Category Archives: flowers

Magenta gladioli

07 Sunday Jun 2026

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During last month’s visits to the Isle of Portland, as I clambered around the former quarries, wandered the wildflower meadows and walked the public footpaths, I noticed the most beautiful magenta-flowered Gladioli growing randomly everywhere.

At first I thought they were garden escapes – and some of them certainly could have been – but, since my return, and having done some internet research, I can’t help but wonder whether these are the same variety Gladiolus communis subsp. byzantinus that has become naturalised on the Isles of Scilly. The vibrant magenta flowers certainly look to be the same colour.

According to the Seasonal Wildflowers website, this species – known locally as Whistling Jacks – is a relic of the Scilly bulb fields and grows throughout the Scillies, as well as having spread into parts of south-west England, and south and east Anglia. To me, it was almost as if Dame Edna had visited Portland and tossed the bulbs of her favourite gladdies everywhere she went.

Burnet rose

31 Sunday May 2026

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The Burnet rose (Rosa spinosissima, formerly Rosa pimpinellifolia) used to grow in my local area but hasn’t been recorded here since 2017 (I don’t know why – perhaps changing use of the environment where it used to grow), so it was good to see a lot of it in flower on the Isle of Portland.

This shrub usually grows low to the ground, forming clumps, sometimes with creeping suckering branches that form new plants. It’s most confined to dry sandy seaside areas and, if growing inland, favours calcareous locations.

My Flora Britannica says its pretty flowers have ‘the sweetest smell of any native rose – a mixture of honey and jasmine’; sadly I didn’t get down low enough to give them a sniff! It’s on the list for my next visit.

Horseshoe vetch

24 Sunday May 2026

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As it’s restricted to those areas in southern England where there is chalk and limestone, I hadn’t seen Horseshoe vetch (Hippocrepis comosa) until my recent visit to the Isle of Portland, or perhaps I should say that I hadn’t recognised it. The plant was, no doubt, growing all around me, especially when I explored the former quarries, but I hadn’t looked at it closely enough to realise it was different from the Bird’s-foot trefoil that it superficially resembles.

Both are members of the pea family, so the individual flowers are similar but the 5 to 12 individual flowers of Horseshoe vetch grow together in whorls, a structure that helps to identify them. I wondered whether this shape was the reason for their common name, but, in Flora Britannica, Richard Mabey notes that each flower develops into a pod ‘which breaks up into a number of horseshoe-shaped segments’.

As I noted in yesterday’s blog post, Horseshoe vetch is the larval plant for the Adonis blue butterfly (Polyommatus bellargus), which is why the populations of that butterfly are restricted to where the plant grows. The leaves of Horseshoe vetch are also used as a food plant by the larvae of the Chalkhill blue and Dingy Skipper butterflies, though the latter species uses several other plant species, meaning its distribution is not as restricted as the Adonis and Chalkhill blues.

Sainfoin

17 Sunday May 2026

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I had never seen this lovely plant before I spotted it at Broadcroft Butterfly Reserve on the Isle of Portland last Monday. This is Sainfoin (Onobrychis viciifolia).

As it was growing near some houses, I wondered, initially, if it was simply a garden escape. This proved to be partly true; according to Richard Mabey, writing in Flora Britannica, this erect form of Sainfoin was ‘introduced as a fodder plant from the continent in the middle of the seventeenth century’, and has since become widely naturalised. There is a native form which Mabey describes as ‘more or less prostrate, has deeper pink flowers and is native in grassland and bare ground on the southern chalk-hills’.

Though the Portland plants were the first sightings I remember, I’ve since checked the local biodiversity database and discovered there is a local site, a short train journey west along the south Wales coast, where I should be able to find them growing. As that is a location I haven’t been to for a while but which has other nice flora and fauna to be seen, I’m resolved to visit in the next few weeks to see if I can find Sainfoin, amongst other things.

