A wildflower interlude

A thunderstorm chucks its load on the Severn Valley (and shortly afterwards, on me) during my walk on Sunday. Normally you get a spectacular view of the Malvern hills from here, but they are swamped!

I rarely blog about anything that isn't in my own garden, but it's worth making an exception sometimes. Not least because I ought to mention occasionally that I have an interest in native British wildflowers (and have a Flickr set of my best photos). And that I'm also lucky enough to live in the Cotswolds, a designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, so I have no excuse not to go out and gawp at them.

I don't have to go very far to find them. Cheltenham sits within a cosy semicircle of hills which form a continuous ridge around it. The ridge gives the town a beautifully sheltered climate and keeps frosts in my garden to a minimum. And the ridge itself is mostly grassland overlaying beautiful honey-coloured limestone which makes a wondrous habitat for wild flowers and butterflies. All of the Cotswold hills have their own unique character and variations in plant life, and when I feel the need for a botanical frenzy I tend to go to the quieter ones which the tourists (and even most locals) don't know about. My favourite is Nottingham Hill, which is a spur at the northern end of the ridge.

Nottingham Hill is a very special place to me. The whole of the top is an iron age hillfort, but you can't see it from the ground because it's too big to view in its entirety. The earth is full of natural holes, dips and openings. The lower slopes (particularly on the N and E sides) are liberally dotted with springs, some of which are the sources of local brooks and streams. Most of the trees around the fort are magical trees, elder, hazel or thorn. There's also a very strange grove on the southern edge just below the fort where almost all the trees are hollow or have holes in them, growing in the dips and hummocks left by ancient quarrying. Some are small finger-sized holes, some cup-shaped holes with grass and violets growing in them, some large oval holes right through the tree. With gorgeous views over the Severn Valley to go with it, it's an incredibly evocative place.

It's also lush with wild flowers.


Rock rose (Helianthemum nummularium) growing next to a common spotted orchid (Dactylorhiza fuchsii) on Nottingham Hill.

These pictures were all taken on Sunday, when I went out for a walk up there on what seemed like a charmingly pleasant early summer day. I was having a great time grovelling about in the undergrowth with my camera when it became apparent that the distant booming I could hear was not some bizarre rural motorsport as I'd assumed but a rather formidable thunderstorm approaching very stealthily. I can't resist rainstorms ... they are an exhilarating manifestation of nature's power and they make me feel wonderful. So once I'd got my camera to a place of safety (just as the rain was starting) I went off up another footpath and climbed up onto a mini-hillock on the hillside and embraced the storm while it pelted down and soaked me. It was bliss!

I had to drive home with a wet arse, but it was worth it.

None of these are particularly rare plants, but I don't care, it's always a joy to see them.


Wild thyme, which is a species called Thymus polytrichus. It looks like a miniature version of garden thyme and you certainly can take it home and sprinkle it on your pizza, but I've found Cotswold wild thyme to be decidedly lacking in the aromatic department, so I generally just admire it and use home-grown stuff for eating.



Yes I know this stuff is common as dirt. But it doesn't half look beautiful once you get down on your hands and knees for a proper look. Bird's foot trefoil, also known as Eggs and Bacon, and Lotus corniculatus.



The decidedly blue flower known as green alkanet, and also by the glorious botanical name of Pentaglossis sempervirens.



Although it looks a bit like lady's bedstraw, this is the slightly more subtle crosswort (Cruciata laevipes). Most things with 'wort' in their name have a history of medicinal use.



Another old healing herb, common milkwort (Polygala vulgaris) which I found in two shades of blue and a pink variant, all growing together in the same clump.



A particularly elegant blossom of creeping cinquefoil (Potentilla reptans).


One of the highlights of my walk was not a flower but a particularly beautiful moth. I don't know much about moths at all but these days all you need is a quick trawl of the interwebs to identify things.




This gorgeous chap (two views of the same moth) is a five-spot burnet, or Zygaena trifolii if you prefer.

Finally, here's something that is in my garden.

