Last week I went on a day course on wild flower identification in Church Wood organised by Nick Covarr, the Deputy Warden at Blean Woods. There were about 12 of us altogether, a mixture of local RSPB staff and a few volunteers. The course was led by Dominic Price of the Species Recovery Trust, which is a small charity who aim to stop the UK’s rarest species from becoming extinct, mainly plants but some invertebrates as well. I’d thought that at this time of year most of the flowers would be over with but there was a surprising amount still to see.
We started off in one of the rides but later went on to heathland. First of all we looked at grasses, which I knew very little about. Some of them have attractive names like Yorkshire Fog, Wavy Hair-grass, Common Bent and Crested Dog’s Tail and they all looked very familiar but I’d never known their names before. Some of the sedges and rushes I was also familiar with, for instance Pendulous Sedge and Compact Rush, both of which we have in our garden. Pictured below are Yorkshire Fog, Compact Rush and Crested Dog's Tail.
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Next we looked at the flowers - there was a lot of one particular umbellifer, which was wild angelica. It has rounded flower heads and purple joints on the underside of the leaves and was much more delicate than the similar-looking hogweed. There was also lots and lots of betony, which is a pretty purple flower (see photo below), which I don’t remember noticing before. Close to the ground was a little yellow buttercup-like flower which I thought might be cinquefoil but was actually tormentil . The difference, we learned, is that tormentil has four petals and cinquefoil (as the name implies) has five. Devil’s-bit scabious, wood spurge and fleabane I recognised already, but was not as sure about thistles, which all look very similar. The one we saw most of was the marsh thistle which has large spines all the way up the stem so is quite easy to recognise. Obviously we saw lots of other flowers but this is just to give a idea of the types of plants we saw.
Altogether it was a fascinating day - I just hope I can retain some of what I learned! Unfortunately I didn’t take me camera with me so all the photos I have included are from geograph.org.uk via Wikimedia Commons. Pictured below are Betony, Marsh Thistle and Wild Angelica.