's base in the French Pyrenees.
