The Audacity of Wildflowers
written by: Liz Dickinson
The adjective ‘great’ is frequently used before wondrous natural wonders, such as the Great Bear (Ursa Major) or impressive man-made architecture like the Great Wall of China, to denote particular importance. There used to be a special nature reserve close to our central UK family home called Great Fenny Wood. This was slightly oxymoronic, as the woods were small at 2.56 hectares, but instead the ‘Great’ stood for its high conservation value.
This was no enchanting Midsummer’s Night Dream woodland of magical faeries. The minuscule, wet woodland rather felt like a mysterious place, with swampy pools, reflecting crooked willow and alder trees, winding creepers, and tussock sedges. The river floodplain was the perfect breeding ground for royal fern, yellow iris, great willowherb, and meadowsweet. The damp, decaying wood provided the perfect habitat for invertebrates such as the nettled carpet moth, and alder catkins fed the willow warblers. My dad was the conservation officer there during the 1980s and was tasked with surveying the local flora and fauna. During weekends, I would accompany him to the woods, silently meandering around the sleeping bog trolls in my oversized wellies. Great Fenny Wood was where I learned about reciprocity in nature: when the river flooded, the woodland soaked up the water and provided food and shelter for many species.
When a major road bypass was built in 1991, linking the surrounding villages to the nearby city, it carved out a corner chunk of Great Fenny Wood. Chopping down the wet woodland broke my dad’s heart: he knew the coordinates and ages of every willow and alder tree.
Driving through the outskirts of a local village the other day, I noticed a street on a new housing estate had been named ‘Fenny Copse Lane’ – some half a mile from the remaining section of Great Fenny Wood. When we name streets and roads after famous musicians or historical figures in this country, it usually fills us with great pride, but this felt like a hollow eulogy. A lane usually conjures up images of a rural road, laden with hedges on both sides, towering sycamores, with views of rolling hills, not the bare remains of a once, great (yet small) wet woodland.
I wanted to share this ironic news with my dad, but nine years since his Alzheimer’s diagnosis, has led to even more substantial frontal lobe damage. It’s easier to reminisce about Great Fenny Wood prior to the catastrophic road bypass construction. His eyes still light up as he recounts the upside-down feeding acrobatics of the lesser redpoll, as it fed from the trees, distinguishable by its red head patch. The willow tit has a sooty black cap, often confused with the marsh tit, but it still reminds me that its ‘zee, zee, zee’ call is highly distinctive. My dad was highly skilled at birdsong and bird flight recognition, and even now still recognises dozens of British birds in paintings or photographs.
Alzheimer’s is often termed ‘the long goodbye’ and with good reason. It has left me with acute anticipatory grief, as I’ve reluctantly watched one of my favourite people in the world slowly start to forget what he ate for breakfast.
His greatest gift was to pass on his tacit knowledge of nature to me, the way that family recipes are often passed down through the generations.
One of the ways that I’ve managed to pass on his love of nature to my own daughters, is through exploring the ancient woodlands and wetland havens in our local vicinity. We live 1.5 miles from Cossington Meadows: one of the 35 nature reserves cared for by The Leicestershire & Rutland Wildlife Trust. It is a wondrous wetland haven, located near the River Soar.
The meadows are prevalent to winter rainfall, making it one of the best times to visit, when the pools attract wildfowl, including: winter geese, swans, wigeon, teal, and short-eared owls. During the summer months, the muddy landscape attracts wading birds like the green sandpiper and oystercatcher, with lapwings also known to nest on the nature reserve. The best murmuration of starlings we’ve ever seen was one cold Autumnal evening, in the middle of the reserve. It’s at times like this that I’ve felt closest to my dad: picturing him sky-centric, with his trusted, weathered brown leather binoculars, scanning for birds in flight.
When you grow up with a birder dad, it makes you more observant of birds and nature, from the flashes of brilliant, metallic blues of kingfishers, quick flit of goldcrests, to the ancient oak trees in Bradgate Park.
The first time I saw a cormorant (Phalacrocorax carbo sinensis) up close wasn’t by the seaside but on the viewing platform of the Mountsorrel and Rothley Marshes, close to the River Soar. With its prehistoric appearance: long neck, hooked bill, and large wingspan, it caught me off guard, suddenly flying into the air. I suspect it had just finished drying out its wings in the sunshine on the rocks. I even managed to accidentally photograph the cormorant in the background of my daughter innocently blowing a clock dandelion flower.
