Sarah Raven's Wild Flowers

wild flowers Sarah Raven P h oto g r a p h y b y

J o n at h a n B u c k l e y

For Alexandra Chaldecott and Kate Hubbard, who both encouraged me to write this book.

And in memory of my father, who first set me on the wild flower path.

Wood Lane, Wall & Hedge Meadow Chalk Down & Limestone Dale Arable & Wasteland Water & Wetlands Heath, Moor & Mountain Coast

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Glossary of Family Names Glossary of Species Names Glossary of Botanical Terms

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Index by Petal Colour Index by Common Name Index by Latin Name Index by Family Name

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Botanical Associations Select Bibliography

496 497

All my life, I have been in love with wild flowers. In the 1970s, as a girl, I used to go botanising with my father, John Raven, who was a classics don at Cambridge.

From when I was seven or eight, we would go on trips together in his Morris Minor (later replaced by a mustard Mini Clubman), with a couple of ham rolls, a bottle of fizzy apple juice and a large bar of Fruit & Nut. We would see pasqueflowers on Therfield Heath in Hertfordshire, oxlips in Hayley Wood in Cambridgeshire, fritillaries in Magdalen Meadow, Oxford. On expeditions further afield, we would find Mountain Avens tucked into the limestone pavements of the Burren in Ireland, spreads of sea-lavender on the salt marshes of the Norfolk coast and exquisite miniature alpine plants high on the hills of Argyll.

My father was an expert amateur botanist with an incredible grasp of everything that made up a place: its geology, soil, altitude, the way it faced in relation to wind and sun, and the plants that were likely to grow there.

He inherited his love of the natural world from his father, Charles Raven.

Between them, astonishingly, they painted almost every plant in the British flora. On their expeditions, whenever they found a new example, they would get out their paints and record it that night in their lodgings or, if it was too rare a specimen to pick, in situ. I still have eighteen volumes of their watercolours.

I have less patience than my father ever did, but he taught me how to look with an eagle eye and, even more usefully, how to botanise at twenty miles an hour. We used to drive along lanes together – not too fast and not too slow – me looking out of the window at one verge, him at the other, shouting out whenever we spotted a cracker.

Getting to know wild flowers adds a new layer to the way you experience the world. An ordinary walk is suddenly full of a new cast of characters. Some you will know already, plants that appear reassuringly in the same places year after year: Primrose, Bluebell and Dog-rose. These will become old friends.

But you will also gather your favourite rarities, high-glamour creatures, such as Frog Orchid, Fly Orchid, White Water-lily and the perfect single flowers of Grass-of-Parnassus, each stem exquisite and strange.

Of course, there are bores, as at any party. I do not love Dog’s Mercury, and I can take or leave Dandelions. But if you look, you will find their more intriguing relatives, hawkbits, just round the corner, some pale and modest, others a bit racy – a touch of orange here, a splash of lemon yellow there. Even the thugs are interesting: Indian Balsam, Butterfly-bush and Japanese Knotweed, all shockingly brutal in their way. The point is that a party where you know half the guests is always going to be more fun. What was just background before suddenly becomes a world in itself.

My father died when I was seventeen, and that was the end of my formal botanising trips for twenty years. I did not stop loving wild flowers; I just stopped hunting them. Particularly on trips abroad, I would still find myself wandering

down a lane just to see what wild flowers were there. Then, recently, it struck me that this was how I was spending my most absorbed, relaxed and happy times.

That moment of realisation is what lies behind this book.

When I took up botanising again in earnest to begin my research, I worried that most of the interesting wild flowers would have gone. The facts and figures certainly made uncomfortable reading. During the second half of the twentieth century, we ploughed, drained and ‘improved’ – with fertilisers or herbicides – almost all of our ancient meadows; others were abandoned and grasslands became rank and dominated by Bracken. The UK Biodiversity Steering Group estimated that 97 per cent of lowland semi-natural grassland in England and Wales disappeared during the fifty years to 1984, and the surviving meadows are fragmented and often degraded. Almost all our meadow plants are rarer as a result, with Green-winged Orchid, for example, now vanished from half its historical range and in many counties reduced to a handful of sites.