All the yellows

19 Sunday Apr 2026

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The splendid sight of road verges gleaming with the brilliant yellow of blooming Dandelions is fast becoming just a wonderful memory as the council tractors and strimmers once again destroy any wildflowers they see in the name of ‘neat’ and ‘tidy’, and this despite the loss of some devastating percentage (50%?) of our insect populations in the last couple of decades. I grabbed some photos before everything started to disappear …

Alexanders: in places like the coastal path the only plant in flower so currently feeding a lot of small insects.

Broom: this might survive as it was in a park surrounded by Brambles.

Cowslips: in a country park so surviving, and looking very lush.

Creeping buttercup: gone.

Dandelion and Lesser celandine: prime targets for destruction.

Gorse: these tend to survive until the flail gets used.

Marsh marigold: a small survivor from a more numerous population, where a volunteer group decided they would build a dead hedge. Make it make sense!

Meadow buttercup: gone.

Primrose: these tend to survive while they’re flowering, then it’s off with their heads!

Sea radish: on the Barrage so not strimmed but the many dogs like to pee on them.

Springtime invasives

22 Sunday Mar 2026

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Yes, the sight of a large field of flowering bluebells is the epitome of springtime but not when they are Spanish bluebells (Hyacinthoides hispanica), which are highly invasive non-native plants, and I do wish people in their home gardens and local authorities in public parks would stop their mass plantings of this species, especially if the area is near a woodland. As well as being invasive and out-competing native British bluebells, Spanish bluebells will also hybridise with them thus threatening the genetic integrity of the native species.

And the same goes for Three-cornered leeks (Allium triquetrum). They do look attractive, and many people who don’t know their plants well get one whiff of these plants and think they are Wild garlic (Allium ursinum), but Three-cornered leeks are another highly invasive non-native plant that will spread like wildfire if left unchecked. In fact, they are now such a problem that they are listed in Schedule 9 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, making it an offence to plant or cause them to grow in the wild.

No woodland here

15 Sunday Mar 2026

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Wood anemone is meant to be ‘one of the most faithful indicators of ancient woodland’ and, from the plants I’ve seen previously that would seem mostly to be true.

However, the Wood anemones pictured here were something of an anomaly, growing on the sloping banks of the lake in Cardiff’s Roath Park. The lake is an artificial creation; the Nant Fawr stream was dammed in the early 1890s to create a lake over what was formerly a boggy marsh.

Beating the gloom

10 Tuesday Mar 2026

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Today I can finally see the sky again but for the past several days we’ve had nothing but grey foggy damp dismal gloom. I’m generally quite a buoyant person and try always to see the positive in situations but, yesterday, even I was starting to find the constant dreary weather a bit depressing, until I saw this. The big bold golden flowers of Marsh marigold are so beautiful and cheering that a smile instantly formed on my face and my mood improved for the rest of the day, in spite of the gloom.

Danish scurvygrass

08 Sunday Mar 2026

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As you might guess from the name, the leaves of both Common scurvygrass (Cochlearia officinalis) and Danish scurvygrass (C. danica) are high in vitamin C and so were used in the days of sailing ships to combat the danger to seamen of suffering from scurvy due to a lack of citrus fruit in their diets.

As far as I’m aware, I’ve never seen Common scurvygrass, which grows in saltmarshes, on cliffs and in sand dunes, but the Danish variety is locally very common, especially along the edges of our busier roads and motorways, where the salt used to clear the roads of ice and snow during the winter months provides the plants with the salt they would usually enjoy when growing close to the sea.

I found the plants shown here growing along the edge of the footways on either side of the four traffic lanes on the A4232 Cardiff Bay Link Road, on the bridge that carries vehicles across the River Taff where the river flows in to Cardiff Bay. The bridge must be about 7 metres (23 feet) above the water (it has a navigable clearance height of around 5.3 metres [17.4 feet]) so it’s fairly safe to assume the seeds of the Danish scurvygrass arrived on the bridge by being blown along by passing traffic.

It’s also fairly safe to assume that the council doesn’t clean the footways very often as enough soil/mud has accumulated for the scurvygrass (and other plants) to grow in. It’s an attractive little plant, its pretty white flowers and glossy green leaves much more pleasant to look at than the rubbish that also collects along the road and footways.