Category: Flora

Village Voices Nature Note: A Sudden Beauty

01 Jul 2020

I have to start with a confession. This month's 'Nature Note' comes not from Shingle Street but from the west of the county. We happened to be here when the music stopped in March and we thought it safer to stay put. But I've been walking out every day, trying to notice things just the same, and I've been making comparisons all the time with the succession of flowers and birds I know have been appearing on the coast too in this remarkable spring - remarkable both for its extraordinary weather and the worldwide pandemic (respectively the best and worst of their kind in my lifetime). A poignant conjunction that has highlighted for many people the beauty of the natural world we are fortunate enough to have enjoyed as a solace.

I came across one quite unexpected delight the other day. I was walking on a grassy footpath - in fact an early section of the same Suffolk Way that runs past our house in Shingle Street - when right in the middle of the track I saw a most striking plant. It had a shortish straight stalk with a rosette of leaves at the base and two more clasping the stalk higher up like a sheath. The flower blooming on top was a remarkable confection of sculpted blooms, looking for all the world like a bee. It was a bee orchid, not as rare as its exotic appearance would suggest, and surprising in its choice of quite banal settings, often railway sidings, spoil heaps and waste ground, anywhere there has disturbed chalky ground.

The Shingle Street ones, which re-appear most but not quite all years, thrive in a heap of 'foreign' soil imported to repair a sea-wall breach in the Great Flood of 1953.

This fantastical flower evolved to mimic a bee as a cunning device to persuade male bees to alight on the fake female and so pollinate the plant.

Jeremy Mynott

Grayling

29 July 2016

The first grayling of the year, rather later than usual – but the buddleia (one of its favourite foodplants) is about two weeks late. There's a distinct shortage of some butterflies this year – no small coppers so far and no wall (for which we are a special site). Maybe they will all emerge in August if we get some sunny weather.

Jeremy

Shingle Street flora survey 2015

Shingle Street is an exacting place for its flora, especially plants of the shingle, saltmarsh and ultra-arid concrete. They are all superbly adapted to their hard life, from plants with taproots that probe metres-deep into the shingle in search of water, to species daily submerged by the tides, and tiny, rare clovers flourishing in compacted soil that are grazed by rabbits right down to the ground. They are all specialists in their own way: finding them, photographing and recording them in 2015 helps create an important benchmark.
Laurie and Jonathan Forsyth
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The wild flowers of Shingle Street

Salty wind, sea and stones are what you get at Shingle Street, and lots of wild flowers. They are a hardy bunch of survivors, and superbly at home in the tough environment where land meets sea. Some live in the mud; others in shingle, grassland, on seawalls, in lagoons and some even manage to exist in the cracks in concrete. Summer at Shingle Street produces a palette of colours from seemingly impossible raw materials. Yellow, pink, white, red and deep blue: any gardener would be proud to have flowers as striking if they came from a garden centre, and a glance at the gardens of the cottages proves the point.
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Mullein

07 May 2015

One good thing that happened on Election Day, whatever else may befall, was walking around with a botanist friend who kept exclaiming about the wild flowers we have here. He identified several things that weren't on the systematic list we've been keeping, including a Hoary Cinquefoil and a Spring Vetch. He was also very taken with our Hoary Mulleins (the ones with a candelabra shape), which whatever their immediate origins are classified as a rare wild plant, found only in Suffolk and Norfolk and he urged us to treasure them.

Jeremy

Alex message 1

10 Mar 2015

We have a Mahonia just outside our five bar gate, a common hardy garden shrub with hollylike leaves and sprays of scented yellow flowers, it is humming, literally! I was attracted by the noise and found many honey bees and a couple of bumble bees. Certainly the Bumbles were there the other day because every time i go out i see them. So brave because it is still fairly chilly, but the flowers do put out a most wonderful smell and there isnt much else to attract at this time of year. Spring is here! Our bird feeder has at least fourteen gold finches, lots of starlings, sparrows, blackbirds, blue tits and there is a wren in the woodpile, a cock pheasant that visits regularly and a brace of partridges. Pigeons come, naturally, and a pair of collar doves. More later.

Alex Williams

Shingle Street Flowers

by Lydia Vulliamy.

Shingle Street is a magical place, right by the mouth of the River Ore. Typical shingle flora grow there in profusion. The great mounds of sea kale Crambe maritima predominate. The leaves die back in the winter; in spring the first shoots appear, very dark purple, crinkly and succulent. The plants fully grown are as big as shrubs, and their roots penetrate deep into the shingle.
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