Flowers Archives - Page 4 of 6 - A Year in the Valley

Common Fleabane (Pulicaria dysenterica) and Long Hoverfly

We had clumps of yellow flowers in both the top garden and in the watermeadow. The ones in the top garden turned out to be ragwort, but these (above) are common fleabane. They both have bright yellow daisy-style flowers, but the leaves are quite different. Ragwort has intricate leaves and fleabane has regular ‘leaf-shaped’ leaves, long and pointed and corrugated.

The other difference is the occupants of the plants. Ragwort, which is poisonous to animals, is host to the striking looking caterpillars of the cinnabar moth. If you see a tall, yellow daisy with complicated leaves look for black and yellow striped caterpillars climbing over it. They are an amazing sight!

Our common fleabane, on the other hand, seemed to be a buffet for hoverflies. Long hoverflies. Long hoverflies have a distinctive elongated tubular body-shape. Their body is longer than their wings. Their eyes are reddish brown and their stripes are fairly regular and slightly m-shaped.

Yesterday, I was walking round the garden thinking that it was mild and muggy, but too damp and dull to see anything much. How wrong I was! There were snails, wasps, damselflies, hoverflies, and many small bugs, as well as more butterflies than I was expecting. I was chasing a few things round the garden.

Now I’m getting to the stage where I think “Oh, I’ve got that one!”. I may have missed a brown butterfly or two thinking that they were Meadow Browns, but it’s difficult to tell when they have their wings folded up. Do I wait patiently or go in search of something else?

And another thing – I was mowing the lawn yesterday, before I went down to the watermeadow, and I found myself not only steering round a baby toad but picking blades of grass with ladybirds on to move them out of the way.

Daisy D

10 August 2023

Flowers, Insects

Common Fleabane, Long Hoverfly

Today in the Watermeadow – and Montbretia

Although the valley looks greener than last month the watermeadow doesn’t as the grass looks a lot drier. This is a bit puzzling, but perhaps it’s because we have a higher proportion of grass in our bit, maybe not as much bindweed clambering over everything.

Pops of colour in the meadow include orange montbretia blooms, spears of purple loosestrife over on the right, and a flourish of water mint in the centre bottom with some purple flowers. Some bulrushes are starting to spike near the top of the picture where the pond is. The pathways are very overgrown, as we haven’t had a chance to get down there to tidy them up.

Here are August and July side-by-side so you can compare and contrast:

The montbretia is a bit of anomaly as I’m sure it is new this year. We used to have a lot in the top garden, and we pulled most of it up as it seemed to be taking over. Now it appears down in the bottom, so I hope it isn’t going to make a bid for domination. I wasn’t sure whether to count it as I thought it was a garden plant, but along with hydrangeas and fuchsias, it is not unusual to see it in Cornish hedgerows and verges, and it is looking quite at home down there.

Daisy D

06 August 2023

Flowers, Views

Montbretia, View

Purple Loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria)

There was this red flower that was really bugging me. It looked like a fat ear of red corn, or a very elongated burnet. I took photos, asked Google Lens, and waded through my Collins Wild Flower Guide literally from cover to cover, but nothing looked like this flower (see below).

And then, about a week later, it actually burst into flower – purple ones – and I realised that I had been looking at the buds!

The red buds, which had once clustered together like ears of corn were now stretched along the stem in tiers and opening into layers of purple flowers. Many of the spikes were now over 2m tall. We used to have one or two making a purple tunnel down one of the paths by the pond, but now we seem to have purple drifts competing with the Great Willowherb, which is still going strong.

Daisy D

01 August 2023

Flowers

Great Willowherb, Purple Loosestrife

Common Daisy (Bellis perennis)

A Common, or Lawn Daisy peeping up from the grass is quite a rare thing down in the watermeadow, only really occurring on the grass paths that we mow occasionally. Bellis perennis means ‘beautiful perennial’, which is what it is. The colloquial name ‘Daisy’ means ‘Day’s Eye’ and refers to the heliotropic nature of the flower which follows the position of the sun across the sky during the day and then closes its petals at night to open them again come daylight. The Common Daisy is in flower from March to September and the flowers are actually a bunch of tiny flowers on a single stalk, mimicking a single flower.

