Category: Flora

If you walk the sea-walls regularly you’ll be familiar with the cow parsley and hogweed that flourish either side of the path in an attractive white avenue. They are among the commoner members of the large family of flowering plants called Umbellifers, that is, plants with umbels, those clusters of whitish flowers supported by little stalks spread out like umbrella ribs.  Other members of the family include economically important plants like chervil, wild carrot, fennel, parsnip, angelica, parsley and dill, so you may find some of them in your favourite salads and summer dishes.  

Beware imposters, though, especially if you are a wild flower forager.  There is a deadly look-alike among them – hemlock.  Hemlock leaves are bright green, rather fernlike, and with jagged edges; but the easiest way to distinguish them is by the stems, which are spotted with purplish dots and blotches.  Every part of this plant is potentially dangerous – leaves, seeds, stems and roots – and dangerous to livestock and dogs as well as to humans if ingested.  Animals know well enough to avoid it, however, deterred by its pungent mousy smell.

Hemlock is a native and widespread plant in Europe and its properties have been well-known for at least 2000 years.  It was the poison of choice for public executions in ancient Greece and its most famous victim was the philosopher Socrates, who was condemned to death by the state for teaching the young to ask difficult questions of their politicians.  His pupil Plato gives us a very moving eye-witness account of Socrates’ final hours as he is administered his dose of hemlock, combined with opium to dull the pain.  The philosopher goes on discoursing cheerfully with his friends as the poison works its way up his body until he finally loses consciousness.  Later herbalists experimented with ways of using very small doses of hemlock to treat complaints like gout, but don’t try this at home!  

You can read an account of the terrible bodily torments Socrates might actually have suffered in a splendid new book by the botanist Peter Marren, The Devil’s Garden, in which he enthusiastically describes all the world’s most deadly plants with his deadpan graveyard humour.  Maybe don’t show it to your gardener, though.

Hemlock is commoner here than you might think.  There is a patch on the sea wall by the northern carpark at Shingle Street.  And it is rampant along the verges of the A12 and other main roads, fuelled by nitrogen-laden car fumes.  The Victorians used flowers as symbols to send covert messages, usually romantic ones, but if you were sent a sprig of hemlock the message was ‘You’ll be the death of me’.

Jeremy Mynott
July 2026

Our hedgerows rank high among the great glories of spring.  You can follow them greening up day by day, from the first fresh buds in March through to the gorgeous extravagance of leaves and blossom in May.  It’s an annual miracle of renewal and rebirth, driven by what the peasant-poet John Clare happily called, ‘the green life of change’.   You can follow the succession of different hedgerow trees and bushes emerging in flower one by one – and revealing in the process just how many different species were hiding there unnoticed in the bare, skeletal hedgerows of winter.   I just came across an old favourite while rambling along an ancient footpath, my attention caught by a lovely display of, creamy-white flowerheads shouldering vigorously through a mixed blackthorn and hawthorn hedge.  A wayfaring tree.  Their flowerheads look superficially similar to elderflower, but those come later and have quite different leaves (and, in autumn, berries).  The wayfarer’s leaves are as attractive as the flowers – soft and wrinkly with fine veins, slightly coarse to the touch and downy-white on the undersides, hence its old country name ‘hoarwithy’.  The present common name is a corruption of ‘wayfarer’s tree’, so called because it flourished alongside established footpaths and so helped reassure walkers that they were on the right track.  It was the sixteenth-century botanist, John Gerard, who gave it this name, and since he also named ‘traveller’s joy’ (old man’s beard) perhaps he had a special sympathy with ramblers.

