NORTH DOWNS & BEYOND

Common Poppy in profusion, Langley Bottom Langley Bottom, Langley Vale, call it what you like - Walton Downs would do - the farmland that blankets much of this area has had a lot of coverage from me over the past few years. To recap: this farm was put up for sale and purchased by the Woodland Trust some three years ago. They plan to release the area into the public domain as a woodland reserve and intend to plant up a great deal of the open farmland, in so doing connecting existing copse and woodland together. So far, so good you may think - after all, private farmland is going to become countryside for the public to access and enjoy. Yes and no. Langley Vale has been farmed sympathetically down the ages, with a tremendous arable flora present as a consequence. It is like a botanical time capsule. When the Woodland Trust released their plans there was a great deal of fuss created by the counties botanists - why plants common trees on top of rare flowers? Meetings were arranged, ...

This morning I met up with local botanist Peter Wakeham to partake in what amounted to a spot of plant 'twitching'. The farmland at Langley Vale had once again come up trumps, with two species of local (and national) rarity having recently been found by the eagle-eyes of Dennis Skinner. Before we made our way to these newly discovered gems, Peter showed me a couple of Night-flowering Catchfly plants that he had come across last week, in a field corner where they had not been seen before. They included one highly robust, fully-flowered specimen, that had a mixture of open and closed flowers. Both are pictured above. These flowers were also strongly pink, the Langley plants being normally coloured white. Our first target was nearby - a single statuesque Jersey Cudweed (below). Although a coloniser of 'nearby' London streets, how this individual made it to a chalky field on the Surrey downs is anybody's guess. Ground-pine (below) is becoming exceedingly...