Tag Archives: Dog Rose

Natural History

Aston rowant Flowery meadows

Aston Rowant’s fine south-facing flowery Chalk Grassland meadow

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.

Chalk Fragrant Orchid (Gymnadenia conopsea)
Forester Moth, distinctive as a day-flying moth with shiny green scales and feathery antennae
Yellow Rattle

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.

Cryptocephalus hypochaeridis (Chrysomelid leaf beetle) as usual on Hawkweed
Ragged Robin, another handsome and once common meadow flower. The attractive grass just below it is Briza, the Quaking-Grass: the little seed-heads shake on their long thin stems when touched.
Hoary Plantain, an elegant (and tall) member of a familiar and often-overlooked family. It grows on lime (such as Chalk Grassland)
Milkwort

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”.

Common Spotted Orchid
Dog Rose
Small Scabious
Yellow-Wort, a member of the Gentian family with its striking perfoliate habit and handsome 8-petalled flowers
Tufted Vetch, showing off its fine purple tufts of flowers, its handsomely pinnate leaves, and its little paired tendrils grasping several nearby grass stems as it scrambles up.
Mother Shipton Moth, named for a famous 16th-century Witch – her beaky nose and chin form a dark brown face pattern around her round eye and mouth. Seems to be a good day for day-flying moths!

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.

Eyebright

Goatsbeard Clock – the largest pappus of any of our dandelion-like composites
Gentians not yet in flower (but rather handsome even so) … come back later, and we’ll find out whether it was a Chiltern Gentian or an Autumn Gentian, maybe!

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/

Conservation, Nature Reserves

Opening up the Mangrove Swamp

Today, down at the nature reserve, it was a day for work and weather rather than natural history. A vigorous Low was working its way across the top of Britain, with a brisk, freshening southwesterly wind bringing little showers across town. The water table had risen appreciably in two days, and I was glad of my gumboots, as I had decided it was time to do something about the overgrown ‘Mangrove Swamp’ in the middle of the reserve.

I should explain at once that we don’t have any coral reefs or fringing banks of Rhizophora mangroves here in Chiswick: that would be a fine thing. What we do have is a wet hollow – probably once a tributary of the long-gone Bollo Brook, one of London’s lost rivers – with attractive carr vegetation. Carr means wet woodland: we have willow of various species (probably mainly crack willow), birch and an assortment of other trees in the drier places – sycamore, hazel, holly, rowan, cherry, oak. But down in the Mangrove Swamp the willows predominate, their feet in the water for half the year. They grow rapidly, and then fall over; or branches get shaded out and die. The result, quite soon, is a tangle of lodged trunks and dead wood that cuts off the view and fills up the hollow, part of the natural succession, but tending to make the reserve less diverse (I think) and less interesting to look at. (I’m reflecting on whether one should be “managing” a “nature reserve” at all, given what George Monbiot says in Feral – he’s all for leaving nature to itself – but in a small reserve in town, management does seem necessary. Perhaps it’s a nature garden or something, not really a reserve at all.)

I cleared a mass of broken or cut dead wood from the wet floor, putting it to one side – it will still be available for fungi and beetles to consume. I then cut several long, heavy willow branches, mostly dead or dying, that had fallen most of the way to the ground across the mangrove swamp. A couple of hours hard work (I completely forgot about the brisk wind) had the main area cleared. We then set to and cleared what seemed to be a dark shrubbery near the boardwalk, but which was actually a large fallen tree shrouded in a six-foot thick mass of ivy. It was satisfying to get it clear; the tree trunk will need chainsawing, however.

After a well-deserved cup of tea, I pruned the hedge that was overhanging the street, pulling down a mass of strong twining hops that had scrambled all over the hawthorn. Blood-red haws rained down but there were plenty left when I had finished. Around the reserve, the rowans were in fine fruit, with some roses covered in scarlet hips.