It is not just our meadows that have changed. In the four decades after the 1940s, most semi-natural habitats were drastically altered. Following the food shortages of the Second World War, ploughing grants were introduced, leading to the loss of unimproved grassland. New farming machinery enabled steeper slopes to be ploughed, and the myxomatosis outbreak of the 1950s, which decimated rabbit populations, further reduced the amount of chalk and limestone grassland, with vast stretches quickly reverting to scrub. Surveys of unimproved chalk grassland suggested a 20 per cent loss between 1966 and 1980.

Our roadsides have fared little better. Until the mid twentieth century, a lengthman carrying a scythe was employed to cut back the vegetation along every road and lane. The cut material was raked and stacked for a week or so, leaving time for the seeds to drop into the sward, encouraging wild flowers.

Now, our roadsides are cut by toppers and the cuttings left where they fall, over-enriching the environment and adding to the effects of fertilisers and herbicides from adjoining farmland. This has vastly increased the growth of grasses and tall, strong growers such as Hogweed and Common Nettle.

That is not the half of it. We have stopped managing most of our woods and coppices; only plants that thrive in shade, such as Bluebell and Early-purple Orchid, are doing well in these neglected woods. We have drained many of our marshes and wetlands for agriculture and, as a result, the previously common Early Marsh-orchid has disappeared from 45 per cent of Britain and 40 per cent of Ireland. Thousands of miles of hedgerow have also gone, hugely decreasing plant numbers. According to one survey by the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology, the total length of hedgerows declined by a fifth in England and a quarter in Wales between 1984 and 1990.

The good news is that our wild flowers are – here and there – on the up again. Conservation organisations are reversing these downward trends, and

Wood

You may also see Bell Heather (p.349), Bilberry (p.349), Bittersweet (p.393), Bracken (p.351), Bugle (p.68), Bramble (p.66), Common Figwort (p.72), Common Gromwell (p.72), Common Ivy (p.73), Cow Parsley (p.77), Crab Apple (p.77), Creeping Buttercup (p.149), Cuckooflower (p.297), Dogwood (p.79), Elder (p.80), False Oxlip (p.81), Field Forget-me-not (p.248), Germander Speedwell (p.85), Goat Willow (p.86), Golden-saxifrage (p.302), Gorse (p.355), Greater Knapweed (p.201), Greater Stitchwort (p.87), Herb-Robert (p.91), Hairy Violet (p.201), Hawthorn (p.89), Marsh-marigold (p.311), Oak (p.101), Pendulous Sedge (p.316), Perforate St John’s-wort (p.209), Primrose (p.103), Rosebay Willowherb (p.258), Sheep’s Sorrel (p.366), Sweet Violet (p.111), Timothy (p.166), Traveller’s-joy (p.112), Tufted Vetch (p.166), Water Avens (p.318), Wild Angelica (p.324), Wild Strawberry (p.120) and Wood Crane’s-bill (p.121).

The wood is where wild flowers start their year. They have to get out early to beat the shade of the leaves on deciduous trees, which close over to create deep shadow by mid May. The tapestry usually starts in early March with Lesser Celandine, Ground-ivy and Primrose, and if you are lucky the odd patch of Sweet Violet, usually in a deep, voluptuous purple with the odd albino form. This is Text …. gradually added to by Wood Anemone, white and pink in carpets that can Text … cover the whole woodland floor.

These plants merge together against a sea of green: Dog’s Mercury, the glossy dark leaves of Bluebell and the odd spathe of Lords-and-Ladies. It is worth a special trip to chalky woods to find the green-flowered, shrubby Spurge-laurel and the Green and Stinking Hellebore.

I look forward to trips to Betty Dawes Wood in Gloucestershire for the mass of wild Daffodils and to Hayley Wood in Cambridgeshire for its Oxlips.

They are both places that I visited as a child with my father in spring.

Bluebells are the dominant theme in the next wave of flowers, with the occasional Early-purple Orchid, splotch of Yellow Archangel and white stars of Greater Stitchwort scattered among them. Swathes of Ramsons colonise the lower, damper ground.

