Know the difference between cow parsley and fool's parsley? Jane Powers on how to identify wild plants and flowers.
Nature, as you may have noticed, is a very good gardener - always suiting the plant to place. Without fail, she ensures that the soil and growing conditions are just right for each plant; she clothes windswept, acid hillsides with hard-foliaged heather and gorse; she pops water-retaining, round-leaved pennywort into difficult, rocky crevices; and she puts salt-resistant sea campion and seakale on the seashore.
But unlike some gardeners, she doesn't stick labels into the ground next to her plants - which means that identifying them can be a bit of a struggle. (And if any reader is wondering why you would want to identify them, the answer is simple: because they're there.)
Of course, knowing a plant's name is only the half of it. The sleuthing process itself is valuable (and even fun), teaching you to look closely at plants and their habitats, and to associate related species with each other. The shape of a stem, the arrangement of petals, the exact hairiness of a leaf: all must be considered by the plant detective before the answer to the riddle - the species ID - is revealed.
Anyway, I don't know why I feel compelled to defend my interest in native plants now. Twenty years ago, when I was in my 20s, it was an odd thing for a young one to go off botanising on her bicycle, but nowadays, wild flowers are very much in vogue.
Proof of this is that at Chelsea Flower Show - the great, glitzy barometer of garden fashion - native species have been holding their heads high in recent years. At last May's London show Kate Frey's bright sea of Californian wild flowers in the Fetzer Vineyard garden was a beautiful sight. Irishwoman Elma Fenton, meanwhile, made good use of our own native flora, including the distinctive, tatter-petalled ragged robin - a plant that featured in several other display gardens.
Growing wild flowers, conserving them, learning their lore, and yes, even identifying them in their native habitats are all ways of affirming our caring stewardship of Planet Earth. Yet, to be honest, people are now more divorced from the natural world than ever - and that goes for gardeners as well. How many, I wonder, can tell the difference between a bugle and a bugloss, or a cuckoo flower and a cuckoopint? Or fool's parsley and cow parsley?
Actually, I stumped myself on that last one, as the white-flowered umbellifers - of which there are numerous native species - tend to merge into an indistinguishable and frothy mass of cream-stippled parasols in my brain.
But a new book, Wild Flowers of Britain and Ireland, written by Rae Spencer-Jones and with photographs by Sarah Cuttle, has pointed out the difference between the fool's and the cow parsleys. The first (Aethusa cynapium) flowers later in the year, is daintier than the second (Anthriscus sylvestris), and - most distinctively - has threadlike green bracts that hang down from the flowers.
It is well-named, because you'd be a fool to eat it, says Spencer-Jones, for it contains toxic alkaloids that are fatal if you consume enough. The Apiaceae family, of which it is a member, can be a fairly hazardous lot: among its villains are hemlock (favoured by Macbeth's witches), hemlock water dropwort (extremely poisonous), giant hogweed, (it exudes skin-blistering chemicals), and ground elder, the near-ineradicable scourge of gardeners.
This large-format book makes an attractive guide for the novice wild flower hunter, as it is arranged by flower colour, has hundreds of photos, and is larded with interesting plant history and folklore. For those who want to grow native species, there is cultural information supplied with each entry (where appropriate), and a separate chapter on gardening with wild flowers.
My own first wild-flower manual has served me well for more than 20 years, and I find it hard to adapt to any other. The Concise British Flora in Colour (it includes Ireland), is the culmination of a lifetime of botanising by the Rev W Keble Martin. He made his first drawings for it in 1899, and published it in 1965, with illustrations of 1,486 species and descriptions of another 1,000 or so. All the plants are arranged by family. It was this book that taught me more about plant relationships than any other. The British vicar's book is long out of print, but Amazon (www.amazon.co.uk) may be able to will sell you a second-hand copy.
I'm in good company apparently. Michael Viney, who writes this paper's Another Life column (and is Mother Nature's Irish oracle, as far as I'm concerned) says that Keble Martin was his first wild-flower book too.
He also recommends, among other guides, the Interactive Flora of the British Isles, a DVD that you slip into your computer (either Mac or Windows). Some 3,500 species - native, naturalised and field crops - are photographed and described, and there is a searchable map system for local distribution. In other words, you can click on any 10km patch of this country and come up with its floral inhabitants, or you can choose any species and find its range - which sounds like hours and hours of fun in front of the computer.
Let's not forget, though, that the best way to appreciate Nature's excellent garden is to get out there and marvel at it.
•
Wild Flowers of Britain and Ireland
by Rae Spencer-Jones and Sarah Cuttle (Kyle Cathie, £25).
Interactive Flora of the British Isles - a digital encyclopedia
(published by ETI Bioinformatics, available from www.etiis.org, £32.95 including postage)
IRISH WILD FLOWERS ON THE WEB
National Botanic Gardens: www.botanicgardens.ie.
Ulster Museum, Flora of Northern Ireland: www.habitas.org.uk/flora.
Design by Nature (seed sales and advice for growing wild flowers): www.allgowild.com.