We took a trip out in Bridget the Midget this week to start the wildflower quest with a visit to Anglesey Abbey; it’s a favourite but we hadn’t done the full woodland walk before. I’ve got a lot of happy memories of this place from trips with the children and it never disappoints. The cyclamen carpet was breathtaking and the silver birch were looking particularly ethereal too. Unsurprisingly for a a walk in early autumn to a place that promised none of my 60 flowers, I didn’t find a single one of them but we did have a gorgeous day full of colour and fresh air and chat – and coffee and cake 🙂
What I did discover was that there are an unreasonable number of small yellow flowering plants in September, none of which were ragwort or groundsel and most of which turned out to to also flower in the gym car park or my currently quite disastrous garden! So this has sparked something of a side quest to the side quest – two in fact! – a collection of ‘plants we found along the way’ and a ‘Oh my god, I absolutely need to be able to identify all the yellow things’ ID sheet. I think maybe I’d start a separate page for the ‘other plants that aren’t in my guides’ and come back to them later.
I’m not sure how I want to lay out these pages yet – I do mean to feature each ‘found’ plant with it’s Potato created image, but perhaps the walks that earned a defining image of their own deserve to be done differently – this particular walk will certainly be remembered for this gorgeous view; it looked and smelled wonderful. So while we didn’t find any of the 60 (I keep wanting to call them the ‘deadly 60’!), we did find both Wood Avens, with a Watership Down link, and Bristly Oxtongue which is not, I repeat not, Groundsel. And for an early autumn walk in a place not expected to show off any wildflowers, I still learned a few new names.
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