It’s a revelation in fact how many other hedgerow species are there once you really start looking. In the same stretch I found field maple, dog rose, crab apple, dogwood, hazel and spindle, along with the dominant hawthorn and blackthorn, suggesting that this must be a very ancient hedgerow indeed.  There’s a calculation called Hooper’s Law which is supposed to enable you to age a hedge by multiplying the number of species in a thirty-yard stretch by 110.  But that would push the date of my hedge back to Domesday, which seems unlikely.  I’m happy just to celebrate it, anyway.  We’re lucky to have any ancient hedges at all. The British countryside went through a devastating period in the 1960s and 1970s, when farmers were encouraged to grub out hedges and drain ditches to enlarge fields to accommodate bigger and more ‘efficient’ agricultural machinery.  We lost thousands of miles of hedgerows, and with them a huge slice of our wildlife, for which hedges act as shelters, corridors, larders and homes – mammals, birds, flowers and insects, the whole inter-connected chain of life.  Many hedgerows have since been replanted, but you can’t make an old hedge any more than you can an old friend.

Jeremy Mynott
May 2026

Climate change is changing our language too.  Do you remember the old country saying about a ‘blackthorn winter’?  It was a reference to that period in March and April when the blackthorn blooms in our hedges, well before the whitethorn (hawthorn) and other hedgerow species ever come into flower.  This is a striking phenomenon in various ways. Most obviously, because in early spring the blackthorn blossom forms a brilliant white boundary along roadsides and across the fields, like a dazzling band of fresh snow.  It’s one of the most cheering and beautiful early manifestations of what is for most people the most uplifting season of the whole year, with its promise of warmth, growth and light after the long winter’s wait while nature was battened down.  One reason a blackthorn hedge looks so dramatic in spring is that unlike most other flowering bushes the blackthorn produces its flowers before its leaves, so the blossom contrasts strongly with its blackish bark, which looks as if it has been frosted like a Christmas decoration on every twig.  

But the phrase ‘blackthorn winter’ referred also to the fact that this promise might be punctuated or delayed by sudden bitter spells and chilly blasts, as winter administered a final, sharp reminder of its powers.  The nineteenth-century Scottish meteorologist, Alexander Buchan, even claimed to have identified a systematic pattern to these bitter spells, which became known as ‘Buchan’s cold snaps’.  In fact, the occasional conjunction of the flowering blackthorn with short wintry interludes was an easy prediction to make, but Buchan made the mistake of being too precise about it. April 11-14 and 9-14 May were his spring dates for a seriously ‘cold snap’.   Well, check it out when the time comes, but I’d be surprised if it happens.  Buchan may have won credibility by sometimes being right, like a canny fairground fortune-teller who tells you that something interesting is about to happen to you, but it was actually pretty random. In any case, Buchan knew nothing then of climate change. We’ve scarcely had a winter in East Anglia this year, certainly not an old-fashioned freeze-up, just a handful of frosty nights and only one day I can remember with a single snow-flake (on my birthday, as it happened). 

Perhaps the invocation of the ‘blackthorn winter’ will survive as a metaphor, annually celebrating the blackthorn’s dense drifts of white blossom, even as we re-define winter itself to suit the changing meteorological facts.  But the phenomenon of snowy blossom appearing in warm March weather may presage the next impending crisis the world is facing – as well as creating a new proverbial reference to a ‘blackthorn spring’.

Jeremy Mynott
3 March 2026

I strode out from the house on one of my regular walks the other morning and after I’d gone a couple of hundred yards I suddenly realised I was naked.  Well, not completely of course, but when I went to raise my binoculars to look at a distant bird I discovered with a shock that I’d left them back at home.  They’ve been so constantly around my neck on walks since childhood that at first I felt I’d lost an additional organ of sight. I still had my five original senses, though, and I started exploring my immediate surroundings more closely with them instead.  There were two trees still in leaf, I noticed, a beech and an oak.  I picked some of their leaves to examine them more intimately. They had a crisp, dry papery feel and crackled pleasantly to the touch. I sniffed them – the beech leaves had a soft, earthy odour but the oak ones hinted at some deeper fragrance I couldn’t quite place.  I glanced around to see if I was being watched and warily nibbled a few.  I could now taste a tang of sharpness in the oak leaves and spat those out pretty sharply.  Don’t try this at home – I think it was probably the tannin and is meant to deter deer and other foragers.  Looked at closely, the beech leaves were particularly beautiful, a rich chestnut colour with their internal veins prominently exposed as they branched out from the mid-rib like little tree skeletons.   A perfect natural image of the vascular architecture.

