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/




Friday, 24 May 2013

Berkshire: Maidenhead Thicket & Few-flowered Leek


3 May 2013                                                OS 175: Reading & Windsor

Length: 1 hour.
 
We started from the car-park by the northern arm of Maidenhead Thicket (National Trust) at SU855816.  Across the road was an open access field carpeted with cowslips Primula veris, one of the best cowslip meadows we have seen, thick with vigorous plants.  This is Pinkneys Green Common, managed by the National Trust.

Cowslips, Pinkneys Green Common

 Having drunk in this spectacle - which is likely to be full of more flowers in the summer - we walked NW through the thicket to the north end and then followed the west edge southwards.  The wood is largely of young trees with occasional mature beech.  Plants common here are red currant Ribes rubrum, ramsons Allium ursinum in large masses but still only in bud, wood anemone Anemone nemorosa, woodruff Galium odoratum, spindle Euonymus europaeus, gooseberry Ribes uva-crispa, bluebell Hyacinthoides non-scripta, lesser celandine Ficaria verna, sanicle Sanicula europaea and our target few-flowered garlic Allium paradoxum. 

Wood anemones, Maidenhead Thicket

Ramsons, Maidenhead Thicket

 The few-flowered garlic, which happened to be in peak condition on this date, was concentrated down the western edge, sometimes spilling out of the wood into the grassland.  This must be one of the best places to see this plant in all its glory.  Most plants consisted of a head of bulbils with several white papery bracts, from which emerged one or two slender stalks with single small white bell-shaped flowers - few-flowered indeed.
Few-flowered garlic flower-head

Dense patch of few-flowered garlic

Few-flowered garlic with cowslips just outside wood

Some plants of hybrid bluebell Hyacinthoides x massartiana near the car-park made us wonder about the origins of the flora in this wood.  The few-flowered garlic is certainly an introduction and can spread rapidly, ramsons is native but also occurs widely as a garden escape, and the same applies to many other plants here, such as red currant and gooseberry.  Others like sanicle and woodruff are almost certainly native.  However it got to be this way, it is still a great spectacle in spring.

 

Afterwards a brief drive took us to Burchetts Green SP840815 (walking there is awkward because of the intervening motorway).  Here an old American red oak Quercus rubra stands at the crossroads opposite the Crown pub.  It was just opening its bright yellow leaves at our visit.

Red oak, Burchetts Green

New leaves on red oak

 We walked up Hall Place Lane from the oak, leading to a path through playing fields to Hall Place College.  On the crest ahead stretches a line of limes Tilia x europaea with large bunches of mistletoe Viscum album, standing out dramatically against the sky.  They border the eastern road into Hall Place and were originally planted in the C17th, although many have been replaced since.  The usual bush of shoots at their base is kept cut, unusually revealing the trunk. 

Hall Place limes from south
 
Mistletoe

The former mansion is now a further education facility teaching a huge range of work skills from farming to hairdressing to dog-handling and the park makes a very pleasant milieu.  A range of daffodils has been planted along the road verges.  We did not stop to identify most, but we were struck by the cultivar 'High Society', which has a trumpet which is pink, white, yellow, then green inside.

'High Society' daffodil

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