Listen to Mike’s Costing the Earth episode, Britain’s Changing Flowers
AT THE RISK of stating the obvious, it has been a diffcult couple of years. Very few of us have remained unaffected by the consequences of Covid-19; many people have lost loved ones or livelihoods.
Certainly, for most of 2020, my normal day-job of filming British wildlife for The One Show all but disappeared, and my daily wild fix became limited to short walks close to home.
Initially, with my wings clipped, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was missing out, but the simple act of taking my foot off the accelerator meant that I suddenly had time to appreciate the botanical wonders just beyond my doorstep. Lockdown, as it happened, came with the silver lining of reigniting my long-buried passion for plants, turning what was the worst of times into some of the very best of times.
In those early days of confinement, as I paused to identify and observe the forget-me-nots and violets I’d been blithely walking past for years, I was hit with a preposterous notion. Could I attempt to see 1,000 wild plants in just 12 months? Once the idea had taken root, I couldn’t stop it from growing. And so it was that 2021 became my big botanical year.
Keen to start with a bang, I kicked off my quest by joining the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland’s New Year– a concept that, thanks to climate change, is not as daft as it once might have sounded. I planned a route between my home village of Chew Stoke, south of Bristol, and neighbouring Chew Magna, taking in a small wood and farmland along the way. Venturing out on that cold day, accompanied by my wife, son and dog, it took less than a minute before I logged my very first specimen: groundsel. Sprouting from a crack between the pavement and a neighbour’s garden wall, I could instantly appreciate why its name is derived from the Old English word for ‘ground swallower’. A little further up, peppering the base of a beech hedge along a road verge, was an early-flowering patch of lesser celandine – William Wordsworth’s favourite bloom and one he wrote a poem about – and the woodland floor specialist dog’s mercury. I was up and running.
