Well, this strange year – a cold dry April when the bees could hardly feed for lack of pollen and nectar; the wettest May anyone can remember; and now a June so late that cherries, raspberries and redcurrants are ripening all together. In some recent years, the end of June would have been too late for many flowers, specially on Aston Rowant’s steep, free-draining Chalk Grassland.
But not this year: it’s like Tolkien’s The Shire after Sam Gamgee has returned victorious and sprinkled the magic grains of earth from Galadriel’s Elvish Garden in all his favourite spots, and everything is glorious with colour, buzzing with bumblebees, and glittering with iridescent green Forester Moths, Thick-Kneed Flower Beetles, and astonishingly shiny Hawkweed Leaf Beetles.
This curious little flower in the Broomrape family, Yellow Rattle, may seem to be just an oddly-shaped herb; but it’s critically important to the flowery meadow ecosystem. It doesn’t have much in the way of green leaves, as it’s a parasite: its roots attach to nearby grasses, extracting the food it needs to live, and in the process weakening the grasses all around it. Result? Tall tough grasses that would otherwise crowd out and overwhelm their attractively coloured neighbours are suppressed, and a wealth of insect-pollinated flowers can, well, flourish. That doesn’t mean the area can just be left to look after itself: Hawthorn and other shrubs would quickly take over and turn the place into forest, so carefully-planned grazing is necessary to keep the land at the meadow stage. It’s called Rattle, by the way, because the ripe seeds dry out and rattle inside the leafy fruit capsules when the plant is shaken.
This small flower was once common in meadows, indeed its name tells its story: it was found wherever milk cattle grazed, in all Britain’s meadows. Now in lowland Britain at least, it’s a rare and special sight, and we feel excited and happy to see it: such is the scale of the catastrophe that has overtaken our countryside. Basically, the flowers are almost all gone; so are the insects; and the birds are fast following them. A place like Aston Rowant is indeed special: its warm, south-facing chalk slopes really were always a wonderful place for flowers like the Chiltern Gentian and butterflies like the Adonis Blue, and happily it still is; but it’s now special just for being what our grandparents would have seen as ordinary: it’s full of what they knew as common wild flowers “of wayside and woodland”.
There weren’t many butterflies about – Meadow Browns, Common Blues, a single Marbled White very handsome with its dancing flight, a good number of Small Heaths up on the hilltop, a Red Admiral. It looks as if the difficult spring has meant low butterfly numbers this year.
My 2014 blog on Aston Rowant, with a different selection of species (and some trenchant thoughts): http://www.obsessedbynature.com/blog/2014/06/18/aston-rowant-beautiful-brutalized/
