Ioannis

First photo is pistil and stamens in a stack of 6 photos to optimize depth field.

There are Mediterranean flowers, most of them with nice fragrance. If you found it in England, probably is not a wild one but cultivated in a garden?

It looks like a cistus. There are many varieties most often with violet or white flowers, differing a lot on the leaves. Your flower looks very much like a Cistus incanus but the leaves are very different so it must be another subspecies. Probably you could try to identify among subspecies by taking a more focused photo of the leaves. Anyhow, its beautiful!

Beautiful!

Thanks @Tom15. You are right. It seems first specimens in Europe arrived in Italy via airplane at Milano, then crossed the border and arrived in France, first observed in Nice in 2006. Apparently they are attacking pine trees and are officially considered as invasive pests.

Fruits are very small: 1 to 2 cm.

Thanks Matthew!

Very nice photo. If you know the species, can you give me your opinion on the one here?
http://www.projectnoah.org/spottings/140...
I think it is Hermodice carunculata but the current was moving me and my photos are not so net as yours.

Hello Despina. I also found in internet the mention about edible roasted seeds but in another site they said it was a "famine food". All trees of the family contain saponins, some are slightly toxic, some can loose their toxicity when roasted, some others are not toxic, some others are considered as pharmaceutical plants. There are some, mainly Chinese, universities performing research on the chemical compounds isolated from Koelreuteria in order to use their toxicity as potential anticancer drugs but till now it is too early to judge if some interesting molecule could be isolated, combining low toxicity with good anticancer activity. See for instance here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23857...

I am afraid I will have to wait for next spring. Even though I walked before this tree many times, I don't remember how were the flowers.