There is incredible scent in a wood at this time of year. At first it is very soft, unless you lie down and put your nose in a Primrose or Sweet Violet.

Then it is vast and wafting, as the Bluebells emerge into flower. It is one of our most delicious and life-enriching flower moments.

Once the leaf canopy closes over, the range of wild flowers is much reduced. The same few plants appear again and again: Foxgloves, Wood Sage, Enchanter’s-nightshade, red-berried Lords-and-Ladies, long-flowering Yellow Pimpernel and Wood Avens and the richly coloured Red Campion. Ferns are there, too, lush and green: Male-fern, Broad Buckler-fern and, the most elegant of all, Lady-fern.

Even these shade-tolerant plants seek out what light they can and spring up in larger numbers on the edges of sunny rides and woodland margins.

That is where you will find curtains of Honeysuckle in June, filling the air with its incredible spicy fragrance, strongest at dawn and dusk. It is when an area has been coppiced and strong light reaches the floor that the summer wood is most colourful. Then Red Campion and Foxglove appear not by the hundred, but the thousand.

If you are lucky, in open woodland with reasonable levels of light you will find some rarities in the late spring and summer wood. Fly Orchid and Greater Butterfly-orchid in May or June; Broad-leaved Helleborine a few weeks later. These stand like beacons, conspicuous from metres away, appearing in similar spots from one year to the next. There is also the pretty Nettle-leaved Bellflower, which flowers all summer long, and the purplebelled, fat-fruited Deadly Nightshade, sometimes appearing in a good clump on the sunnier side of a wide path through a wood.

Woodland flowers diminish in autumn, save for the yellow-green flowers of Common Ivy. Before the golden Hazel catkins that will herald the start of the growing year in January, the only colour in a wood comes from evergreen leaves and Holly berries. In deep winter, when all the dried, stalky and seedy remains of the year’s flowers are outlined in hoar frost, the woodland floor becomes a sparkling re-enactment of its springtime beauty.

Bird’s-nest Orchid (Neottia nidus-avis) A plant from another world, this is always fun to find. It is one of three British orchids that have no green leaves. Instead of photosynthesising to make food, it gets what it needs from a mycorrhizal fungus. It can therefore survive in deep shade.

The fungus absorbs carbohydrate from tree roots, providing minerals for the tree in exchange. The orchid gets its carbohydrates from the fungus, but does not provide anything in return. If you come across a Bird’s-nest Orchid, you are likely to discover other interesting plants, as this grows in traditionally managed woods; the particular fungi that the orchid relies on, Sebacina, are associated with beech. The name Bird’s-nest refers to its roots, which are a great untidy mass. Its flowers have a nice, slightly sickly honey scent.

Plant type Orchid family, Orchidaceae. Flowers May–June.

Height 20–40cm. Description Erect saprophytic herb. Leaves are brownish, scale-like, sheathing the stem. Inflorescence is a dense spike of honey-coloured flowers. Each flower has perianth segments that form a hood, except the lower petal, which forms a diverging, two-lobed lip. It is most likely to be confused with unrelated species, such as broomrapes (p.421), rather than other orchids. Companion species Beech, although it may be found in mixed woodland and overgrown hazel coppice. Distribution Native. Found throughout Britain and Ireland, although rare in most regions. It is locally common in parts of southern England, becoming increasingly scarce to the north. It is very rare in northern Scotland. A significant decline in its distribution since 1945 is due largely to the replanting of semi-natural ancient woodland with conifers. Habitat Deep shade in broadleaved woodland on calcareous soils. It is most abundant on the chalk and limestone of southern England.

Bluebell (Hyacinthoides non-scripta) If we did not have bluebell woods, we would travel across the world to see them. They are unique to the Atlantic seaboard of Europe, so only we know what it is like to walk through a wood in April and May and get that incredible smell: a soft, sweet, almost indefinable scent. This perfume is oddly equivalent to the colour: a combination of so many different blues (and sometimes whites and soft pinks) that when you see them en masse you cannot quite define it. We resist the temptation to pick bluebells, but cutting them in fact does no harm. It is tramping across the foliage, or pulling out the bulb centre, which kills them. If you have picked a handful, sear the stem ends (2–3cm) for fifteen seconds in boiling water and they will look good for a week in water.

