Common Blue?

The best way to learn about wild flora and fauna is to have someone point things out to you.

That is the way I learnt about wildflowers. The mother of one of my friends in the village where I was brought up was extremely knowledgeable and took me and my friend for long walks and helped us identify everything we saw. We were doing a wildflower diary as a biology project at the time. My friend got first prize for the project and I got second. I was furious at the time, but it was of course only right.

Unfortunately I’ve never had anyone to help me with birds or butterflies, and I struggle because what I see never looks like the pictures in the books and because the darned creatures move too much.

Here is a little blue butterfly which I see quite a lot of. This morning I managed to capture it on camera and, after a lot of perusal of my books, I have decided that it is the Common Blue.

If you know better, I’d love to hear from you

Seakale

 

The rare Seakale on an East Devon beach last August

Watching BBC2's Springwatch last night (which was on Minsmere RSPB Reserve on the Suffolk coast), I discovered the name of the plant I saw on an East Devon beach last August but couldn’t identify. It’s Seakale.

The plant grows on shingle beaches in the south (mostly) and used to be abundant. You can eat the leaves however and in the eighteenth century became fashionable and was harvested almost to extinction. I feel quite privileged therefore to have seen it.

My two older wildflower books say it flowers June to August, but my newest one (published 2008) says it flowers May to September – a sign of changing climate, I suppose. Another interesting point. (Well, I find it interesting anyway.)

Buttercups

I know buttercups are anathema to farmers because they can poison grazing animals, but they don't half look nice.

Bad and good news

I’m not a fan of The News (on television and radio). Much of it is prurient. Most of it is bad. You get the beginning of a story but not the end. It adds nothing to the sum of human happiness. It was only by chance therefore that I came across the following happy ending.

Last year, as you may remember, seabirds were dying in their thousands on West Country beaches. The cause turned out to be a chemical called PIB (polyisobutylene) discharged by boats. (What they were doing with it and why they got rid of it, I don’t know.)

The Devon Wildlife Trust, RSPB and RSPCA among others launched themselves at the problem and over 25,000 people signed petitions (me among them and maybe you too), and in October last year the International Maritime Organisation changed the chemical’s classification so that it can no longer be discharged at sea.

As the latest DWT magazine says, ‘Change in pollution legislation often comes very slowly, while international change only moves at the speed of a glacier. However, this time things were different . . . Campaigning for wildlife really does bring results.’

The DWT article, with some delightful pictures of guillemots, one of the birds worst hit by the PIB pollution

As promised

Here, as promised, is a picture taken this morning of the Early purple orchid coming into flower.

Early purple orchid coming into flower

 
There were at least half a dozen others in the area, and here is one whose flowers are more fully opened. Sorry for the blurriness – I have no idea why it happened – but at least the picture gives you more of an idea of the colour and shape of the individual flowers.

A blurred but closer picture of an Early purple orchid. Note the petal that looks like a tongue hanging down

At first glance you might mistake the plant for a reddish Bluebell, especially as the two of them come out at the same time and grow in similar places. The Early purple orchid however stands upright; it doesn’t have the graceful droop of (English) Bluebells.* 

The graceful droop of the English Bluebell

 
Also, the flowers are a completely different shape. The Bluebell, as you might expect, has a frilled bell-shape whereas orchids have a sort of tongue hanging down. (In some, like the Bee and Fly orchids, the tongue actually looks like the insect they are trying to attract.)

The frilled bell-shape of Bluebell flowers

My beloved Oxford Book of Wildflowers, published in 1960, and given to me by my parents for my birthday in 1964, says that the Early purple orchid is ‘common in woods and meadows throughout Britain’. I fear this is no longer so. All you can say is that it is the least rare orchid.


*The Spanish bluebell, found in gardens, is fatter and it doesn’t droop – it looks more like a hyacinth. Sadly, it is prone to escaping from gardens and taking over in the wild from our more subtle version. Why, oh why, do we persist in filling our gardens with foreign plants? (The subject of another post/rant maybe.)

Spanish bluebells in our garden, planted before I knew any better. So far it's confined itself to the flowerbed where I put it.

