Category Archives: plants

Invasive Water-primrose

06 Sunday Sep 2026

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I was having a mooch around the vegetation by the River Ely at Cardiff’s Grangemoor Park on Thursday when an official-looking chap approached and asked if I was surveying. I explained that my activity wasn’t anything official but that I am a biodiversity recorder and also that I write this blog … and so we got chatting. It turned out that he is the ecologist for the Cardiff Harbour Authority, and he was there on official business.

Presumably due to the hot temperatures in recent months, the Ely has had a lot more vegetation than usual growing on its surface this summer. I don’t know anything about water vegetation – some might have been algal bloom, some various types of plants that grow in water. On the opposite side of the river from Grangemoor Park there have also been several large raft-like clumps of vegetation that have grown and expanded considerably during the summer. It was these that had prompted the ecologist’s visit as they are, in fact, the highly invasive plant Water-primrose (Ludwigia grandiflora).

Legally, in the UK, Water-primrose is a ‘species of special concern’; unless you have a special exemption, you are not permitted to grow it, sell it, release it into the environment (the National Wildlife Crime Unit website has the full list of regulations), and you must report it if you see it. Of course, if I had known what it was, I would have done that; fortunately, a well-known Cardiff ecologist spotted it and recorded it on 19 August. That was the first time this plant has been recorded in Wales.

The CHA ecologist had subsequently been notified about the plant, as had Defra, the UK government’s Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, and the ecologist told me that a specialist team from Defra would be coming to endeavour to remove the plants this coming week. As you can see from my photos, the Water-primrose is in full bloom, so the authorities will want to remove it before it seeds to prevent its spread. The plant also grows easily from cuttings, so they will have to be especially vigilant about removing all the material. Needless to say, if those of you who live in Britain ever see a plant like this growing in any waterway near you, please do report it to Defra, or your local environmental authority.

Drought-tolerant Common fleabane

16 Sunday Aug 2026

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I’ve just been looking at the rainfall data for my area: 1mm on 2 July, 0.4mm on 17 July, 0.8mm on 25 July and a few very welcome showers on 4 August that seemed to have given us an accumulation of about 4mm, and that’s it for the last seven weeks. And, today, our fifth heatwave of the year has just ended, with temperatures dropping to the mid-20°s Celsius. It’s little wonder then that drought was officially declared for the whole of Wales at the end of July.

Nature is struggling, to say the least, but there are some plants that are remarkably drought and heat tolerant, and the one that I’m noticing most often during my walks is Common fleabane (Pulicaria dysenterica).

During today’s walk I revisited the wildflower meadow I featured here two Sundays ago, A meadow full of Painted ladies. All the gorgeous Knapweed that had attracted the Painted lady butterflies had gone to seed but the Common fleabane remained, as full of life and vibrant as two weeks ago. Though some flowers had gone over, buds were still opening on most plants.

Even better, that fleabane was feeding a lot of little creatures, from butterflies and a few moth species, to hoverflies, flies and bees, as well as various bugs, both adults and nymphs. It made me feel a little more hopeful that some of our wonderful wildlife will survive this difficult weather.

When I noticed yesterday how well the fleabane was surviving, I started taking photos of the creatures I was seeing on it, and I continued that theme today. During a series of blogs this week, I’ll share what I’ve found.

Wood sage

19 Sunday Jul 2026

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With its sage-green leaves, this looks like a herb you should be able to cook with but it doesn’t have the smell you’d expect from a sage and, though I haven’t actually tried to cook with it, everything I’ve read says not to bother. I guess the lack of smell also indicates a lack of culinary taste.

I’m talking about a plant that I personally think is very poorly named, Wood sage (Teucrium scorodonia). I have never yet seen it growing in a woodland setting; the two photos below were taken in the last ten days, the first showing Wood sage growing very happily on the sea wall in Penarth, on the south Wales coast, the second in the hot rocky landscape of a former quarry on the Isle of Portland, where Wood sage is abundant and thriving.

Wood sage is a very pretty plant, I think. Those sage-green leaves look lush, despite the heatwave we’ve been experiencing for the past couple of weeks, and have a wonderful crinkly texture. And the flowers are a smooth buttery cream, with prominent pinkish filaments and yellow anthers.

Two bedstraws

05 Sunday Jul 2026

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The bedstraw family of plants (the Rubiaceae) includes wildflowers like Field madder (Sherardia arvensis) (featured in a post of that name in May 2023), and Woodruff (Galium odoratum) and Cleavers (Galium aparine) (both of which appeared in New and noticed, May 2021), but today I want to focus on the two bedstraws I’m seeing everywhere in the local fields at the moment, the yellow-flowered Lady’s bedstraw (Galium verum) and white-flowered Hedge bedstraw (Galium mollugo).

In Flora Britannica, Richard Mabey writes that the flowers of Lady’s bedstraw smell strongly of honey, something I’ve never got down low enough to notice, and when dry, smells of new-mown hay, which is why it used to be stuffed into straw mattresses. Mabey also notes that this plant is ‘a coagulant and was once employed not just as a styptic, but as a vegetable substitute of rennet … in the making of cheese’.

Though I mostly see Hedge bedstraw growing alongside its yellow-flowered cousin in the local wildflower meadows, as its name implies, it is more often seen climbing amongst other plants in and around hedgerows, and in areas of low scrub. Both plants are a lovely addition to the profusion of summer flowers now in bloom.

Orange-tip larvae

20 Saturday Jun 2026

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Adult Orange-tip butterflies may now have died away for this year but not before completing their life’s purpose, mating and egg-laying to ensure the continuation of their species. (The egg shown below was photographed on Garlic mustard on 15 May.)

Orange-tips overwinter as pupae, not something I’ve ever seen but, if you look now at the plants their larvae munch on, you’ll probably spot caterpillars of various sizes.

Their favourite larval plants are Cuckooflower (Cardamine pratensis) and Garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata) but they will also use other crucifers: Hedge mustard, Winter-cress, Turnip, Charlock, Large bitter-cress and Hairy rock-cress, according to Peter Eeles in Life Cycles of British & Irish Butterflies.

Looking at the excellent photos in Peter’s book, I think the larvae shown in my photos are all late instars; the larvae go through five different stages before they pupate. Eeles writes that the pose shown in the photo above is characteristic of a 5th instar larva.

I’ve made myself a note to look for a pupa near the many Garlic mustard plants on which I found these larvae, though I’m not very hopeful of finding any, as Eeles notes that the larvae often travel quite a distance to find a suitable plant; they don’t use the larval plants as these die back during the winter months.

Rosy garlic

14 Sunday Jun 2026

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The words ‘rosy’ and ‘garlic’ don’t seem to sit well together, the former associated with the sweet aromas that have inspired perfume makers for centuries, the latter with a pungent smell you either love or hate to cook with and/or eat. Here, though, the word ‘rosy’ relates to the colour of the plant’s flowers rather than its smell and, for me, this is a very attractive flower, particularly when the plants are found growing in good numbers as they were in an area of the Broadcroft Quarry Butterfly Reserve on the Isle of Portland.

As you may have worked out, this plant is a member of the Allium family that includes edible plants like garlic, the various species of onion, leeks and chives, as well as ornamental plants like Three-cornered leek, Field garlic and Star-of-Persia.

Rosy garlic (Allium roseum) is a Mediterranean species, not native to the UK, and is often seen in gardens, from which it has escaped and naturalised in areas of waste ground, mostly in southern Britain, particularly in coastal locations.

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.