The leaves were still strongly intact, however, and firmly attached to the parent trees. Why, I wondered, do oaks and beeches hold on to their leaves so long, often right up to next spring, when other deciduous trees shed them – in one of the defining manifestations of autumn (the North American ‘fall’)?  When I got back home and was restored to my books (and binoculars) I tried to investigate this and learned a new word describing the phenomenon, ‘marcescence’ (evidently new to spellcheckers, too).  The scientists have this technical term for it but it turns out they don’t really know why it occurs.  Some suggested explanations are: that it helps protect the growing buds from foragers like deer (and me); that it ensures the leaves will eventually fall close to the tree’s roots and so recycle its nutrients; that it deters predatory insects; or all of the above.  But none of these answers seem to explain why as a strategy marcescence is restricted just to oaks, beeches and a very few other trees like hornbeam.

New explorations for a new year.

Jeremy Mynott
January 2026

It’s been a bumper year for acorns. The ground under oak trees is strewn thick with these lovely oval nuts, some of them still enclosed in their little knobbly cups.  It’s been what they call a ‘mast year’, when the weather conditions in spring and summer offered just the right combination of sun, warmth and rain to pollinate the trees and fatten their fruits.  And acorns are the fruits of the oak.  The word is derived from the Old English ac (oak) and corn (their fruit).  I asked a fruit farmer recently what a fruit actually is and he came up with this interesting answer, ‘it’s a seed dispersal mechanism’. Oaks don’t produce acorns in this profusion every year, but in a mast year they create far more of them than any of their natural consumers can possibly eat on the spot – the technical name for this strategy is ‘predator satiation’ – and that encourages long-term planners like squirrels and jays to carry the acorns away and bury them in scattered locations from which they can later retrieve them for tasty winter snacks.  Inevitably they will forget where they hid a few of them, and so will have effectively planted and dispersed lots of new oak seedlings.  Clever Nature.

Acorns are very rich in tannins and are seriously harmful in their raw state to some other animals, including dogs, horses and humans.  If they are boiled or roasted, however, you can leach the tannins out and then they are said to make nutritious flour or even decaffeinated coffee.   In some human cultures, like those of certain native North American tribes, acorns were a staple item of diet when properly prepared in this way, so maybe we should experiment more (cautiously!). Pigs don’t need that detoxification process, however, and there was an ancient forest right called pannage, whereby you could let your pigs out into the woods to gorge themselves on acorns for an authorised period every autumn.  In fact, they still observe that practice in the New Forest in Hampshire and the permitted pannage season there this year is from 15 September to 28 November, in case you’re interested.

Oak trees themselves are one of the glories of our woodlands.  They support an incredible range of wildlife: some 2,300 other species depend on them in part for their food, shelter and living quarters. These include birds (woodpeckers), mammals (badgers, deer, wood mice), many lovely moths and butterflies (crimson underwings and purple hairstreaks), bees, hoverflies, beetles, fungi, lichen and mosses; and of these over 250 depend wholly on oaks.  No wonder the oak and the acorn are such powerful symbols of growth, abundance, fertility and life.

Jeremy Mynott
October 2025

I made several wonderful trips to the vast steppes in southern Russia some years ago when that was still possible.  Standing in the steppe there you can see gently waving grasslands stretching as far as the eye can see, and beyond your horizon there are further horizons of yet more.  There are grasslands on every continent except the Antarctica, under such names as the African savannah, South American pampas and the American plains as well as these Eurasian steppes.  Grass covers over half of the earth’s land surface and it was grass that enabled the first agricultural revolution some 10,000 years ago when humans exploited it as food for themselves in the form of grain and as fodder for their domesticated animals.  One reason grass is such a successful plant is that it grows from the base not the top, so if it is cropped or mown it can more easily regenerate than most other plants and will grow back up again.  The word ‘grass’ itself comes from an ancient Indo-European root meaning ‘to grow’.