I have a few wild plants naturalised in my garden, either because they've always been there or because I've introduced them through locally collected seeds. My house was built in the 1930s on land that was formerly a damson orchard, and I still have some damson trees in what was originally a field boundary at the back of my garden, and it's quite possible that some of the native wild flowers have stuck around here too.

At any rate, when I moved here in 2004 and started weeding the garden, which had been fallow for a year, I found a scarlet pimpernel with purply-mauve flowers instead of the usual pale red. I carefully weeded round it to give it a chance to mature and set seed. I wasn't sure whether the flower colour would come true from seed, but sure enough the following year there were more.

It's not particularly unusual to get colour variants in scarlet pimpernels. But blue is a more common one to find, or white. I'm not sure how widespread the mauvey purple ones are. But it certainly is a heritable trait because there's no variation from year to year. I try to help them colonise by carefully preserving all the pimpernels when I'm weeding and then removing a lot of the scarlet ones once they show their colour. Sometimes if I'm out there with my tweezers I grab an anther off one of the purples and dab it on the stigma of another purple on a different plant, just to make sure. But in all honesty it doesn't need my help, it's surviving fine by itself.


Violet-purple petals on a scarlet pimpernel, Anagallis arvensis. Native to my garden!

Today in the garden .... bleeuurrgh!

Wild white campion, grown from seed I collected locally, is one of the few things still looking good in the garden at the moment.

My garden is in a very sorry state at the moment. I have a few nice flower pictures taken over the last two or three weeks, and those will have to do for today's blog because the veg plots are a mess. Most of May and June had very turbulent weather, which has become far worse in the last week or two. It has been really bad for some people in the UK, so it seems churlish to complain about my vegetables when others have had their homes devastated ... but even so, I find it quite depressing to go out in the garden at the moment. (Quite apart from the risk of getting soaked.)

For a start I've been unable to get out there much to deal with routine jobs, so the lawn is like a hayfield and the weeds are springing up everywhere. But there's also a huge problem with disease which I've never had on this scale before. All over the vegetable beds, things are blighted, mouldy and rotting.

The pattern of the weather for the last couple of months has been constant warmth and frequent bursts of intense pelting rain. The rain barely has a chance to soak away before the next lot comes. Everything is soaking wet, pots need baling out on a daily basis, and some plants are being damaged by the force of the rain or the blustery winds. They're probably rather confused about what season it is, because they had a kind of 'summer' in April and it's been warm and wet ever since. But the biggest problem is that warmth and wet is the perfect environment for some of the worst bacterial and fungal diseases to thrive and spread. The most deadly of all these is blight, and yes – I now have blight in my garden.

Let's look at another pretty flower picture. This is Allium christophii with a California poppy growing up through it.

I don't ever recall having blight strike this early in the season. Last year it didn't come till September. So far it's only making itself manifest on a few potatoes, but once it starts to appear it's really only a matter of time before it devastates every potato and tomato in the whole garden. It's very frustrating, because even just a few years ago it wasn't really a problem. According to Alan Romans in his Potato Book, there used to be only one type of blight in Europe, which made only asexual spores. Then a second blight type arrived in a consignment of infected potatoes from Mexico. So now blight reproduces sexually and asexually and is really having a very jolly old time at the expense of potato and tomato growers. And all the while, whichever type it is, it's mutating like the clappers. The spores are wind-borne, so there's not really any way you can keep it out of your garden. **shakes fist**

Less devastating, but still very annoying, is the garlic rust. I picked off the worst affected leaves a few weeks ago, but now the remaining ones are completely encrusted and there's not much more I can do. The orange crusty bits turn black when they're about to release their spores, so I tried to pick off all the leaves with black bits as soon as they appeared ... and it seems to have helped, because the ones I picked the leaves off are thriving better than the ones I left alone. But even so, they are all in an appalling state. It shouldn't directly affect the bulbs underground, but plants need their leaves to provide nourishment, so a really bad rust attack can choke the plants and reduce bulb size. For some reason it's only affecting the hardneck garlic. I'm growing one softneck type, Solent Wight, and that's absolutely fine (though it never produces good sized bulbs in my garden anyway). I don't know whether softneck garlic is more rust resistant or whether it's a special property of Solent Wight.