Mountsorrel and Rothley Marshes are a mile’s walk from our house and are part of the local River Soar floodplain, the previous agricultural fields now forming a much-loved nature reserve. Once upon a time, the area was harvested for maize, later grazed by cattle, and used as grassland, but now it supports the local biodiversity and even soaks up rainwater during flooding. The team of dedicated volunteers has lovingly created a myriad of pools, swamps, wet grassland, and wet woodland, purposefully designed to attract over-wintering birds like lapwings, snipe, and redshank. The growing wet woodland has attracted warblers, which will hopefully later breed in the area. Like the Great Fenny Wood before it, the marshes have alder trees and willow sticks, carefully planted by the volunteers.
What makes it even more magical is the way nature has re-wilded itself: some areas of woodland have bloomed spontaneously from seeds swept in from the winds or provided by the floodwaters. Over time, it is expected that a wide range of wildflowers and plants will naturally take root, from purple loosestrife, ragged-robin, cuckooflower to rush, and sedge.
Over the years, it is the sheer tenacity of wildflowers that has given me hope for the future, despite relentless daily reporting on climate change, the heartbreaking recent felling of the UK’s much-lamented Sycamore Gap Tree, and the prior loss of Great Fenny Wood.
During childhood, many of us whiled away the hours, counting the dandelion flower ‘clock,’ while earnestly blowing the fluffy seeds. Both my daughters would run headlong into meadows, zigzagging through wild tussocks in bare feet, then pausing, as if part of some great Impressionistic painting; a skyline of blue sky, protruded by the whitest, fluffiest clouds. Suddenly they would appear: downy, white parachutes floating; my girls trying to catch them, marvelling, rapturous as if privy to rare shooting stars. Delighting in the King of weeds: the dandelion clock, the sun set as they spun in their own liminal lightness of being.
A time-lapse video of a dandelion flower to seed head remains the most exquisite viewing; almost like a choreographed ballet, the fluttering of yellow florets reborn into fluffy pom poms.
The common dandelion (Taraxacum officinalis) grows in grasslands, including pastures, meadows, roadside verges to lawns, and is considered an important early nectar source for pollinators, such as beetles, butterflies, and bees. The leaves provide a caterpillar foodplant for an abundance of moth species from large yellow underwing, orange swift, and giant leopard. Goldfinches and house sparrows later devour the dandelion seeds during late summer.
The roots protect the soil from wind and water erosion, the plants covering bare soil so quickly that they function as natural mulch by giving shade and conserving moisture. The long, hardy tap roots grow through dry earth, separating it: allowing air and water channels to flourish, which in turn provides a perfect soil structure for earthworms. Even when they die and eventually decompose, their parting gift is a mineral-rich, infused organic matter that nourishes the soil.
Despite this astonishing ecosystem life cycle, many gardeners still dismiss this gold-standard nectar source as a pernicious weed. The tap roots cling to the soil like hardy, rusty anchors and grow mercilessly from walls, pavement cracks, and even the most pristine English gardens.
Back in Great Fenny Wood as a child, clumps of stinging nettles were everywhere, but even then, I accepted that they had every right to be there and just carefully swerved around them to avoid getting stung. Side-stepping these ‘weeds,’ later prepared me for long-distance hiking on the West Highland Way in West Scotland. It is one of my favourite places in the world and is listed by The National Geographic as one of the world’s Top Ten Trails. It’s easy to see why: from the breathtaking views of Loch Lomond from Conic Hill, to the glaciated valley of Glen Nevis.
In 2020, the trail celebrated its 40th anniversary and became part of the International Appalachian Trail, and was extended by one mile to finish in the centre of Fort William. The Appalachian Mountains in North America and the Scottish Highlands were once part of the same, vast ancient Caledonian Mountain range, separated only by the Atlantic Ocean.
The 96-mile West Highland Way is signposted throughout by faithful wooden way-markers, with images of a white thistle on a brown background. The spear thistle (Cirsium vulgare) is Scotland’s national flower, symbol of the Scottish Rugby team, and many businesses from Edinburgh to Fife.