Closer to home, there is grass all around you.  Or more exactly, grasses.  We think of grass as just one thing and we talk of ‘cutting the grass’ or ‘green as grass’; but in fact there are some 10,000 different species of grass worldwide, each with its own characteristics.  Here in Shingle Street there are at least a dozen different kinds growing right by the roadside.  They have some lovely names.  There’s cocksfoot, false oat grass, sheep’s fescue, meadow barley, sea couch, bent, meadow grass and the curiously-named Timothy.  This last is apparently so-called after an American farmer of that name who promoted its cultivation in the southern states in the early eighteenth century.  Feels to me like a name you might have called a guinea-pig rather than a kind of grass, but there you are.  

My favourite name of a local grass, however, is Yorkshire fog.  The scientific name is Holcus lanatus and that second term means ‘woolly’, referring to the grass’s soft, billowing look, which may also explain tits English name, conjuring up an image of smoke drifting from northern industrial chimneys.  It’s an abundant grass, tolerant of poor soils and wasteland – so much so that it is sometimes thought of as a weed.  That’s a cultural term, though, not a botanical one, and is surely misplaced in the case of such a beautiful plant, which is also an important part of our local ecology.   For Yorkshire fog is particularly attractive as a food plant to some scarce butterflies like the small skipper and the even rarer wall brown butterfly that bred here until recently.  Thank you, Yorkshire.

Jeremy Mynott
September 2025

I’ve just been watching the first butterfly of spring, a lovely yellow brimstone gliding across a sheltered spot in the garden.  These are the floatiest of butterflies, like a large leaf pirouetting in a breeze, and their rich buttery hue seems to accentuate their spring freshness. It’s even been suggested that their colour gave ‘butterflies’ their name. Anyway, the sight made me start wondering about possible connections between spring and the colour yellow.  We think of spring as the season of greening, but maybe spring makes some of its most important announcements in yellow.  After all, a lot of our early spring flowers are yellow, too.  The year starts with aconites, gleaming like little golden lanterns through the winter’s undergrowth.  We then pretty soon have a succession of primroses, celandines, daffodils, dandelions, coltsfoot and cowslips – all different shades of yellow.  Why would that be?  One theory is that their bright yellow colour attracts the early pollinators like bees, so these plants get a head start in the work of fertilisation.  Nice idea – simple, striking and plausible.  It’s the sort of pop scientific knowledge we all like to parade.  But hang on, does the logic work?  Aren’t there a lot of early flowers that are not yellow – snowdrops, many crocuses, scilla, wood anemone, and so on?  And equally, there are lots of yellow flowers that come later – sunflowers, chrysanthemum, corn marigold, tansy, ragwort, mullein and a whole tribe of humble vetches, trefoils, stonecrops and saxifrages.  Moreover, gorse displays at least some of its sweet-smelling yellow flowers all the year round – hence the wise saying that when the gorse flowers kissing is in fashion.  And anyway, don’t most insects have quite different perceptions of colour from ours, relying much more on the ultra-violet band in the wavelength, so they wouldn’t necessarily see the yellows we see?   

Collapse of hypothesis?  Not entirely, but it demonstrates that these things are quite complicated.  Another thought might be that several of these early yellow flowers like the celandine and buttercup are also very shiny, so maybe they are more reflective of such sunlight as there is early in the year and therefore more attractive to insects for that reason?  By contrast, some of the later flowering plants like ragwort have a much duller, matt finish. 

Could there be an unlikely clue to the puzzle from taxi-cab design? It’s said that when John Hertz founded his Yellow Cab Company in Chicago in 1907 he chose that colour because it made his taxis easier to spot at a distance and his customers found it attractive.  And now yellow cabs are everywhere in the world.  Nature knows best.

Jeremy Mynott
March 2025