Some plants are loving the warm wet weather. My crocosmia flowers are better than I've ever seen them. And also the Somme poppies ... most days the flowers have been pelted to smithereens by the rain but they have kept producing more ... and they're bigger and brighter than ever before. Poppies have a lot of variability in their flower size and colour depending on the growing conditions, and the moist soil obviously suits them.

Wild poppies from seed collected on the Somme. They are doing fabulously well this year.

My blogging is a bit sporadic at the moment because I'm getting very close to releasing my album at last, and it's all gone a bit manic. I've just been working on the final-final-final mixes – as opposed to the final and final-final mixes, because every time I listen to them I hear something else I want to change. Is that mandolin too loud? Would that vocal sound better panned to the left instead of the right? It can get quite obsessive. Of course if I was a rock star I would have somebody else do all this for me, but due to a combination of thriftiness and control freakery I am my own producer and engineer. But yesterday I sent off all the tracks to the record label (hurrah!) so I can't tinker with them any more. Not that that's the end of the hard work by any means ... I still have all the legal and marketing stuff to deal with. Tsk ... I thought being a musician meant I'd be able to sit around strumming a guitar all day, but it's actually just as much work as being a graphic designer. (Oh, and that's my next job ... because I'm an ex-graphic designer I'm doing my own CD booklet design too. Aaargh!)

Today in the garden ... legume love

Meraviglia di Venezia ... latecomer to the party

In all my progress reports on climbing beans, there's one variety I've barely mentioned since the early posts. Meraviglia di Venezia is an exceptionally late maturing variety (September/October is normal), and is only now starting to produce flowers and set pods. The one on the right in the photo is literally the first. It's pale green at the moment, but it will mature to a creamy golden yellow with wavy edges. When the beans eventually mature they will be shiny and charcoal black. Although it was one of the first beans I planted way back in early spring, and all the other beans have been podding like mad things throughout the summer, Meraviglia di Venezia initially put on a rampant scramble for the top of the fence (and over into next door's garden) and then remained resolutely committed to being a huge pile of leaves. When its season is right, however, it starts throwing out pods at a rate which make up for all the months of inactivity. It's a large plant with yellowy stems and lime green leaves which will elbow any other nearby plants out of the way. The flowers are pinky mauve and turn flesh pink as they mature; not the prettiest in the garden but decorative enough.

At last the first tomatoes are beginning to colour up (Pink Jester is the only one showing any interest in ripening). I was thinking I'd have to change the title of the blog to Daughter of the Unripe Tomato. They are very light-sensitive and as the weather has been so overcast throughout August they haven't been progressing as well as I'd hoped. They're still showing far more interest in spurting sideshoots from every available orifice than they are in ripening their existing fruit. They're even sprouting sideshoots from their fruit trusses, which is a bit daft. I've given them a good talking to. I've explained that they're not in their native South America now, they're in a cold damp country with a short growing season and they'd better get on with it.

But while the climate has not been kind to tomatoes it thoroughly suits the peas.

I've really fallen in love with pea plants this year. I never had much luck growing them in the past. They always had tiddly little pods with snail trails all over them ... the yields never seemed worth the effort or the growing space. All the varieties I grew were conventional ones whose growth habit is short and bushy and which ripen all together ... which is great if you're a commercial grower and you want to mow the lot with a tractor, but has no advantage to gardeners. The real revelation has been trying the Victorian tall peas for the first time. Their yields and their beauty don't bear comparison with a modern commercial pea.

I'll definitely be trying more tall heritage peas next year. Alderman is part of a group of 5-8ft tall voluptuous peas known as the Telephone group. Telephone may sound like a strange thing to call a group of peas, but probably didn't seem so in the context of the time. It would be a bit like having a new pea variety today called iPod.