Daisy D

30 July 2023

Flowers

Common Daisy

Wild Teasel (Dipsacus fullonum)

We had some teasels in our top garden. They are biennial. The first year, they looked like giant primrose leaves. We had no clue what they were, but we thought, let’s leave them and see what happens. They didn’t die back in the autumn, but the following summer they grew taller and taller, up to 2m, and we only realised what they were going to be when the iconic teasel-heads started to appear. The dried out hollow teasels were still standing in early spring this year, while a new generation of first-year teasels had started. Down in the watermeadow, meanwhile a couple of clumps of second-year teasels seemed to spring out of nowhere, as we obviously didn’t see the telltale leaves last summer.

There is another type of Teasel, Fuller’s Teasel, that has escaped from cultivation. Those teasels were grown to use in the textile industry. They were set on rollers to brush the cloth to give it a softer and more luxurious feel.

Daisy D

23 July 2023

Flowers

Wild Teasel

Wild Angelica Angelica sylvestris

Down in the stream, it’s a bit crowded this year. We usually clear an open path for the water, in case of any flash floods, but since finding the unconfirmed dead water vole, we have removed this job from our ‘to-do’ list for the time being. This is because they live in reed beds alongside water courses and eat grasses and herbs.

As a result the stream is now grown over with vegetation. Many are previously mentioned – Reed Canary Grass, Branched Burr-reed, and the odd Hemlock Water Dropwort. But there seems to be a new kid on the block.

Meet Wild Angelica. A robust clump with red celery-style stems and lush green leaves like a rose-bush growing in the stream. I was worried she was going to be a Hemlock variant and in a way, she is, being an Umbellifer with cow parsley style flowers.

However, the leaves are completely different – perfectly leaf-shaped, in pairs with a single leaf at the tip of each branch – and the hollow stem is crimson. Some of the HWD have red or red-mottled stems, but those ones tend also to have red-tinted leaves. However, here’s the thing, our Angelica is in a lot better shape than the HWDs, which have all keeled over by now. Her flowers are fairly feeble, but they are just coming into bloom. (I’m secretly hoping she will seize control of the valley from the army of toxic HWD, but it’s early days.)

In this picture, you can see how the Wild Angelica has taken over that part of the stream.

Also, you can see some of the white flowers.

Candied angelica used to be used as a cake decoration, but I’m not taking any chances with beginner’s foraging.

In this picture you can see another 14-spot ladybird with an aphid near the top of the right-hand branch.

Daisy D

21 July 2023

Flowers

Branched Burr-reed, Fourteen-spot ladybird, Hemlock Water Dropwort, Reed Canary Grass, Wild Angelica

Selfheal (Prunella vulgaris)

I have noticed some of the watermeadow wildflowers growing in our lawn. Selfheal is one of those. It prefers short grass, verges, or the edges of woodland. I noticed it first among the long grass alongside the pathways – and I have now seen the flowers in scrubby patches on our lawn. Looking like a kind of elongated clover, it’s one of those flowers that have always been there, but unnoticed. Yet as the name suggests it has a long tradition as a herbal remedy, particularly in native American medicine. It was used for digestive conditions, healing wounds and burns, and reducing fever. In fact, it is also called Heal-all.

Daisy D

20 July 2023

Flowers

Selfheal

Cut-leaved crane’s-bill (Geranium dissectum)

Walking back up the ramp, tiny shocking pink flowers caught my eye. Nestling jewel-like in a setting of green finger-like leaves, they were so minute that I had to look again, close-up to be sure I hadn’t imagined them. They are found on waste ground, roadsides, and rough grassland, so that describes our ramp. It has five notched ‘Barbie’ pink petals and the sepals, which are the leaf-like structures that cup the flower, have tiny red bristles on the ends. Some sources say the leaves are deeply-divided into seven fingers, but Collins Wildflower Guide makes no mention of this, and the illustration shows random divisions, just like the ones I have seen and photographed. It is in the same family as Herb Robert.

