Category Archives: wildflowers

NFY: Small skipper

24 Wednesday Jun 2026

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The butterflies are emerging in a steady flow now; for four days in a row last week I saw a new species each day – one day I saw two. My first two Small skippers (Thymelicus sylvestris) popped up at Cosmeston Lakes Country Park on Sunday 14 June; the beautiful creature shown here was the second of them. Although I did get a reasonable photo of the first Small skipper I saw, I’ve chosen these images for two reasons. Firstly, with the butterfly perched feeding on a Pyramidal orchid, this scene is much more photogenic.

Secondly, if you look closely at my second photo, you’ll notice that the butterfly has something attached to the end of its proboscis. These are pollinia, little packets of pollen that some flowers have specifically to aid in pollination. When a creature like a bee pokes its head into the flower, the sticky pollinia will attach themselves to its head and so, when the bee next pokes its head into a flower, the pollen from the first flower will rub off onto the second. Bee orchids also have these pollinia, and I’m guessing this lovely Small skipper has a particular preference for feeding on orchids.

Orchids at Grangemoor Park

21 Sunday Jun 2026

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During a recent wander around Cardiff’s Grangemoor Park, I was delighted to spot four different species of Britain’s native orchids. I thought our unseasonal heatwave in late May might have caused the orchids to frizzle but I think the fact that the record-breaking high temperatures were followed immediately by a week of rainy weather has meant that the orchids growing at Grangemoor and in other local parks are looking particularly lush this year. Here’s a selection …

Bee orchids (Ophrys apifera)

I have an ambition to get a photo of all three species – Bee, Common spotted and Pyramidal – growing together but I’ve yet to find them. These are Common spotted and Bee.

Another Common spotted-orchid (Dactylorhiza fuchsia)

Pyramidal orchid (Anacamptis pyramidalis), in the usual pink colour

White Pyramidal orchids – I’ve seen these given the scientific name Anacamptis pyramidalis var. albiflora (on the FirstNature website), but that name is not included in the list for recording purposes.

Southern marsh-orchid (Dactylorhiza praetermissa). These hybridise easily with Common spotted so it took a while to find a true Southern marsh.

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.

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.

The Twayblades return

10 Sunday May 2026

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It’s been three years since I last spotted these beautiful little orchids, Common twayblades (Neottia ovata), at Lavernock Nature Reserve.

While the Wildlife Trust was busy renegotiating a new lease for the reserve with the local council, a process that seemed to take a very long time, the reserve was neglected and became very overgrown, so it was impossible to walk along some of the paths, let alone find these very small orchids amongst the vegetation.

And then, when the lease was finalised and the Wildlife Trust resumed its maintenance work, someone from their staff decided it would be a good idea to build a fence right through the area where the Common twayblades had been growing.

I had thought the habitat destruction involved in the fence building would have been the end of the orchids but it seems they’re tough little plants, and I was able to pick out at least a dozen just coming in to flower during last Tuesday’s visit to the reserve. Very good news!

Lords-and-ladies

03 Sunday May 2026

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As you can probably imagine, the shape of this plant’s flowers makes it noticeable, and provides the inspiration for the 90-plus vernacular names it has been known by over the centuries and from different locations around Britain (per Flora Britannica).

This is Arum maculatum, a plant most commonly known as Lords-and-ladies, a name that Flora Britannica says is ‘probably a Victorian invention, coined as a polite alternative to this great catalogue of vulgarities’. Those vulgarities include Cuckoo-pint (where ‘pint’, rhymes with mint, is short for pintle, slang for penis), Dog’s cock (a name from Wiltshire), Priest’s pilly (from Westmorland), and Willy lily (from the first Elizabethan era), amongst many others.

Fortunately, not all Arum maculatum‘s common names are focused on its flowers’ shape. In Flora Britannica, Richard Mabey also lists this, amongst others: ‘Starchwort, for example, recalls the era when the dried and ground-up tubers were used as a substitute for starch in laundries’. While you might not favour some this plant’s more ribald names, I do like the fact that the names show that people have taken the time to notice this plant (which people rarely do in today’s busy world) and to look at it closely enough to have imagined names for it.

Peak Wild garlic

26 Sunday Apr 2026

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It’s peak Wild garlic flowering time in my local green spaces, making a visit to my local park a culinary experience – the smell is so strong you can almost taste it in the air!

On Wednesday I went for a stroll through Cwm George woodland, a local hotspot for Wild garlic (or Ramsons, if you prefer; Allium ursinum), and it was just glorious.

The lush green swathes of Wild garlic, with their abundant brilliant white flowers, looked so picturesque carpeting the earth beneath the towering Beech trees and garlanding the edges of the woodland pathways.

And it wasn’t only the human visitors who were appreciating the profusion of flowers. Flies and bees of many species, hoverflies, butterflies and beetles were all lapping up this springtime feast.