I've found that Franchi Sementi do a variety of tall pea called Telefono, which is presumably related. It looks very like Alderman if the picture on the packet is anything to go by. But if it's been grown in Italy for any length of time it will be a sub-strain, and it'll be interesting to compare it with British versions of the Telephone peas. (Any excuse to buy another packet of seeds.)

Ezetha's Krombek Blauwschok, of pre-1882 vintage, showing a ring of purple in the leaf axils. All the purple-podded varieties seem to have this, and the yellow-podded Golden Sweet has a larger double ring.

Meanwhile I've planted out all of my F1 hybrid experimental peas. They have only a trace of purple in the leaf axils ... less than the full-blooded purple-podded, but I should see a lot more purple in the next generation if I can get them to seed.

My latest crop of Alderman has just started flowering, and is thriving in the manky cloudy weather. Ezetha's Krombek Blauwschok is not far behind. I have high hopes of a bountiful pea-fest this autumn.

In addition to having a lovely garden, I'm lucky enough to live among some of the finest countryside England has to offer and I love going out for walks in the hills which surround Cheltenham in a semi-circle (and provide it with its pleasant microclimate).

My husband is used to it by now ... every time we go out for walks anywhere I'm constantly diving into the undergrowth to look at plants.

And this is what I was so interested in. It's a common British field poppy, Papaver rhoeas, but a very special one with dark red stripey veins. My eye was initially caught by its unusually intense colour, but the extraordinary flame-like pattern was an amazing find. I feel very privileged to have seen it.

Today in the garden ... and elsewhere

Mr Bethell's Purple Podded pea, aka Mr Bethell's Purple Tendrils

Well, this is a first. I went out to a garden centre ... my favourite one, in fact ... and came away empty handed. I can't think of a single occasion in my whole life when I've done that. But there was absolutely nothing I wanted.

And on the way home I stopped off at a racing stables on Cleeve Hill where they have bags of well-rotted horse manure on offer at the roadside for a quid each. That's something I do need. But even when I'm shopping for shit I have standards, and having worked with horses during my childhood I know decent dung when I see it. Frankly their crap was crap. It was a mixture of newspaper and manure, but mostly newspaper, compacted, claggy and hardly rotted at all. You couldn't put it straight on the garden in that state. Not only that, the bags were two-thirds empty and you barely got more than a shovelful for your quid. A complete rip off. There was even a sign up asking people to bring the bags back afterwards. Bloody cheek.

I've also been out collecting elderflower to make another batch of cordial. Doing a bucketload this time. This involved pillaging the hedgerow up on Prestbury Hill which, like most of Gloucestershire, has an abundance of elder. I came across some interesting wildflowers along the way, including some beautiful sainfoin (never seen that on the hill before) and an uncommon subspecies of poppy with smaller orangey-red flowers.

I grew this foxglove Primrose Carousel from seed

Back in the garden, the fruit is going into full-scale glut mode. Blackcurrants, tayberries, raspberries and strawberries are all ripe and begging to be picked (and the birds are certainly obliging). Gooseberries and whitecurrants are not far behind.

Meanwhile I've been starting off more tomatoes. Yes, I know it's technically a bit late for sowing them now. But in my experience, tomatoes just sulk in their pots up until the summer solstice and then go completely nuts. It doesn't matter whether you sowed them in February and nursed them on a windowsill or whether you left it till June and stuck them in at the last minute. They all seem to perform about the same in the end. As I have an obsessive-compulsive unusual-vegetable-seeking disorder I was unable to stop myself from buying some exotically striped Green Tiger tomatoes on a recent visit to Marks & Sparks and planting a couple of its seeds. The fruits are very striking indeed with their skins streaked in dark red and green and their flesh a very luscious crimson. The flavour is not absolutely to my taste but it's pleasant enough. So I'll see how that does. I'm also having to resow one of my American tomatoes, Isis Candy, since something has managed to snap the stem on the one seedling I had. The whole of the veg garden has put on a surge in the last few days, helped along by some nice sploshy rain. Climbing French beans are going like the clappers ... this is Kew Blue in the picture.