Daisy D

19 July 2023

Flowers

Cut-leaved crane’s-bill, Herb Robert

Which Willowherb?

I’m on a learning curve with plant identification and have been relying on cross-referencing websites to help me so far, but today I managed to formally identify the Willowherb using my Collins Wildflower Guide Key for the first time. This reference book is very comprehensive but uses botanical terminology in a flowchart style to eliminate different species. I knew I would need a bit of time to learn some of the terms.

With the Willowherb, the first bit was easy. Is the plant upright, or prostrate? Upright.

So I moved on to question 2, which concerned the stigma. I knew this was inside the flower. Was it 4-lobed or knob-shaped? I saw a white 4-lobed thing inside the flower.

“Go to >3”. This was about hairs on the stem. I had to look up ‘glandular’, ‘glabrous’ and ‘appressed’. Glandular means with glands i.e. raised like when you have goose-pimples. Glabrous means without hairs. Appressed means pressed close to, but not fused with. The stem was hairy and the hairs though fine stuck out from the stem, as you can see from the picture.

On to question 4. About the leaves and flowers. Interesting. Did the leaves slightly clasp the stem or not and were the flowers pale or deep pink? The leaves do slightly cup themselves round the stem and the flowers are definitely deep pink. In the photo they look more purply-pink.

Conclusion – It’s a Great Willowherb (Epilobium hirsutum), also known as Hairy Willowherb, nearly 2 metres tall, hairy stalked with slim oval leaves and deep pink flowers. It loves a damp habitat, so pond margins, marshes and watermeadows are good.

I plan to go back over previous posts and check them out with the Collins guide just to make sure. I will post any updates and discoveries.

Daisy D

15 July 2023

Flowers

Great Willowherb

Common Knapweed (Centaurea nigra) and Yarrow (Achillea millefolium)

When is a thistle not a thistle? When it’s a Common Knapweed! Common Knapweed is found on grasslands, including roadside verges and clifftops, and is loved by butterflies. The flowers are actually flower-clusters at the top of the stems and the leaves are smooth and hairy, rather than prickly like thistles. It’s actually not in the thistle family, but in the same family as Cornflowers and if you imagine it blue, then you virtually have a cornflower! Common knapweed is also known as Black Knapweed. Knapweed is named after its shape as ‘knap’ means button, knob, or tuft in Middle English.

I’m including the ramp that we have built down to the watermeadow, because we are pretty much letting it go wild, apart from mowing a single track down for the wheelbarrow and lawnmower (we sometimes mow the watermeadow pathways for ease of access). We have a small bit of dry-stone wall that edges the ramp and stops it collapsing on the steps that we have cut into the bank. This has been known to house lizards, so I’m still hoping to catch one of them on my camera (fingers crossed!). Because the ramp is built of garden waste and turf, it tends to sink on a regular basis as the ‘foundations’ decompose, and we top it up with more turf and soil. The habitat on the ramp and the right-hand bank of the watermeadow becomes dryer as it rises up towards the garden, so this is where we find more meadow plants. The left-hand bank is in the shade, so still a bit damp and home to ferns and fungi.

On the ramp, I noticed a feathery plant with cow-parsley-style white flower heads. Yarrow comes in yellow or pale pink as well as white. It can be found in grasslands and disturbed soil, both of which apply here. It has many medicinal uses – Yarrow tea can be made into a poultice for wound healing and inflammation or drunk to aid digestion or mental health. In fact, Yarrow’s Latin name Achillea is named after Achilles, who used it to treat his soldiers’ wounds and millefolium means ‘a thousand leaves’ referring to their feathery appearance.

Daisy D

13 July 2023

Flowers

Common Knapweed, Yarrow