Some very welcome rain today. I’ve carefully mown around this St John’s Wort growing in our orchard. This plant is a medicinal herb and often sold as a cure for depression and anxiety. Haven’t tried it myself and we enjoy it simply as a pretty wild flower.
Two plants spotted today.
Agrimony.
Broadleaf Plantain. Earlier in the year we had Narrowleaf or Ribwort plantain. This one is Broadleaf Plantain and you can see why it got it’s name.
A warm day. Here are a couple of things I missed the other day.
Yellow Rattle. We were give a few seeds some years ago and it must like it here because it has spread widely. It is supposed to be good in wild flower meadows because it weakens the grass and allows other plants to move in. It’s an annual and sets seed very readily.
Crested Dog’s Tail Grass. A few days ago I posted this picture of this grass.
Now it is in flower and looks like this –
We have a hornet which comes to our little pond to drink and I was trying to take a picture of it. No luck with that but we did get this damsel fly.
It’s warm today and thunderstorms are forecast. First I want to talk about grass. This year we’ve been overwhelmed by grass. There’s so much of it. Not complaining really, I just can’t keep up so I’ve just picked a few which are of interest.
Cock’s Foot
This is in full flower at the moment and it’s producing great clouds of pollen. It must be hell for Hayfever sufferers. Some is red/purple and some is white.
Perennial Ryegrass. Most people can recognize this grass with the flower buds alternate across the stem as a kind of wavy line but in this picture the flowers are open with the stamens showing. Later when the flowers have been fertilised the seeds fold back up again.
Crested Dog’s Tail. One of the problems I find with identifying grasses is that their appearance changes greatly as the season progresses. In this early picture the flower buds are tight against the stem. I’ll post more pictures later so we can see how it changes. I don’t know why they call it Crested Dog’s Tail.
Bird’s Foot Trefoil. So called because its leaves are in groups of three a little like a chickens foot. The buds are orange when they first open but then change to yellow.
Cinquefoil. We just had a Trefoil with it’s groups of three leaves. This one is Cinquefoil and it has 5 leaves. It’s quite hard to spot in a field covered in Buttercups. The plant straggles through the grass and the flowers are usually low down in the grass. The flowers look a lot like Buttercups but each petal has a little notch at the edge.
Bramble. This patch of bramble is always out first and is a favorite with our honeybees.
Foxglove. We get these in the hedges every year but when we clear a patch of ground we get lots of Fox Gloves the following year.
Nettle. Great for some species of Butterfly.
Common Spotted Orchid
White Clover. This is out later than Red Clover and it appears in big patches unlike the Red Clover which tends to be dotted here and there. Honey Bees prefer the white clover because their tongues are too short for the Red Clover which has bigger flowers.
Wild Rose. It’s odd that one of the prettiest flowers has the most vicious thorns.
I’ve mentioned before about our interest in Black Poplar and I thought I’d bring some items together in this post. Black poplar is Dioecious meaning that there are separate male and female plants. Black Poplars are quite rare and female trees are even rarer. One supposed reason is that the female tree produces vast amounts of fluffy seed which makes the place look untidy so the female trees get cut down. Here are some pictures starting with the catkins.
Male Catkins
Female Fluff
This pictures shows some of the unopened seed buds on the female tree but you can also see the wooly seeds coming out of the ripe buds. According to the books the seeds have to fall on wet or muddy ground to be viable which is why Black Poplars are often found on river banks.
Shropshire Wild Flowers 