Ongoing projects: Local wildflowers

It's very trendy to have your own miniature wildflower meadow these days, and I've got my small patch set aside at the bottom of the garden for nature to do its stuff. It comprises a scruffy bit of lawn full of ribwort which was always a bugger to mow anyway because it's all lumpy-bumpy, a thick cluster of old damson, pear, elder and lilac trees, and a shady patch behind them which the previous owners used as a log store (now occupied by a luxurious crop of nettles). Which is perfect, because it's got three habitats in one: a sunny meadow, something resembling a hedgerow, and a shady woodland edge, all of which should support different species of wildflower.

This year I'm expanding the range of habitats even further, donating an adjacent chunk of garden for a 'soggy patch' (can't really give it the glamorous title of bog garden, it ain't exotic or squishy enough) and digging over a small strip of the meadow to make a tiny cornfield. Because the soil here is so dry it's difficult for me to grow any of the native wildflowers that thrive in British sogginess. I'm hoping that by digging out a bed and lining it at the bottom with a lightly perforated polythene sheet, I might just slow down the drainage enough for some of them to thrive. The bed is laid out with a border of large logs (the last relics of the previous owners' firewood stash) which are untreated, so they'll gradually dissolve into the garden and provide a nice habitat for interesting fungus. The cornfield bit will be sown with wheat or barley and should provide a home for those plants which prefer richer soil and don't thrive in grass, like poppies and cornflowers.

It's a bit ambitious to have five contrasting habitats in an area about 20ft square, but what the hell.

White campion (Silene alba) which I grew from seeds collected on a local railway line

In addition to the usual flowering weeds (speedwell, chickweed, dandelion, plantain, great willowherb, cat's-ear, hairy bittercress, Canadian fleabane, daisies and buttercups) there were some wildflowers already growing here when I took over the garden:
Black medick
Wood avens
White deadnettle
Red deadnettle
Ivy-leaved toadflax
Cut-leaved cranesbill
Tansy
Nipplewort
Herb robert
Jack-by-the-hedge
Lesser celandine
Fumitory
An as-yet-unidentified vetch

Most interesting of all, I have a mauve-flowered scarlet pimpernel. I found two of them growing in the lawn when we moved here, and avoided mowing them. I collected some seeds and let the rest self-sow. The following year there were quite a few of them ... so they may be coming true from seed. That'd be nice.

Having set aside my meadow, I have to go about sowing it with something more interesting than ribwort. I like the idea of making it a microcosm of the surrounding area by growing species native to Gloucestershire. So rather than buying a commercial seed mix I've been collecting seeds locally, which means I'm only growing plants that belong around here, and helping to preserve any local variants into the bargain. I hasten to add I'm meticulously careful about what I collect and where from, because plundering stuff from the wild to stock your own garden is not generally something to be encouraged. I only collect from good sized colonies and only take as many seeds (not plants) as I need to propagate a handful ... because I can build up my own stock over successive years. Anything that's rare or delicate I don't touch. They're collected from various places in the immediate vicinity of Cheltenham, the main sources being the disused Honeybourne railway line and the crescent of hills surrounding the town. Some of the seeds are sown in plugs of sterile compost, labelled, and cultivated like garden plants (most respond well to it, as long as the compost is low in nutrients). The rest are chucked straight into the meadow and given a good trampling.

These are the species I've collected in the Cheltenham area so far (not all are growing here yet, but I'm working on it):
Small scabious
Field scabious
Common knapweed
Greater knapweed
Rock rose
Lady's bedstraw
Agrimony
Yellow rattle
Harebell
Pignut
Autumn gentian
Kidney vetch
Salad burnet
Red clover
Wild thyme
Wild marjoram
Bugle
Selfheal
Slender St John's wort
Dwarf thistle
Woolly thistle
Common hemp nettle
Wood sage
Pineapple weed
Hemp agrimony
Ox-eye daisy
White campion
Red Campion
Bladder campion
Mugwort
Hedge woundwort

Not bad, I reckon.