Below a table of all the Native Plant Families I hope to write about in the coming future and links on all those families already covered. This will also be displayed on one of my pages, as it gets easily lost in between my posts!
The reasons for doing my blog is also best explained in these earlier posts:
Pseudofumaria lutea or Yellow Corydalis is an attractive wildflower in the Papaveraceae, Sub-family Fumarioideae. Here it even grows inside a wall (Picture by Mike Poulton)
The previous post of the Papaveraceae was all about the genus Papaver which has all the poppies we know and love, as well as some more genera in the Sub-family Papaveroideae.
This post is all about the Sub-family The Fumarioides!
F. parviflora or Fine-leaved Fumitory (archaeophyte)
F. purpurea or Purple Ramping-fumitory
F. reuteri or Martin’s Ramping-fumitory (neophyte)
F. vaillantii or Few-flowered Fumitory ((archaeophyte)
Colour coding for easy reading is blue for general interest. Green for various uses of the plant and pink background for medicinal use or toxic warning! FBBC added if the plant occurs in the Birmingham & Black Country area. Pictures credit by Matt Summers, Mike Poulton and Wikipedia Commons. Information from various websites, see links.
This is just an educational blog on Ethnobotanical uses of plants and we can not take any responsibility for any adverse effects! Always seek advice from a professional before using a plant medicinally.
Most of us love and/or hate the dandelion. Their en mass-flowering period is relatively short although it will carry on sending new flowers throughout the year. This post was my first plant about a member of the Asteraceae family back in July 2018!
It is probably the most useful native member so this is why it needs an entire post!
The following posts are all about the Asteraceae or Compositae as they used to be called:
The blossom of our Hawthorn is a beautiful site and is an important member of the Rose family.
The Rosaceae or Rose family is a large and important family containing trees, shrubs, sub-shrubs and herbs. Although occurring worldwide, the greatest numbers of species are being found in the North Temperate region. This post will tell more about the uses of our native members of the Rosaceae.
In Stace it is family 48, so relative early in the evolution of the Flowering plants. It has 36 genera but several genera + species are introduced garden plants and of course are easily spread by the seeds in their fruits which are attractive as a food for birds in particular, spreading the plants far and wide into natural areas.
As this blog is not about ornamental plants but is about our useful ‘weeds’ I will use the order of genera mentioned in ‘The Wild Flower Key. This has less of those ornamental genera and species as mentioned in Stace. It has also lumped all the trees and shrubs together followed by the herbs.
This week we’ll start with all the native trees and shrubs in the Rose family.
The whole idea of starting an Ethnobotanical garden came about after volunteering for 2 months at ‘Jardin Etnobotanico de Oaxaca’ in 2008!
Outside at EntranceInside the Entrance a detailed Plan!
So what is an Ethnobotanical garden? Hope to explain all about this on the next page and why I feel it is important to have one in this day and age of global warming and pandemics!
This is a one off blog about some weeds found in tropical countries. Most of those are actually exotics from other tropical climates which originally may have been introduced as an ornamental, just as in our own temperate world!
But you will be surprised that their are also temperate plants which can become weeds in the tropics!
My blog now got a big brother in the form of a short video each week about ten popular, or not so popular weeds!Watch the video below.
Cardoon and Sunflower are both non-native ornamental as well as economical food crops in the Asteraceae (both pictures by Matt Summers)
The post on Asteraceae went through the entire classification and might have been a little tedious for you?
However, I do hope you find it fascinating like myself how classification does make sense, especially in large families such as the Composites or Asteraceae.
It neatly groups similar looking plants together and when these plants ‘look similar’ they most likely also have the same properties and uses.
This week we start with the uses of this family.
Of course weeds or native plants as I like to call them, are ALWAYS useful in any habitat situation, soil and indeed for other living creatures apart from ourselves.
When we pull out the dandelion or ragwort we are taking away a valuable food source for multiples of creatures. Is it really worth that?
A very nice blog to read on edible ‘thistles’ can be found here: https://www.permaculture.co.uk/articles/thistles-a-highly-nutritious-and-medicinal-weed/
Here are links to all the different posts on Asteraceae:
With my recent research into the Bagnall Herbarium at Birmingham Museum I’ve been looking through many boxes of this large and diverse group of ‘blackberries’.
Bagnall seem to be fascinated by them and I discovered also there is a lot more to them than you first may think!
An example of Herbarium book with Japanese plants from Siebold’s collection in Leiden, 1825 By P. F. Siebold – Sieboldcollectie Naturalis, Public Domain and thanks to Wikipedia
Hello dear Readers!
The Tuesdays of the last few months I’ve been busy with research in Birmingham’s Museum Warehouses. I’ve been looking at the vast amount of dried specimen plants of one of the 6 or so Herbariums they have stored in there.
Why I wanted to research Bagnall’s Herbarium in particular was because of the many local native plants Bagnall himself collected as well as the many plants from Sutton Park. This is a national important nature reserve and SSSI. More about this later!
As I wrote in a recent blog, I would like to re edit most of the last year’s blogs as we now have the Gutenberg editing and this makes the blogs more beautiful and pleasant to read!
As in any science there are some difficult words and terms used of which I would like to explain some this week.
If not explained you will often find a link on the ‘difficult’ word which will guide you to an explanatory page.
