Late flowerers

For the past 10 days or more I've been banging on to anybody that I meet just how profuse the flowering is, so late in the season. Being November 1st, a beautiful and sunny (even warm) day, and quiet on the bird front, I kept a list of just what was still in flower, and reached a respectable 46 species. They were - for anyone interested - White campion, common gorse, groundsel, viper's-bugloss, common ragwort, yarrow, smooth sow-thistle, pink oxalis, lesser periwinkle, black mustard, wild carrot, bramble agg, red valerian, annual Mercury, moth mullein, Nottingham catchfly, hare's-foot clover, sheep's-bit, sea campion, fennel, common toadflax, common mallow, black horehound, prickly sow-thistle, oxeye daisy, yellow-horned poppy, hieraccium agg, black nightshade, wood sage, common Centaury, common mouse-ear, white clover, ragged robin, wild carrot, perforate st.john's wort, mugwort, mouse-ear hawkweed, English stonecrop, foxglove, broom, ragweed, scarlet pimpernel, greater mullein, daisy, rock samphire and thrift. Maybe the lack of frosts and gales have been kind to them.

Comments

Derek Faulkner said…
Quite an amazing list that, seems that yourself and Plover had the same thought on the same day, which shows how impressive the spectacle must be for the time of year. We badly need some frosts to bring the season round to where it should be, if only to stop my lawn growing!
2 November 2015 at 05:40
Steve Gale said…
It isn't just the variety of species still in flower Derek, some of them (particularly Sea Campion) are almost profuse!
2 November 2015 at 06:23
Derek Faulkner said…
Well we're into our second day of blanket fog here so can't see any flowers let alone count them. 50 yds vis. on the marsh this morning.
2 November 2015 at 10:02
Gibster said…
Ragweed? What the heck is that??? One that I've yet to find so thanks for the head's up!
5 November 2015 at 19:16
Steve Gale said…
Seth, look where people feed birds...
6 November 2015 at 17:35
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Goldfinches and Lavender

Image
We have three medium-sized Lavender bushes in our back garden. Throughout the summer the flowers (which last for several months) are a magnet for insects and give off a most restful aroma. As tempting as it is to cut the dead stems in the autumn, we always leave them, as we know that during the late winter we will get visitors to feed on the seed heads... This video was taken from the kitchen window this morning. We will normally see one or two birds over a few days, but have had up to 14 at once. We never tire of watching them. Lavender is a wonderful plant to have in the garden, with year round natural history benefits. So what are you waiting for? They are readily available at a garden centre close to you right now! There is an historic association with Lavender in this part of northern Surrey and south London. Lavender fields have been harvested for many years, with one particular field close to Woodmansterne being very popular with day trippers. A significant proportion o...
Read more

Welcome back!

Image
In November 2005 I purchased a pair of Swarovski 10x42 EL binoculars from The London Camera Exchange shop in Guildford, for the then princely sum of £899. These bins have served me well, with almost daily use in all types of weather, testing their durability to the maximum - salt water spray, deluges of rain, 38C temperatures, dust, dirt, slight knocks... and apart from the armour coating that had started to bubble and come away from the body, nothing to be alarmed about. Then, in the summer of 2022, I noticed that I had a problem when close focusing - the outer focusing wheel would lose grip and it would take me an age to regain a middle-ground distance of focus - plus, over the next few weeks this outer focusing wheel became loose. I resorted to the use of tape to keep it all in place, but realised that I had to do something about it in the long run. For a while I did consider buying a new pair - after all, they were then 17-years old - but they were still optically superb. It seemed...
Read more

A special day

In birding, timing can mean the difference between an average day in the field and that of a spectacular one. Good timing can be helped by reading the weather conditions correctly, or understanding local conditions but it is more often down to pure luck. In this case, I just got lucky... I had not visited Dungeness since March 2022, quite a gap for me. It was high time that I once more trod the shingle and my timing of a visit was down to several factors, mostly a personal liking for mid-late autumn but also because I needed to be at home until September 20th and could not make the journey south until then. I also chose to stay at the bird observatory for a few days rather than make it a day trip. All this conveniently found me stepping outside the observatory's back door in the breaking dawn of Sunday 22nd September, quickly making my way to the fishing boats, an area I prefer to stand to best appreciate any visible bird migration, an aspect of birding that I find exhilarating.  A...
Read more