Category Archives: wildflowers

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.

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!