Plant type Asparagus family, Asparagaceae. Flowers April– May. Height 20–50cm. Description This hairless, perennial bulb has glossy, narrow leaves with hooded tips, which pierce the soil like missiles in early March. Flowers are cylindrical and bell-shaped, full of yellow stamens, with two bluepurple bracts at the base. Six perianth segments each curl up separately at the tip, like pigs’ tails. It is easily confused with Spanish Bluebell (p.107) and the hybrid between the two (opposite). Companion species Bugle (p.68), Greater Stitchwort (p.87), Lesser Celandine (p.18), Ramsons (p.23), Wild Strawberry (p.120) and Wood Anemone (p.30). It also thrives in the shade of cliff-slope bracken. Distribution Native, very common across the British Isles, except high mountains and fens. Absent in Orkney and Shetland.

Habitat Wide variety, including deciduous woodland, hedge banks and meadows. It prefers neutral to acid soils. Forms extensive carpets, especially under a closed canopy, where it often co-habits with Ramsons.

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Bluebell (Native-Spanish Hybrid) (Hyacinthoides x massartiana) This fertile hybrid of the native Bluebell (opposite) and Spanish Bluebell (p.107) is the commonest cultivated bluebell in gardens and increasingly common in the wild. Discarded bulbs readily naturalise and then cross-fertilise with H. non-scripta.

The danger with this hybrid (unlike the Spanish form) is that it thrives in a shady woodland setting and, with its hybrid vigour, is a more robust plant than the native. If numbers are not monitored and controlled, big hybrid colonies could form, which will slowly muddy the genetics of our own plant.

Plant type Asparagus family, Asparagaceae. Flowers April– May. Height 30–50cm. Description Depending on how many times it has crossed, its appearance varies across the spectrum between the native and Spanish forms. Hybrid plants tend to be a bit taller and broader than natives. Unlike the native Bluebell, which has curved stem tips that hang slightly, the hybrid has vertical stems, leaning but not curved over, and flowers that are more densely packed, with a slightly wider bell shape. This mimics the Spanish form, but like the native Bluebell, the hybrid has flowers with the perianth segments curled back. It also has a lesser scent. Companion species Greater Stitchwort (p.87), Ramsons (p.23) and Wood Anemone (p.30). Distribution The hybrid was first recorded in the wild in 1963 and its range and frequency are increasing.

It is relatively widespread in woodland and woodland margins, particularly close to urban areas where the Spanish Bluebell is prevalent. In more remote regions, the hybrid is proportionately rarer or even absent. Habitat Like our native Bluebell, this now occurs in a wide variety of habitats – deciduous woodland, hedge banks and meadows. It has a greater pH and heat tolerance than the native, so it also does well on chalk and on sunny banks and roadsides.

Broad Buckler-fern (Dryopteris dilatata) Walking through the wood at Sissinghurst, Kent, last spring, just as the sun was falling, I came across a stand of Broad Buckler-fern on the far side of the small stream. Normally unnoticeable in a dark, damp part of the valley, every plant was spotlit, like a burning bush in the spring dusk (pp.42–3). The fronds of Broad Buckler-fern are arranged in dense crowns, and there were twenty or thirty plants scattered quite evenly through this patch of wood, each with leaves arching elegantly outwards, with every scale on the stem, every part of every frond, bronze-gold and haloed. This is one of the most delicately arranged ferns, its pinnae widely spaced, the stem standing out in strong contrast to the lush, bright green leaves.

It typically has a bearded, scaly stem of a dark chocolate-brown colour, with a deep brown-black central zone. It grows in similar places to Male-fern (p.19), but the overall impression of Broad Buckler is brighter, lighter and more elegant. It has more highly cut, three-pinnate fronds, whereas Male-fern is mainly once pinnate, sometimes twice pinnate near the main stem.

