The series of warm, dry Septembers we have enjoyed lately ended this year with thunderous deluges lasting for days. If autumn has come early this year, with blackberries almost over by September, and fully ripe sloes in the hedgerows, there are still a few late wild flowers. On Spring Hill patches of bright blue reveal the Devil’s-bit Scabious, which has little pom-pom heads, known locally as ‘blue bobs’. The name refers to its root, which is squared off at the end as though something has nipped it. According to the herbals of yesteryear, Devil’s-bit could cure fever, poison, freckles, dandruff, swellings, worms, and the plague, as well as the bites of serpents. A useful plant then, though today we know it best as the foodplant of the Marsh Fritillary butterfly.
In Hen’s Wood we found another late flower called Naked Ladies, otherwise known as Meadow Saffron. It is a Colchicum, bright pink and resembling a crocus, but flowering without any leaves, hence ‘naked’. The leaves appear separately in the spring. Meadow Saffron is, unfortunately, a misleading name nowadays for the plant is poisonous to cattle and has been evicted from most meadows. You probably wouldn’t want to eat its saffron (the plant’s orange stamens) either!
It has been a rotten year for butterflies, but in August and September at least one species had a late burst: the humble Small White. Some of them might have been migrants, even though it is hard to imagine this little fluttering butterfly crossing the high seas. Their progeny will emerge as butterflies in the spring, but for some unknown reason the spring brood is always much smaller than the summer one. In fact, I can’t recall seeing a single Small White last spring!
There have been some unusual cover-crops in the fields around the village this year, but one of the oddest is canary grass, whose bobble heads make a subdued but lovely clacking noise in the wind. In my cycle ride around the parish there sometimes seem to be more cover crops than actual crops! But they are certainly an opportunity for the small and harmless ‘weeds’ to flourish around the edges, and they in turn are food for partridges, buntings, and finches.
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