This website mentions over 20 most troublesome weeds, upon which I will hope to do a write up in the coming weeks. As my partner is going through 1000’s of pictures taken by him in the last 10 years, I will occasionally stray to another weed/native plant which I think is worth you knowing about!
Probably the most common Crane’s-bill is Herb Robert or Geranium robertianum
This week another pretty and mostly common native ‘weed’ which can also be very useful! It easily could have been called the ‘Geranium’ family as the Geranium is its largest member and has got a fruit suggesting a crane’s bill.
But the genus Erodium, has also several native species on the B.I. and has a fruit similar to a stork’s bill.
So what is the difference in those bird bills to give the Geraniums their name?
Found this information from Bird expert Quentin Kalis: The easiest way is to look at the bill; storks have large heavy bills and cranes have short bills. Herons have intermediate bills between the two, and you can see pictures in the link here.
Pictures are by Matt Summers unless different stated. The coloured background indicates use. Green for Wildlife, Ornamental, Edible and other uses. Pink for Medicinal or if the plant is poisonous or troublesome. Blue background for interesting information although I do hope you find it all worthwhile to read!
This week I like to introduce the uses about the Mignonette (or Resedaceae) family here on the British Isles with only 5 species mentioned in Stace, whereby just 2 are native and 3 are introduced species. I like to introduce their uses
I got inspired to write this post as I noticed the Weld plant on a boatyard we visited last week. I love the rosettes of wrinkly leaves and the tall spikes of small flowers.
Another mignonette, not native, called the Garden Mignonette or Reseda odorata is well worth growing due to its lovely scent! I have been growing it in hanging baskets this last season on our allotment for this reason. It is supposed to be annual although it survived last year’s winter!
All the information found is again from various Floras and websites and the links for those are provided. Have utilized the info in our very own Flora of Birmingham and the Black Country this time which is produced by Ecorecord. Pictures by Matt Summers unless stated otherwise.
Large Lime along busy road in Walsall (picture by M. Summers)
Pollarded Lime In Dudley (picture by M. Poulton)
Lime trees are versatile in use and stature in towns and countrysite!
The Lime trees are recognisable large trees often planted along roads and in parks. They often get pruned very hard, a process called: pollarding, which may happen in restricted areas such as shown in the picture above. Fortunately the trees in Walsall are not pruned so are extremely scented when in flower and very useful for honeybees!
They have heart-shaped leaves, fragrant flowers in summer and later the round, pea-size fruit are attached to the persistent papery leaf called a bracteole which ‘sails’ down to the ground eventually and possibly form a new tree if it finds some suitable soil!
Malva sylvestris or Common Mallow growing as a pretty weed (by Mike Poulton)
I was inspired to write up about the Mallows this week as I have many seedlings of the Common Mallow below a large mother plant on my allotment and I noticed that my opposite neighbour also had some. When I spoke to her she was just about to dig some large specimen up and told me she had several all over her allotment too. So this lovely, innocent looking plant can be a little invasive!
The Malvaceae includes the easy recognisable, pink flowered Mallows as well as our Lime trees. This seems very unlikely as they do not resemble each other in the slightest and therefore they have often been separated into the Tiliaceae as for example in the Wild Flower Key by F. Rose. However according to Stace the molecular evidence shows that genus Tilia should be united in the Mallow family. As there are too many Mallows to write about I will cover the Limes in a next post!
Most information is again from various websites or books and floras for which are provided links throughout the text for some more information. If you are very interested in this family it is worth getting the Mallow notebook through the fabulous Eatweeds.co.uk. It has a lot more descriptions about the individual Mallows as well as good pictures for identification.
The Plumbaginaceae is an attractive family with ca 30 genera world wide although on the British Isles we only got 2 genera: Armeria and Limonium.
Armeria in wintertime is an attractive site!
We start with Armeria maritimaor Thriftwhich is the only native species growing along our coasts. It is a common sight in British salt marshes too, where it flowers April to October.
Armeria maritima has a great copper-tolerance, and is able to grow in soils with copper concentrations of up to 6400 mg/kg. One mechanism proposed is that not much copper is transported up the shoot of the plant, and is excreted from decaying leaves.
The last 2 posts were about the native members of the Caprifoliaceae and members which had moved into the Adoxacea in the last edition of Stace.This post will talk about all the plants I missed out on in the earlier blogs.
The Adoxaceae is a small family consisting of five genera and about 150–200 species.
In older classifications, this entire family was part of Caprifoliaceae or the honeysuckle family. Adoxa (moschatel) was the first plant to be moved to this new group. Much later, the genera Sambucus (Elders) and Viburnum were added after careful morphological analysis and biochemical tests by the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group.
It used to be a member of the Caprifoliaceae but now it belongs in the Adoxacea together with Viburnum and Adoxa with the most modern thinking in Plant Taxonomy.
I had done a post back in 2018, which was all about the virtues of our Common Elder.
As there is a lot of information available about this plant on various websites I will just list most of the uses in a very edited form and you can find links to the various websites available. I like to specially mention the Eatweeds website by Robin Harford giving much interesting information about Elder and many other so called weeds!
