2023 was a very good year for identifying plants in the wild although I did not spend enough time doing it. I'm determined that 2024 will be better. This is a good January resolution.
Common centaury is my plant of the year. It's small and a lovely dusty-pink. I saw it at a lot of the locations I visit over many months.
I tried out a few plant identification apps last year and settled on Flora Incognita. They all had their strengths and weaknesses, and it still feels a bit like cheating. I found them pretty reliable at the genus level, if species sometimes proved illusive. Still, that's what good reference books are for, and the one I prefer is far too heavy to cart around.
Without the app, I doubt I'd have recognised hedge nettle, white bedstraw, marsh woundwort, musk mallow or nettle leaved bellflower – and many more.
I don't travel far as that seems to miss the point. My own wild flower grassland at the front of the house is where I go every day. It's a riot of yellow shades dotted with common vetch, ox-eye daisy, red clover and multiple pyramidal orchid. I can claim little credit for creating this as it's 'natural' owing its existence to what the builder passed off as top soil. Happily it was poor stuff and I don't complain. I have nurtured it a little I suppose over the years, with the addition of yellow rattle being the most effective grass inhibitor.
Sadly, there is nowhere in the village or surroundings that is anywhere near as good as this. There's a nearby village with verges planted with a "wild flower mix". Well, it might be wild (though I doubt it), but it's certainly not English wild. It brings Geoffrey Palmer's reading of Browning's 'Home Thoughts from Abroad' to mind. Just listen to the disdain he brings to “gaudy melon flower”.
Everywhere I go is chalk or off-chalk, although I sometimes visit some limestone in Gloucestershire, but that's almost 90 minutes away. Mostly I go to an iron-age hill fort, infantry-training pasture on Salisbury Plain, a civil war battleground, a part of the Wansdyke on the trailing edge of the Marlborough Downs, and to the grounds of a ruined mansion just below the Plain.
What treasure.
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