Category: Flowers

The Flora of Bilberry Wood

Victorian OS Map
Adapted from Ordnance Survey, Yorkshire LXXXI.SE, Revised: 1907, Published: 1910
OS Ref: SD857 821, 54° 14′ 04″ N 2° 13′ 15″ W
Copyright Openstreetmap

Bilberry Wood was planted in the mid-Victorian period, at about the same time as Nethergill was built as a lodge.

Heather

Heather

Heather, also known as ling, Calluna vulgaris, grows in the drier parts of the wood, including on tussocks raised about the boggy areas and, here, from a crevice on a fallen pine trunk. Heather is an indicator of dry acid soils. The abundant heather and bilberry here are a sign that the wood has been only lightly or moderately grazed.

Lightly-grazed pinewood with tall heather is classified as National Vegetation Classification community W18.

Continue reading The Flora of Bilberry Wood

Dishevelled Sunflower

sunflower

A suitably dishevelled end-of-the-season sunflower which has grown from a spilt sunflower heart from the nearby feeders and which we’re now leaving to go to seed for the birds.

The feeders attract the local sparrowhawks and yesterday fluffy breast feathers were scattered across the lawn and the pond, probably marking a kill, the victim of one of our regular wood pigeons, which often peck around beneath the feeders.

A blue dragonfly whizzes past and makes a quick search by the cordon apples then returns and heads over the hedge into next door’s garden. From its predominantly blue appearance, I’m guessing that this was a migrant hawker.

Foxgloves

foxglove
Original drawing 6 cm, 2.4 inches across.

Our first visitor since March: Barbara’s sister Susan joins us for a socially-distanced coffee and bran loaf in our back garden. This group of foxgloves were self-sown but they’ve positioned themselves perfectly in the border. Thanks to lockdown, we’re more ahead in the garden than ever before and yesterday we made a trip to the garden centre to buy enough pollinator-friendly plants to fill the last gaps in the border.

bag and chair
wine glass

During the last three months we haven’t set foot in anyone else’s house, with the exception of Barbara’s brother John, who needed our assistance on a couple of occasions.

I’ve been putting my enforced spare time to good use by giving myself a refresher course in illustration and getting a bit more familiar with the work of illustrators, photographers and designers through the daily podcasts from Adobe, but I could soon get back into my usual sketchbook habit. I feel that what I’ve learnt over the past few months feeds into my regular observational drawing, even if that’s something as familiar as drawing a foxglove in the back garden.

Fox-and-Cubs

fox and cubs

Fox-and-cubs grows from between the stones by the bridge at Smithy Brook. Some years ago a few rosettes of it popped up at the top end of our lawn at the edge of the patio. Much as I like the flowers, we made efforts to weed them out because they can spread by stolons (creeping stems on the surface) and rhizomes (under ground storage stems) into turf where they are near-impossible to eradicate.

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Wayside Flowers

flowers

As today would have been the first of our Wakefield Naturalists’ Society outdoor meetings, Richard and I decided we would spend our one hour walk to Smithy Brook recording the species we saw.
After all the glorious sunny weather over the last six weeks, today was disappointingly overcast, breezy and quite cool, however it actually made it easier to stop and identify the plants as no-one else seemed inclined to be out and about.
We counted 59 plant species but only eight birds, as the cooler weather seemed to have dampened their spirits: we usually get skylark, sparrows and various finches and tits along the lane but today we heard chiff-chaff and yellow hammer and watched a buzzard soaring over the fields.
Because of the cooler weather we didn’t see a single butterfly. We would normally see speckled wood along the sunken lane, then peacock, small tortoiseshell and orange tips along the more open stretch.

valley
Smithy Brook Valley.

When we looked closer at the wild flowers, we spotted common vetch alongside the more conspicuous bush vetch and we almost missed a patch of ground ivy, nestling among the grass and herbage on the sunken lane. Over the last few weeks we have watched the countryside changing as the hawthorn hedges turn from fresh green leaf to frothy white blossom, giving off that wonderful musky sweet smell of spring.
Bluebells, white and red campion and Herb Robert were just a few of the species along the lane with wild garlic, white comfrey and yellow flag alongside Smithy Brook. A field dotted with meadow buttercups and the bright yellow of a patch of birdsfoot trefoil add a little brightness to the morning.

Thank you to Barbara for writing this today.

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Foxgloves

foxgloves

Instead of weeding out these foxglove seedlings, I’m saving them for my meadow area.

