Last summer was my first real attempt at British botany – I mostly blundered around in a haze, periodically looking at plants and trying to figure out what they were. A winter followed where I did a lot of reading before finally spring again returned and I could get outside and look at plants again.
This year I’ve been more targeted with my botany – having deliberate trips to nature reserves and nearby woodland but still employing my scattergun approach when I found things I hadn’t seen before. That’s reflected in this years list of plants identified. One of the early entries is Wood anemone which I of course knew from first glance, but had no memory at all of ever seeing it before on one of my regular local walks. I’m starting to believe that once you ID a plant you then begin to see it everywhere as it sticks out of the usual ‘plant blindness’ that most people walk around with. Green alakanet being another example – suddenly everywhere I looked this summer I saw its small blue flowers and was warning people to pull it out of their gardens. More interesting entries this year are focused on orchids – already a passion of mine as an indoor grower, its lovely to see the native species. One minor failure was dragging my partner to a meadow to have a very quick look for orchids when we should have been driving elsewhere, finding one poor example, getting back to the car and then realising the entire bank we’d parked next to was carpeted in them!
I’ve not reached another 50 species this year, coming about 12 short but that’s down to now feeling like I can ID pretty much everything common in my local area that I often walk in and a summer doing a lot of other things. Spring for me is normally my botanising time, but this year autumn has proved to have had some highlights as well. I made a trip especially to see Autumn Crocus (Colchicum autumnale) and also ID’ed my first aquatic species as my ‘other’ hobby involves a lot of time in water.
To go along with all of this I’ve also tried to increase my knowledge of herbalism without being too middle class hippy about it! I can confirm just how useful plantain is when I got seriously stung whilst blackberry picking this year but I’ve not been brave enough to try much else.
Year began with snowdrops
Then continued with Vinca (seen before) and the Green alakanet (Pentaglottis sempervirens)
Then a walk in the woods lead me to Violets – first assumed sweet then better keying led me to dog.
Then a visit to an amazing meadow got me Green winged orchid (Anacamptis morio), Cuckoo flower (Cardamine pratensis) and Common twayblade (Neottia ovata)
A few other bits and piece followed but then I went off on a sadly fruitless hunt for butterfly orchids and found Hairy St Johns wort (Hypericum hirsutum) and Ragged Robin (Lychnis flos-cuculi) instead!
More bits and pieces before another trip back to the amazing meadow to see Autumn Crocus (Colchicum autumnale)
