Tag Archives: non-native British wildflowers

Snowdrops, native or not

21 Sunday Feb 2021

Posted by in flowers, spring, wildflowers

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I thought the Snowdrop was a native British wildflower but it seems not.

210221 snowdrops (1)

This is from the publication Wonderland (by Brett Westwood and Stephen Moss):

Though they were once considered native, botanists now believe they were brought here from continental Europe to adorn Elizabethan gardens.
The first definite record in the wild dates from the 1770s, when they were discovered in Gloucestershire and Worcestershire. If these showy flowers were truly native before then, it is hard to imagine them being overlooked.

I’m now seeing plenty of Snowdrops when I’m out and about on my exercise walks, though I’m not sure whether they’re naturalised non-natives or have been planted along the roadsides by green-fingered locals. There are several different varieties of Snowdrop, and I’ve also seen quite a lot of double-flowered varieties amongst the more common types. The doubles (pictured on the right above) are probably Galanthus nivalis Flore Pleno, according to the identification crib sheet on the BSBI website, which, if you’re interested, also gives clear details of how to ID the single-flowered varieties.

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Ivy-leaved toadflax

27 Thursday Apr 2017

Posted by in flowers, nature, wildflowers

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170427 Ivy-leaved toadflax (4)

I see this plant so very often that I would’ve sworn it was a native British wildflower but no! Ivy-leaved toadflax (Cymbalaria muralis) only came to Britain in the early 1600s. In his excellent book Weeds: How vagabond plants gatecrashed and changed the way we think about nature (Profile Books, London, 2010), author Richard Mabey relates the story that the plant’s seeds ‘were caught up in the packing of some marble statuary imported from Italy to Oxford, whence, like the city’s eponymous ragwort, they migrated into the wider world via the college walls’. This explains why Ivy-leaved toadflax was, for a time, known as ‘Oxford weed’, though it has accumulated several other common names as well: Kenilworth ivy, coliseum ivy, mother of thousands, and pennywort.

170427 Ivy-leaved toadflax (3)

Ivy-leaved toadflax came originally from the mountains of southern Europe but, in Britain and many other parts of the world, it has swapped alpine rocks and stones for the bricks and stones of man-made walls. Its pretty little snapdragon-like flowers can be seen from April through to September.