Pink wildflowers and sagging cliffs

And on that note (see previous post), here are some more pictures of the wildflowers springing up all over the place at the moment.

This is Cuckoo flower, also called Lady’s smock, a plant of damp places. The plants are usually fairly well spaced but you usually see a lot at a time. At this time of year a whole water-meadow for instance can be peppered with these gorgeous pinky-mauve blooms. I actually took this picture next to a neighbour’s stream last week.

Cuckoo flower/Lady's smock next to a stream

This picture shows the lovely colour of the Cuckoo flower/Lady's smock. I'm holding the plant to stop it moving in the wind.

And here is another pink flower – Thrift or Sea pink – on cliffs in East Devon yesterday. I don’t see it on the white chalky cliffs further east. Whether that’s because it prefers this red sandstone or whether it’s because there is less competition here, I don’t know. In spite of the name, it’s not related to the garden Pink.

Thrift/Sea pink, a plant of cliffs (including inland) and salt marshes

It grows in clumps

 

The wind did get to the flower here but at least you can see its exquisite (I'm running out of adjectives) colour and delicate internal striping. Each flower head is made up of a number of individual flowers. 

 

The walk was a little hairy because great cracks were apparent along the cliff edge. There were also many instances of sags and falls - with bits of fence and rabbit burrows hanging in mid-air. The fencing that had remained in the proper place was in a dreadful state of dilapidation. 'They're obviously not bothering to replace it', I said, 'because they don't expect it to be there much longer.' 

Rainforest rehabilitation

When I was twenty-one I went to Australia on a ‘working holiday’ visa. From the moment I stepped off the plane I was bowled over by the landscape. I had never seen anything so big, so wild and so ancient. It was like looking into the night sky. It put my life into perspective and made me happy.

After I’d been there nearly a year my parents arrived in Sydney. My father was on a business trip (one I hadn’t heard about until a few weeks before). If their intention was to get me back, they succeeded. My conscience got the better of me. The country no longer felt quite so free. I left my job on an island near the Great Barrier Reef, took the long train journey south to see them and a few weeks later returned to England.

Ever since then, Oz has been a symbol to me of somewhere where things were more right than they are here, where nature stood a chance, a sort of Garden of Eden. I knew I couldn’t return. Having worked there, I didn’t want to be a tourist. I knew the country wouldn’t necessarily have the same effect on me: I’ve changed, it has probably changed. I didn’t want to spoil my memories. Even so, just knowing that Oz existed gave me hope.

That is, until I read Germaine Greer’s latest book, White Beech. In it she documents, in typical passionate and iconoclastic style, her attempts to turn a patch of land near the Queensland/New South Wales border back to pristine semi-tropical rainforest.* Along the way she reveals the devastation caused to Australia's native flora and fauna by imported species, as well as by farming, logging, mining, housing etc etc. The way she describes it, the continent sounds a complete mess – even worse than here.

The book without its jacket - a picture of the rainforest

Last night I couldn’t sleep. I felt so low. My last refuge had gone. The planet was doomed. I was doomed. I wanted to turn over more of our garden to a natural state, but I knew Frog wasn’t keen. He has a mower, a strimmer and a chainsaw to use. Yesterday evening I followed him around squealing as he dobbed poison on ‘weeds’ between the paving stones.

Then about 5am, I had a thought. I’m not GG. I’m not capable of doing what she does. Nor do I have to save the planet all by myself. All I have to do is what I can.

At first Germaine wasn’t going to buy the plot because she thought it was too damaged but then, on a later visit:

Out from the clumps of Native Raspberry at the forest edge stepped a bird, a sort-of crow in fancy dress . . . He walked up to within a few feet of me, fixed me with his round yellow eye and began to move his black rump rhythmically back and forth. There was no doubt about it. He was dancing.

She walks back.

As I came in sight of the house, a man was leaning on the verandah rail.
    I said, ‘Hi.’ What I thought was, ‘Sorry, mate, I’m gunna buy your house.’
. . . The heraldic bird had thrown down the gauntlet.

‘There you see,’ said Frog, when I described the passage to him. ‘Even the smallest things can have an effect.’

Even this blog, maybe.


* This project is called the Cave Creek Rainforest Rehabilitation Scheme.