About this Blog

This blog reflects our twin interests in walking and natural history, especially botany.



"Ich wandle unter Blumen

Und blühe selber mit ..."

Heinrich Heine





Walking is important to us as a way of being in direct touch with the environment, experiencing species and habitats in their ecological and historical context. By walking between different flower sites we experience the character of the general countryside, getting to know as much where flowers are not as where they are. Walking allows for the serendipitous - chance encounters with animals, meetings with local people, unexpected species - which enrich the experience.

We set up this blog to share a variety of mainly day-long walks centred on "iconic" flower sites and locations of rare plants, where these are publicly accessible. The accounts include descriptions of the routes taken, key plants seen, other wildlife encountered, and anything of general environmental or historical interest. All the walks allow time for looking around (some flowers need searching for), photography etc, and usually include a half-way stop for refreshment at some suitable establishment. The walks are seasonal, depending on the flowering/fruiting times of different species, although one cannot hit the peak time for all species seen on one walk, and the best timings will vary from year to year. Lengths vary but the walks may be anything up to 12 miles or more, so an early start is recommended.



A certain knowledge of our flora is assumed, but those less familiar should be able to identify most of the plants mentioned with the help of one of the good field guides - Blamey, Fitter and Fitter Wild Flowers of Britain & Ireland (A&C Black) or Francis Rose The Wild Flower Key (Warne) - although occasionally recourse may be needed to more technical tomes such as Clive Stace New Flora of the British Isles (Cambridge) or the specialist volumes published by BSBI (Botanical Society of the British Isles) on grasses, sedges, umbellifers etc.



While examining plants it is interesting to note the galls, leaf-mines and fungi (rusts etc) that are often specific to particular taxa. For galls we use Redfern and Shirley British Plant Galls, for leaf-mines http://www.ukflymines.co.uk/ (which also includes lepidopteran and other mines), and for fungi Ellis and Ellis Microfungi on Land Plants, although this is a technical tome rather than a field guide.

Our completed walk around the coast and borders of England is described on http://www.coastwalking.blogspot.co.uk/ and our current walk around the coast of Wales is on http://www.coastwalkwales.blogspot.co.uk/




Monday 11 July 2011

Buckinghamshire: Oakley Parish Hedge

3 May 2011                                  OS Map SP6111 to 6112
Length 1 hour

We started at Oakley Wood, part of the once extensive Bernwood Forest, which now exists only as small patches of disconnected woodland.  The nearby village of Oakley, like this wood, gets its name from the oak Quercus robur which is still one of the prominent trees in the wood, although we could not find any specimens that were particularly old, as the wood has obviously been extensively worked for timber in the past.  The oldest we found probably dates back 150-200 years.  In Anglo-Saxon times one can presume that oaks were dominant in this part of Bernwood Forest, although their particular value for timber may also have served to make them more notable when it came to naming the settlement here.  In a glade behind the car-park (SP611117) with some standard oaks there is a large colony of wood anemone Anemone nemorosa.

Pedunculate oak leaves

Oakley Parish Hedge continues northwards from the wood-edge along the lane to Boarstall.  It follows an old boundary between Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire, the current boundary being a couple of fields further west.  Most of the hedgerow is quite wide, with signs of former laying and coppicing, on a substantial bank and ditch that show it is ancient. 

Oakley Parish Hedge

There was some wood anemone and cowslip Primula veris underneath, while there was a good intermixture of shrubs with none dominant, interesting ones including the downy rose Rosa tomentosa, Midland hawthorn Crataegus laevigata and its hybrid with common hawthorn, wild plum Prunus domestica and spindle Euonymus europaeus.

Midland hawthorn

Hybrid hawthorn

Spindle flowers

Oaks are a common tree constituent, usually divided at the base into two or three trunks, indicative of early coppicing. 

Double-trunked oak

We carried out two counts of shrubs along 30 metre lengths giving scores of 8 and 9, an average of 8.5 (around 850 years old), which is high, but not quite as high as one would expect from a hedge that is known to date back to early medieval times.  The hedge is difficult to approach on the other side where a thick outgrowth of bramble into the field gets in the way.
The hedge supports thriving wildlife: we found along here the red-headed cardinal beetle Pyrochroa serraticornis, the dragonfly broad-bodied chaser Libellula depressa and a caterpillar of the lackey moth.  Less welcome was the presence of the invading harlequin ladybird Harmonia axyridis.
The verge outside the wood had a long patch of shining cranesbill Geranium lucidum and a single plant of white comfrey Symphytum orientale.

White comfrey

Five miles north of here in Oxfordshire is another village named after a tree, in this case Blackthorn.  We noticed abundant sloe hedges along the lanes north and south into the village, although this is one of the dominant hedge shrubs generally in any case, so why this village, which has a long ancient history, had a particular association is not known.  Perhaps the valley of the River Ray here was dominated by a thicket of blackthorn that would have required a major effort to clear a space for settlement.


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