Everyone knows the white foam of cow parsley or ‘keck’ that borders the lanes in May. But there are many similar flowers which are less familiar yet, almost as common. Fortunately, they flower at different times which helps to tell them apart. In June, while cow parsley is going over, a new, prettier one with pure white ‘umbels’ (the name given to these flat-topped composite flowers) and grey stems is chervil, also called rough chervil from the short, stiff hairs on its stems. Come July, that is replaced in turn, by the daintiest of them, hedge parsley, with lacy flowers and delicate parsley-like leaves. Then, in August, on some lanes with high banks, the common one is burnet saxifrage, shorter, with more slender stem leaves.
In the water, however, there are more umbellifers which flower late in the year. One is fool’s watercress. What looks like ordinary watercress earlier in the year, suddenly sprouts little, stemless, umbel heads. One difference is that it smells like carrot, not cress. Another is lesser water-parsnip, a signature plant of chalkstreams, which has pinnate (ladder-shaped) leaves, and smells, as its name implies, like parsnip. Meanwhile, on field borders and downs you can find wild carrot, flat-topped and bristly with long bracts, and guess what that smells like! It’s a reminder that carrots, parsnips, parsley, and many other vegetables too, are all cultivated umbellifers. It’s a very tasty family! All these late-summer plants are flowering well this year. One with fluffy, pinkish heads, which looks like an umbellifer but isn’t, is hemp agrimony. A large, self-sown clump of it at the bottom of my garden grew up to seven feet high this year, and by early August was a mass of blossom with a heavy, face-cream scent.
Where have all the insects gone? Fortunately, numbers of butterflies and hoverflies have picked up a bit by late summer, perhaps assisted by migration. The most blindingly colourful ‘butterfly’ of them all is actually a moth – the Jersey tiger-moth. It, at least, has enjoyed a good year. First found in Jersey more than a century ago, it colonised the Isle of Wight, then the south coast, then London, and now Ramsbury! And soon the ivy will be swarming with ivy bees, another recent coloniser. Climate change is producing winners as well as losers.
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