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| Clockwise from top left: Marsh marigolds, Adder's tongue ferns, Gorse, Wood vetch, Pignut, Scarlet elf-cup , Archangel, and the tiny flowers of Thyme - leaved speedwell |
As workdays go, Wednesday was quite an unusual one.
I moved from a regional team to a national team at work just
as COVID hit; I've spent a lot of time working at home, with regular office
days ever since the office reopened, but I get very few days out in the field. I'm really enjoying my current role so I'm not
going to grumble about that.
Like I said though, Wednesday was different. A retired
colleague had either volunteered or been persuaded to share her botanical
knowledge with the current regional team, and I was lucky enough to join them
and to catch up with old friends and to make new ones. I've been out to the reserve we were at several
times previously; It’s a very long walk, though, much further than you’d think when
you have four wheels underneath you - so it’s great when I go with someone who
has a car! I see new plants and learn
new things each time I visit it. I’ve
seen Enchanter’s nightshade there, Pyramidal orchids galore, Lady’s bedstraw, Common
vetch, Birdsfoot trefoil, rushes and sedges.
My hope for the day had been to learn to identify some new
plants, and I wasn't disappointed. I'd never seen thyme-leaved speedwell before;
it’s got such tiny flowers! Adder’s tongue
ferns* were another new one for me - I can see where they get their name. Someone with eagle eyes spotted some tiny Scarlet elf-cup fungi - another kingdom altogether. There were swathes of Wood mellick, a grass I
hadn't seen before, there was Bush vetch, and there were dried heads of Small
teasel. Going off at a tangent for this
one sentence, we’ve got [common] teasels growing in our front garden; we get lots
of goldfinches here and I’m hoping to watch them enjoying the buffet.
Coming back to Wednesday, there were even nightingales, who regaled us with their song while we were learning and when we stopped for lunch. I had never actually heard a Nightingale before, so I was absolutely thrilled! Adding that into the mix of new flowers and botany, old friends, and good weather, it was one of those days that are just about perfect. I didn't even need to worry about 'that' Supreme Court ruling - we'd been warned beforehand that there were no toilets at all at the reserve.
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*My inner palaeobotany geek wants me to comment that
ferns are waaaay older than flowering plants, and that they, along with horsetails and
seed plants, evolved from a group of leafless plants in the early Devonian,
400 million years ago; flowering plants appeared in the early Cretaceous, roughly
130 million years ago.
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