My peppers are more than ready for potting on but I wanted to draw this Sun Spurge, Euphorbia helioscopia, now going to seed, before I do that. I took the soil for the peppers from the greenhouse, so it’s not surprising that this sprouted. Spurge ‘bribes’ ants to disperse its seed by tempting them with oil-rich attachments – elaiosomes – which the ants or their larvae eat before discarding the seed.
Like all euphorbias, as a deterrent to herbivores, the Sun Spurge has milky, latex sap that can cause irritation.
As we continue under high pressure, it’s been cold – sometimes down to below freezing on a night – and very dry. That hasn’t been a problem for the spurge, growing in my wild flower patch at the bottom of the garden. I guess that the milky, corrosive sap must work well as an anti-freeze and is perhaps one of the reasons that spurges do well in dry habitats, for instance in the dry, sometimes dusty, soil in the raised bed in our greenhouse.
It isn’t the most popular of plants with pollinators: during the hour or so that I’m drawing I notice only two insect visitors, both small flies, one a species of hoverfly. The small bumble bee in my sketch was working its way around the flowerhead of a dandelion.
We’re on coal measures rocks, so mainly shales and sandstones, which usually weather into slightly acid soils.
The foxglove is typical of dry acid soils and it self-seeds and thrives amongst our flower borders and veg beds so, as a change from trying to establish a patch of traditional English meadow on my wild flower patch, I’m going with the flow and planting out the foxglove seedlings transplanted from where they’ve sprung up to create a woodland edge habitat.
