Fox and Cubs

This dazzler is the plant variously known as orange hawkweed, Grim-the-collier, fox-and-cubs and botanically as Hieracium aurantiacum. It’s a naturalised garden escape, establishing itself on stony ground and sending out creeping runners until it becomes a dense eye-catching colony. The reference to foxes is obvious enough, with the tawny orange ‘cubs’ grouped around a central ‘vixen’, but the reference to coal miners is a bit more cryptic. I’ve always assumed that the name comes from the ease with which it colonised coal mine spoil tips, thanks to its ability to thrive in such unpromising soils, but I recently read that it’s to do with the black hairs in the flower head. A closer look reveals that they do resemble sooty black whiskers, so maybe that's the reason. Whatever the derivation of the name, the flower colour is stunning.....

In Clover

It’s a shame that computers can’t convey smells digitally, because when I stood in the middle of this large patch of white clover in the mid-day heat the smell was simply wonderful. Just like the aroma of a newly-opened jar of warm honey. The whole area – a large patch of waste ground that was reseeded with a clover/rye grass mix last spring – hummed with honeybees and bumblebees, moving from flower to flower. Surely one of the best ways to support our ailing bee population would be to sow clover wherever land of any kind is lying fallow? White clover Trifolium repens has a neat way to ensure it gets the maximum labour out of its bee workforce. As soon as the flowers have been pollinated they begin to flush pink, and then the bees ignore then, concentrating instead on newly-open, nectar-laden flowers. Meanwhile, after half a day the flower stalks of pollinated flowers bend downwards, out of the way of the visiting bees. You can see the difference between a newly-open flower head (left) and one that’s been open for about a day (right) in the top photograph.

Emblems of summer

There are plenty of emblematic species that mark the transition from winter into spring – violets, primroses, wood anemones, etc. But which are the wild flowers that mark the fuzzier boundary between the end of spring and the beginning of summer? There’s an official date on the calendar but for me the botanical signal comes when the first wild roses open (top picture) in the hedgerow and the roadsides are fringed with the frothy blossom of cow parsley (bottom pictures). Anyone got any alternative suggestions?