Today’s blast of colour is brought to you by the colour purple, with splashes of pink and blue and lilac. All these gorgeous wild plants are still flowering in my local area and, on grey days, when we here in Wales are once again in full Covid-19 lockdown, seeing these on my daily exercise walks is a spirit-lifting delight!
For those who want to know, these are: Buddleja, Bush vetch, Common knapweed, Creeping thistle, Devil’s-bit scabious, Field scabious, Hedge woundwort, Herb Robert, Ivy-leaved toadflax, Meadow crane’s-bill, Musk-mallow, Purple toadflax, Rosebay willowherb, Teasel, and Tufted vetch.
I just can’t resist the structural elements of seedheads, whether they be associated with wildflowers or grasses. And so here are some more recent photos …
Botanically speaking, I’ve been a bit preoccupied in the past few weeks with the structural shapes of seedheads and the autumn bounty of fruit, so yesterday, during a walk across farm fields and along woodland rides, I thought I’d record how many wildflowers I could find in bloom. Turns out, there are still rather a lot, including Agrimony, Bramble, Broad-leaved willowherb, Creeping buttercup, Creeping thistle, a Dandelion species, Hedge woundwort, Hemp agrimony, Herb Robert, Knapweed, Meadow vetchling, Ragwort, Red campion, Red clover, White clover and Yarrow.
‘There is not a fragment in all nature, for every relative fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself.’
~ John Muir, The Wilderness World of John Muir, ed. Edwin Way Teale, 1954
‘The vegetable life does not content itself with casting from the flower or the tree a single seed, but it fills the air and earth with a prodigality of seeds, that, if thousands perish, thousands may plant themselves, that hundreds may come up, that tens may live to maturity; that, at least one may replace the parent.’
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, Chapter 6: Nature, Essays, Second Series, 1844.
One of the side benefits of searching the scabious for rare bees (see yesterday’s piece, Searching the scabious, 1) is that my search also revealed how many other insects were enjoying the essential late summer-early autumn food supply provided by the beautiful wildflower, Devil’s-bit scabious. Amongst them were these five butterflies and a moth: Large white, Red admiral, Small copper, Small tortoiseshell, Small white and a Silver Y.
And also these five hoverflies: Eristalis intricarius, Helophilus trivittatus, Sericomyia silentis, Volucella pellucens and Volucella zonaria.
In recent weeks, when the weather has been fine and the air relatively still, I’ve been spending time searching the Devil’s-bit scabious for bees. Not just any bees, but four scarce and endangered bees. This is part of Buglife’s ‘Searching for Scabious’ project, which
aims to improve our understanding of the distribution and conservation status of some of Wales’ rarest and most threatened solitary bees – the Large Scabious Mining Bee (Andrena hattorfiana) and its associated cuckoo, the Armed nomad bee (Nomada armata), and Small Scabious Mining Bee (Andrena marginata) and its cuckoo, the Silver-sided nomad bee (Nomada argentata).
I wasn’t familiar with these bees and am not very good at bee identification in general but Liam Olds, Buglife’s local conservation officer, has put together an excellent explainer video, which can be accessed on YouTube, so I thought I’d join the search.
Unfortunately, I haven’t managed to find any of the scarce bees at the two local sites where Devil’s-bit scabious grows in abundance (and neither has Liam, which was reassuring for me re my search skills but bad news for the bees). The bees I did find most commonly were the appropriately named Common carder (Bombus pascuorum) (below, left) and the Buff-tailed bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) (below, right).
Liam very kindly helped to identify the other small bees I found. These lovely little furrow bees are either the White-zoned furrow bee (Lasioglossum leucozonium) or the Bull-headed furrow bee (Lasioglossum zonulum) – the two species are too similar to tell them apart without closer examination.
I also found several of these more distinctive individuals, the Wood-carving leafcutter bee (Megachile ligniseca). You can find out more about them, and watch a little video of their nest-building skills, on the BWARS website. Meantime, I’m heading back to the scabious for another look.
Bumblebees and Teasels – I’m not sure why but they seem to be a match made in heaven.
In fact, bumblebees are the insects I see most often nectaring on Teasels, though the Burnet moths also find Teasel to their taste, as did this Meadow brown butterfly yesterday.
Earlier this year, when we were in full lockdown and our Council, in their stupidity, closed the spacious local country park even to local pedestrians, I was one of many who looked for alternative places, other than too-narrow pavements, to walk, and in the process discovered a disused lane that leads to farm fields, which, this year, have not been leased for crop growing. These fields are where, in recent months, I’ve seen many nice birds, and plants like the Musk thistle I blogged about in July and the Lesser burdock from August’s Burdock Beasties. These are a few more finds from those fields.
Redshank (Persicaria maculosa)
Of course, you can find Redshank in many diverse locations – it thrives along the lane behind my flat – but it seems to be doing particularly well in this arable landscape. You may notice that Redshank bears a strong resemblance to the Amphibious bistort I blogged about on Thursday – they are both from the genus Persicaria, and, if you want to know more about this fascinating plant, I recommend you read the entry on the Plant Lore website, which will explain why one East Anglian name for the plant is ‘devil’s arse-wipe’!
Greater plantain (Plantago major)
Its name may be Greater plantain but I think this is the Greatest plantain I’ve ever seen – it was huge. The Plantlife website has some fascinating information about this plant:
A common name is Rat’s tails which perfectly describes the plant’s flowering spike. Another vernacular name is Angels’ harps because when you pull the leaves apart you get the fibres showing between. This is also the likely explanation for the names Banjos and Beatles’ guitars.
Plantain has healing powers since the leaves contain tannins and astringent chemicals, which can make them useful styptics if crushed and applied to small cuts.
Common field-speedwell (Veronica persica)
I have trouble identifying the various members of the Speedwell family but I’m fairly confident about this one – it was low and sprawling and hairy, and its solitary flowers were on stems growing from the bases of the upper leaves. A check of its seed capsules would’ve clinched it but I forgot to look at those. As its name implies, Common field-speedwell is commonly found in fields – in fact, my footpath today took me along the edge of a field where the farmer is growing maize and the soil between the maize plants was completely covered by this lovely plant with its delicate blue flowers.
Initially, I doubted my identification of this plant – I’d seen it growing in clumps in the waters of Cosmeston Country Park’s west lake, so how could this be the same plant growing in a section of meadow, albeit a damp area where reeds are abundant?
The Great crested grebes like to park themselves amongst the plant, perhaps to stop them drifting while they snooze.
The clue, of course, is in its name: amphibious, ‘relating to, living in, or suited for both land and water’ (Oxford Dictionary). Amphibious bistort (Persicaria amphibia) has two forms, one that resembles a water lily, floating its leaves upon the water surface, and another that lives quite happily on land that can be quite a distance from water, as long as that land is moist.
This second type also shows the somewhat more elongated leaves that its generic name refers to – persicaria ‘relates the shape of leaves of this group of plants to those of a peach tree’ (First Nature) – and the land-based form has hairy leaves, which the water-growing form does not. To clinch the identification, my book (The Wild Flower Key) says to look for two stigmas in most flowers, which Amphibious bistort has but similar species do not. And very pretty flowers they are too!