The spear thistle is a biennial plant, often found in waste ground, roadside verges, and bare ground. During its first year, the deep branches tap root anchor underground, and the flower stems grow from 30 cm to one metre high during the second year. It flowers in July and September, with purple flowerheads, with bright florets on the tip of a spiny ball. The tall stems are winged and spiny, with grey-green colouring.
The purple flowerheads are sensational, loved by wildflower artists everywhere. Purple is, in fact, the most refracted colour when light passes through a prism, right at the end of the visible colour spectrum. Pre-Raphaelite painters mixed cobalt blue with madder to create fairer shades of purple, and Impressionists like Claude Monet used striking cobalt violet for pond surface and water flowers in his revered Water Lilies painting.
In Autumn, birds like linnets, goldfinches, and redpolls eat thistle seed, which constitutes a third of their diet, and use the soft, fluffy thistledown to line nests. Bees and butterflies like the white letter hairstreak, peacock, and meadow brown feed on the nectar, and the leaves are an important food source for painted ladies and other species. Thistles are micro-habitats for many invertebrates, such as the prickly leaves providing protection from predators higher up the food chain. Towards the end of the year, in the heart of winter, the hollow stems even provide shelter for hibernating insects.
It’s no wonder that the Scottish poet, Christopher Murray Grieve (pen name: Hugh MacDiarmid), referred to insects humming round the thistle in his epic, observational 1926 poem: ‘A Drunk Man looks at a Thistle.’
“Rootit on gressless peaks, whar its erect/ And jaggy leaves, austerely cauld and dumb/ Haud the slow scaly serpent in respect/ The Gothic thistle. Where the insects hum.”
Beloved by artists, the thistle is famously captured in the quintessential English nature diary: ‘The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady’ by Edith Holden, written and illustrated in 1906 and posthumously published for the first time in 1977. Edith was an art teacher and illustrator of children’s books, and the diary is a stunning almanac of native flora and fauna.
In the September feature, there is a beautiful watercolour painting of an adult goldfinch (Carduelis carduelis) feeding on a thistle-seed, with its long, fine beak. With a bright red face, it hovers over the thistle with its yellow wing patch like an aerial expert. A few pages later, there is a paraphrased extract from the poem ‘Scholar and the Carpenter’ by 19th-century English poet Jean Ingelow:
“The goldfinch on a thistle-head,
Stood scattering seedlets as she fed,
The wrens their pretty gossip spread,
Or joined a random roundelay.”
The thistle, though decidedly pricklier in appearance than the dandelion, remains an integral part of rural and urban eco-system landscapes.
Often when we’re lost through grief, we lose hope and desperately look for signs to bring us home again. The thistle- way markers, like weathered ferrymen, helped me navigate 96 miles of fairly remote Scottish landscape. The thistle, however, holds a wider motif, wrapped in the folklore of wildflowers.
The Scottish thistle is emblematic of the enduring power of nature: the ability of wildflowers like dandelions and thistles to grow on waste ground or roadside verges, or purple loosestrife and ragged-robin to self-seed in wet woodlands on floodplains, against the odds.
Grieving for my dad’s Alzheimer’s has felt like being benighted: walking through Loch Lomond one summer evening, watching the swallows dart in and out of the hedges, and seeing the reflected red and gold hues on Loch Lomond during the golden hour. Sensing that time is running out, knowing that I should have been at the youth hostel hours ago, but the call of the evening sun was too good to miss. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, night falls, and very quickly, it’s pitch black. I have no torch and am all alone in the middle of nowhere.
I still mourn the loss of Great Fenny Wood and long to see my dad one last time, with his faded brown leather binoculars, patiently scanning for lesser redpolls, dangling precariously from trees. For now, I will take comfort in the tenacious resilience of wildflowers, not caring how they look or if they’re loved, just rooting themselves firmly against the wind, waiting for day to break.
FOOTNOTE:
As the age-old debate of what constitutes a weed rages on across the gardening world, it is worth noting here that for thousands of years, the dandelion was considered a medicinal herb for treating stomach upsets, stomach ailments, hormone imbalance, and routinely used for detoxification.
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