Tag Archives: British wildflowers

On Common fleabane: bees and flies

23 Sunday Aug 2026

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As I wrote in my blog last Sunday about the life-saving benefits to wildlife of Drought-tolerant Common fleabane, the sheer number of insects I’ve seen feeding on fleabane gives me hope for their survival of this summer’s heat and drought. And, fortunately, many locations in the UK have had some rain this week, easing the situation a little for both wildlife and humans. This final blog includes some of the bees and flies I’ve seen on Common fleabane. However, as I’m not very skilled at identifying either of these families, I’ve excluded several I wasn’t able to name. Bees first.

A worker Buff-tailed bumblebee (Bombus terrestris), out foraging for pollen to take home to its family, all the offspring of a single queen who mated at the end of last summer, hibernated through the winter and began a new family in the spring. That life cycle will soon begin again.

A Common carder bumblebee (Bombus pascuorum), hard at work just like its Buff-tailed cousin.

A Honey bee (Apis mellifera) – I think we all know about Honey bees, their hives, their delicious product.

And now the flies I’ve been able to identify. Firstly, the very distinctive Red-sided parasite fly (Eriothrix rufomaculata). I spotted a few of these, which appeared to be feeding on the flowers but may also have been looking for moth larvae to parasitise.

This splendid metallic green fly is Lucilia sericata. Although there are several similar green flies, by zooming in on my image I was able to confirm that this one has ‘one anterior-dorsal bristle on the mid-tibia’, which is one of the main identification features for this species.

On Common fleabane: hoverflies

20 Thursday Aug 2026

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Here’s the second of my more general blogs about the insects I’ve been finding in the past week that are managing to survive the season’s destructive heatwaves and drought by feeding on the flowers of Drought-tolerant Common fleabane. Today we have some of the many species of hoverflies I’ve noticed and managed to photograph.

First up, two different Eristalis species – I included the first image just because I liked it.

Episyrphus balteatus, aka Marmalade hoverfly, one I’m sure most people will have seen.

The Footballer, Helophilus pendulus, which gets its common name from the resemblance of its stripy thorax to a football strip.

The Sphaerophoria species of hoverfly were probably the most common in my favourite wildflower field, but they can be tricky to name precisely.

There were also a lot of these Syritta pipiens, but they were very wary of me getting close enough for photos so I was pleased to snap this one.

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.

A meadow full of Painted ladies

02 Sunday Aug 2026

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I had a different blog planned for today (though it was also about this butterfly, and will follow tomorrow) but, after spending a magical hour in this wildflower meadow today, spellbound at the sight of at least twenty, probably more Painted ladies, I just had to share my enchantment with you.

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.

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.

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.