Discovering the flora and fauna in a small square of Portmellon Valley
This is a mystery left over from September when I spotted the flower peeping out from under the decking. A perennial, it is now coming up again for the summer and I’ve been able to identify it as a Fringed Willowherb, also known as American Willowherb, as it was first recorded in the British Isles in 1891. It prefers a damp habitat but can also be seen in gardens and roadsides. The flowers are tinier than the Great Willowherb.
The valley today is windswept and rainy as yet another storm blows in. The grass is flattened, and the green clumps are tangles of bindweed tumbling over the skeletons of hemlock water dropwort and other foliage, their white bells scattered over the valley. The far edge is hemmed with a flourish of bracken. Any brown you can see is dead HWD. There are some frothy white flowers in the distance, but I’m not sure what they are, possibly meadowsweet, but I’ll have to investigate when the weather improves. Finally, there are some swathes of purple, which is willowherb, probably the great willowherb that has been in our patch. Compared to last month, the valley is greener and lusher, generally, due to all the rain we have had.
Close-ups:
To brighten up the post, here is my best goldfinch photo so far, which I took the other day, when we were doing the Big Butterfly Count. It is sitting near the top of one of the sea buckthorn trees.
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.
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.
