I was lucky enough to have a properly wild week for the first full week of #30 Days Wild, with many opportunities to get outdoors and revel in the natural world. This was the first week of our two week ‘Genes and Diversity’ workshop for third year students, which meant half a day teaching them the basics of plant ID out by the Mountjoy pond at the start of the week, helping them to get to grips with the general key of Francis Rose’s The Wildflower Key. It’s good to be reminded how daunting identifying wildflowers can be to beginners, when they have no idea where to start. There are so many specialist words to get to grips with, not to mention the abbreviations. I always feel a little resentful if I have to start with the general key, taking it for granted that I can recognise most unknown plants to family level without much difficulty, so it’s a much less onerous process! All the students engaged well, though. It was good to see their confidence growing, even if some were more taken by the tiny grasshopper which landed on their book or the fluffy black Moorhen chicks on the pond. Our postgrad demonstrator, Dan, wryly pointed out it’s good to see these while we can, before the Heron spots them…

Whilst collecting buttercups in our park for the students to practice on, I was delighted to see lots of Cuckoo-flowers in the longer grass – definitely a welcome hangover from No Mow May. The other lovely surprise was the plant diversity around the Mountjoy pond – lots of species here are also benefitting from the reduced mowing regime. We had no difficulty collecting 30 or so wild species for DNA barcoding, including my first Eyebrights of the year and plenty of Northern Marsh-orchids. I spotted a couple of Marsh orchids in a front garden on my walk to work too so am feeling very jealous!

On an enforced walk to work, because of yet another bike puncture, I watched a Kestrel hovering above the sheep fields at High Shincliffe and wondered what it had spotted.  There have been Oystercatchers around this week too, calling plaintively, and on our two visits to Auckland Castle Park with students this week we saw and heard lots of birdlife including a pair of noisy Jays, a Green Woodpecker with its characteristic undulating flight and a flock of Long-tailed tits, sitting in the trees around our field site and gossiping about what we were up to.

The students were surveying the vegetation on and around the anthills which are a prominent feature of this lowland acid grassland, putting into practice their new ID skills.  It didn’t hurt that we had lovely weather to enjoy the site and most approached the task in a leisurely but thorough way. Soil in the anthills is even more acidic than the surrounding soil, often coming in at a pH of about 5.  Plants such as Heath Speedwell, Mouse-ear-hawkweed, Bird’s-foot Trefoil and Heath Bedstraw thrive in these conditions, especially with the grass kept in check by a range of grazers over the course of the year.   In the longer grass there is plenty of Bitter-vetch, it’s lovely crimson-veined flowers turning blue as they age.

As if that wasn’t enough botanical loveliness for one week, on Saturday I got to visit Waitby Greenriggs nature reserve near Kirkby Stephen in Cumbria, with friends for the first time.  The reserve covers a short section of the old Stainmore Railway and Eden Valley branch lines, where they converge, with a really diverse grassland flora on the sides of cuttings through the Carboniferous limestone which is never far from the surface in these parts.

The place is a mecca for botanists. There are more spikes of Fly orchid and Lesser Buttterfly-orchids in flower than I’ve seen anywhere before and the Bird’s-eye Primroses here make their Upper Teesdale cousins look decidely stunted. There is plenty of Salad Burnett amongst the buttercups and Ox-eye daisies and deep blue Milkwort where the grass is shorter.

Fly orchids are rare this far north in Britain, with the head of the Eden valley being their northerly limit, though the plants do like a limestone habitat.   The flower spikes are small and inconspicuous, until you get your eye in, and a drab brownish colour.  On closer inspection the flowers are as intriguing and deceptive as their Bee orchid relatives.  The flower lip is a deep, velvety brown with a brighter, bluish patch known as a speculum across the centre and two shiny ‘pseudoeyes’ just below the pollinia. The speculum is supposed to look like an insect’s wings and the very narrow upper petals like its antennae.  Personally I think the flowers look more like tiny people than flies, but their shape and texture, along with the pheromones they emit, serve to attract amorous male digger wasps. When the wasps attempt to mate with the flower they pick up the pollinia on their back or head and transfer them from one plant to another.  Only two of the 110 species of digger wasp in the UK, Argogorytes mystaceus and A. fargeii, can pollinate the flowers. This finely-honed pollination mechanism means pollen is less likely to be wasted by being transferred to the wrong species of flower but depends very much on the insects emerging before the plants flower – the kind of synchronicity which can be altered, for example, by climate change. UK populations of Early Spider Orchid, Ophrys sphegodes, which I’ve only seen around the Mediterranean, have struggled recently because of just such a mid-match between the emergence of males of the specific solitary mining bee which pollinates them and the appearance of the flowers.  At best, pollination of Fly orchids is a hit-or-miss affair, with less than one fifth of flowers usually pollinated and they are currently characterised as ‘Vulnerable’ in Britain, so it was doubly good to see such a good number of plants at Waitby Greenriggs.

Although it’s June, the cold, wet weather seems to have slowed down the appearance of the butterflies for which the reserve is equally famous so another visit might be in order when the weather finally warms up.

Most of the other flowers on the reserve are pollinated, of course, by generalists such as the lovely, iridescent beetles below. Of course they may also be making a tasty snack of the pollen…

In the allotment, I’m ashamed to say I finally resorted to some slug pellets when planting out my runner beans and it does seem to have helped them survive their first few days in the ground.  The weedy species in the allotment definitely have the upper hand at the moment but, much as things like the Perennial cornflowers are a nuisance to control, I couldn’t help but notice that they were hosting a continual stream of hungry bees as I worked.

In the garden the roses are glorious in both scent and smell. They, at least, are enjoying this cold, damp spring and summer.