BOTANY ON THE MALVERN HILLS
All information supplied by Keith Barnett & from his book"The Wild Flowers of the Malvern Hills"
Photographs by David Hollis ARPS and Keith Barnett
The wild flowers to look out for month by month
MAY
BLINKS Montia fontana (L.)
Blinks is so called because its tiny greenish-white flowers rarely open fully, fancifully as if they were reluctant to face the sun. It is a small (up to 20 cm high) rather fleshy and often reddish plant. It often grows in abundance, forming dense pale green moss-like patches beside springs and rivulets, all kinds of damp grassland including lawns, and sometimes dry open places. It may be found on bare places on the Malvern Hills and Castlemorton Common "A curious but not conspicuous plant" (Edwin Lees, The Botany of Malvern 1868)
CROSSWORT Cruciata laevipes Opiz
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John Gerard's The Herball, or Generall Historie of Plants (1597) described Crosswort as a 'low and base herbe, of a pale green colour, having many square, feeble rough stalks full of joints or knees, covered over with a soft downe'. It is hard to improve on this, except perhaps to add that it is a perennial found growing in grassy places and scrub, mostly calcareous, with tiny yellow honey-scented flowers densely clustered in the angles of the leaf and the stem. The flowers have an unusual structure, and it is only the outer (bisexual) flowers that produce seeds, whilst the (male) inner ones soon fall off. The egg-shaped leaves, in whorls of four around the stem, are also odd. Only two of the 'leaves' in each whorl are in fact true leaves: the other two, although looking the same, are actually leafy stipules lacking auxiliary flower buds. This species formerly had a reputation as a wound-herb and a cure for ruptures. It is present in small quantity on Castlemorton Common and near Swinyard Hill.
GROUND IVY Glechoma hederacea L.
Ground-ivy was formerly planted in cemeteries where its long, rooting runners creeping along the ground were ideal for covering graves, but in the wild it is a commonly encountered plant of moist hedges and woods. There are whorls of 3-6 small, two-lipped, bluish-purple (rarely pink) flowers. The long-stalked, kidney-shaped, softly hairy leaves are bitterly aromatic: from Anglo-Saxon times up to the Middle Ages and beyond these were used to clear and improve the flavour of beer, for which reason the plant was also known as Ale-hoof. Another use for the leaves was as an early veterinary medicine: if the owner of a cock that had been wounded in the eye during a cockfight chewed the leaves, and then spit into the damaged eye, it was believed that a rapid recovery would follow! Ground-ivy's name seems to have arisen from an ancient comparison with the true Ivy (Hedera helix), both are certainly very vigorous but are not related.
YELLOW CORYDALIS Pseudofumaria lutea (L.) Borkh
Yellow Corydalis is very commonly seen on the old walls of Malvern, a native of the limestone scree and rocks of the central and eastern Alps that since the early 19th century has become thoroughly naturalised in Britain in urban areas. It was first recorded in the wild in Britain in 1796. It is a branched perennial with yellow flowers and leaves that are green above and blue-green beneath. It is related to the native (and scarce) Climbing Corydalis (Ceratocapnos claviculata) with white flowers which grows on some of the bracken slopes of the Malvern Hills
2005 INDEX
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