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One-flowered Wintergreen

Moneses uniflora

Months

Season

Colour

Habitat

Close up of a delicate One-flowered Wintergreen flower. The five white petals stand out against the forest floor.

How to identify:

Annual/Perennial/BiennialEvergreen perennial
Height15cm
Flower typeSingle , white, 12-20mm
LeavesLight green leaves which are oval shaped
StemsGrows in rosettes with light green stem for single flower heads

 

Three One-flowered Wintergreen plants can be seen amongst the fallen leaves on the forest floor. They have not yet bloomed and the individual buds one each plant hang like white bells.

How to Spot

One-flowered Wintergreen can be a hard one to spot. As well as being very rare, it’s a small, single-flowered plant that grows on the forest floor, which can make it harder to see.

It is a distinctive plant however. Each plant has just 1 stem, and 1 flower. The flower heads are white, with 5 petals and 5 filaments with anthers, leaves at the base of the plant form in a rosette.

Where to Spot

This pretty plant is very rare. In the UK, it can only be found in pine woods in North East Scotland.

One-flowered Wintergreen only occurs at specific sites, and is often isolated to an area a few tens of metres across in a large and apparently suitable woodland.

As part of a possibly global decline, we have recorded it going locally extinct at more than half of the sites it was recorded at, since 2000.

We have been working with this plant up in the Cairngorms and have had some break throughs in understanding it better. Read the full story here.

Did you Know?

We have been working hard to save this tiny wildflower in Scotland. In Autumn 2023 we translocated 109 individual One-flowered Wintergreen rosettes from two sites in to RSPB Abernethy, reinforcing a tiny relic population.

The translocation was a huge success, with a 70 per cent survival success rate one year on.

Read the full story here.

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