Plant type Buckler-fern family, Dryopteridaceae. Height 30–150cm. Description Fronds are triangular, varying in colour from olive green to darker, bluish green. They are clustered in a dense ‘shuttlecock’ crown that arches outwards. The frond stalk is normally shorter than the blade and is densely covered with pointed scales, each of which has a dark brown centre and pale edges. Companion species Bluebell (opposite), Elder (p.80), Pendulous Sedge (p.316) and Wood-sorrel (p.33).

Distribution Native. Common throughout Britain and Ireland, absent only from the area surrounding the Wash.

Habitat Shady places on neutral to very acidic soils, including deciduous and coniferous woodland, hedgerows, ditches, open moorland, rocky slopes, boulder scree and rock fissures.

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Columbine (Aquilegia vulgaris) We have become so used to seeing this plant – or one of its hybrids – in our gardens that we may not at first appreciate those rare and marvellous occasions when it appears in the wild. The British common name comes from the Latin columba meaning ‘dove’; the Latin name from aquila meaning ‘eagle’. Each flower does indeed look like a cluster of birds, and its odd shape makes it insect specific. The nectar is secreted at the base of the long spur, or hollow horn, that tops every petal, and is accessible only to long-tongued bumblebees. Also known as Granny’s Bonnet, the Columbine used to be common: it often appears in church carvings, such as the misericord supports at Ripon Cathedral in Yorkshire.

Broad-leaved Helleborine (Epipactis helleborine) It may not have the smoky beauty of its relative Marsh Helleborine (p.309), but in its own way this has a touch of glamour, looking more like an orchid from a Malaysian rainforest than a plant of English deciduous woodland. Each flower spike is tall and substantial, with thirty to a hundred flowers on each spike. The hearts of the flowers are pink, with jutting-out green wings and a chocolate-brown throat, although the colours are variable. In shady places, they tend to be greener, developing the pinky-purplish tinge in the sunnier spots on the edge of a wood. You will normally find them in groups of one to three rather than the big family drifts associated with Marsh Helleborine.

Plant type Orchid family, Orchidaceae. Flowers July–August.

Height 25–80cm. Description Robust, erect perennial herb.

Stem is downy towards the top; stems are sometimes clumped, with several arising together. Leaves are dull green, broad, oval and spirally arranged up the stem, becoming narrower towards the top but reduced to scales at the base. The largest leaves are 5–17cm long and 2.5–10cm wide. Inflorescence is a dense, one-sided raceme. Each flower has three oval, greenish purplish sepals and three petals, the lowermost forming a cuplike structure with a projecting, heart-shaped lip. Companion species Enchanter’s-nightshade (p.9), Wood Sage (p.32) and Yellow Pimpernel (p.35). Distribution Native. Occurs throughout the British Isles. Quite frequent in southern England and Wales, it becomes more localised to the north and is very rare in northern Scotland. It is also localised in Ireland. Habitat Deciduous woodlands, particularly beech woods. It is also found along disused railway lines, hedgerows, roadsides and, in northern and western Britain, limestone pavement, scree and grasslands.

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Plant type Buttercup family, Ranunculaceae. Flowers May–June.

Height 50–90cm. Description Tall, hairless perennial with hanging blue or violet-blue layered flowers. Each flower has five interior spurred petals contained by five spurless sepals in a flounced, layered skirt. They have dark crimson-purple stems, the colour extending into the midrib of the leaf. Leaves are greyish green, often washed purple, arranged in three parts, each one with three lobes. The ones that rise from the root rather than the stem are prettily crenellated, giving them the shape of Maidenhair Fern (p.404). Companion species Deadly Nightshade (p.6) and Tufted Vetch (p.166).

Distribution Native, rare. Local and decreasing in the wild.

It occurs as a native or alien throughout the British Isles, but it is a little less rare in southern England and south-west Wales.

Habitat Native colonies occur in calcareous woods, scrub and fen, as well as stream sides, damp grassland and on scree slopes. Garden escapes naturalise in quarries, and on roadsides and railway banks, and tend to be a mix of colours, including pink and white, which rarely occur in native species.