Chicory tends to take over from most of the wild flowers that I try to introduce but foxgloves stand a fighting chance as they colonise open woodland and burnt areas and they prefer dry or moist acid soils. I’m not going to be able to establish the kind of wild flower meadow that you’d find on chalk downland but I should have more success in creating a woodland edge habitat.

Butterwort

butterwort

You’ll find the starfish rosettes of greasy-looking yellow-green leaves of butterwort, just an inch or two across, dotted around on boggy ground. Common Butterwort, Pinguicula vulgaris, is a small carnivorous plant which traps insects on the sticky surfaces of its yellow-green leaves. The in-rolled margins gradually curl around to digest the prey. It’s a member of the bladderwort family, found on heaths, moors and in bogs, in damp, acid habitats where nutrients are in short supply.

In 1635 the herbalist Gerard wrote:

“The husbandmans wives of Yorkshire do use to anoint the dugs (udders) of their kine with fat and oilous juice of the herbe Butterworte, when they are bitten by any venomous worm, or chapped, rifted, and hurt by any other means.”

I drew this on my iPad, using the program Clip Studio Paint, from a photograph that I’d taken in May last year, by the track up onto the moor at Moss End, Oughtershaw, in Langstrothdale.

Codlins and Cream

great willowherb

Great willowherb, Epilobium hirsutum, gets its common name codlins-and-cream because the rose pink of the flowers resembles the colour of a codlin, or codling, apple when cut into or cooked.

In my photograph taken at the top end of Newmillerdam, you can see the flower’s four stamens dotted with grains of pollen surrounding the pistil, which is made up of the female parts of the flower: the ovary, style and stigma.

great willowherb

With stamens and stigma in the same flower, how does the willowherb avoid being accidentally self-fertilised?

As a new flower opens, the pistil emerges first with the stigma – the receptive part of the flower – appearing as a furry-looking white cross in the centre. You can see that this is already dotted with pollen.

Once the flower has been fertilised the stigma is discarded and the stamens start to appear.

Peony Seedpods

With our peonies, I much prefer drawing the seedpods to the frilly magenta pink flowers. Peonies are related to buttercups and the other place where I’ve seen pods shaped like a court jester’s cockscomb hat is on the kingcups by the pond.

Unlike the kingcups, the pods on the peony have a furry covering. As they ripen they turn from light green to a light ginger brown. They’ve yet to open but some of the pods on the kingcups have already split to disperse the seeds.

Wild Garlic

In yesterday’s post, I’d got as far as the pen and ink for the ransoms or wild garlic for my woodland flowers spread. Adding the watercolour makes such a difference. As I painted it, I started thinking about the wood in spring with a waft of garlic drifting through the shadier, damper valley bottom by the beck.

Despite the recent snows, it’s young leaves are already beginning to appear, so I couldn’t resist tearing off a small piece yesterday morning, to crush it between my fingers to release that gentle scent of garlic.

In a month or two, when it’s at its lushest amongst the crack willows and alders alongside Coxley Beck, it looks rather tropical. When we moved here, thirty or so years ago, that area was open and meadow-like. Alder saplings started to colonise the open ground; now it’s alder woodland with ransoms spreading like weeds. Except ransoms isn’t a weed – in the sense of ‘a plant growing in the wrong place’ – because in Coxley Wood, it’s growing exactly where it should be growing. It’s good to see a wild flower doing well and spreading for a change.

Another drawing that’s been transformed by a wash of watercolour is the yellow archangel, which is one of my favourite woodland plants, as it’s supposed to be one of the indicators of ancient woodland. My original drawing, in my Sketchbook of the Natural History of the Country Round Wakefield, was just an inch and a quarter across, line only, so it resembled a Victorian engraving. Adding colour  reminds me how this plant brightens up the odd corner alongside woodland paths.

Wood sorrel isn’t nearly as widespread as lesser celandine, wood anemone and bluebell in the wood. I like those clover-shaped leaves, which are usually, if not always, folded back.

Next stage is to drop these scanned images onto a sketchbook background for my May nature diary spread in The Dalesman magazine. I realised that I’d need landscape format this time, not a double-page portrait sketchbook with the spiral binding in the centre, which is what I’ve used so far for my articles.

As luck would have it, the afternoon light was still suitable for me to go out to photograph an A5 sketchbook on a mossy rock on the raised bed behind the pond. I look forward to putting the whole design together and adding some lettering: not too much as I don’t want to crowd out the flowers.