Lily's Blog

A post by Tom Doorley got me thinking as I gaze out at the field beside our house. This field has been sold as a site on which a house will be built shortly. This afternoon I will take out my camera and see how many wild flowers I can see and try to name in that field.

One end of the field is a mass of buttercups but not the other. The only real difference between the two ends is that the ‘buttercup’ end is much wetter. Sure as ‘eggs are eggs’, when I look up wikipedia
Ranunculus is a large genus of about 400 species of plants …. It includes the buttercups, … The name Ranunculus is Latin for “little frog … This probably refers to many species being found near water, like frogs.

Isn’t the expanse of yellow just so cheerful!

I am armed with Usborne Spotter’s Guides ‘Country Walks’, 1985 edition, bought for young Collisons, cost 2.50 sterling!, all 64 pages. Pages 23 to 39 deal with wild flowers. I have other books of wild flowers but this is the most useful. The flowers are laid out by colour for children. Very useful for non-children also!

Because this was a grazed field up to recently, grass is still predominant. Years ago, when I was in secondary school and college, I had a summer job in Lyons Estate, which then was a research station for UCD Dept of Agriculture. It was a great summer job because a lot of time was spent in the outdoors. I was working as an assistant in the grassland section. My memory of that time is the variety of grasses. Timothy and Cocksfoot are ones I can recall.

Nettles, haven’t we all been stung by these many times?

Thistle though not in bloom

We referred to this as ‘Devil’s Porridge’. ‘The book’ calls it Cow Parsley.

Common Speedwell

When I had finished this, I went for a walk with the dogs. The one amazing difference was the variety of wild flowers I saw within ten minutes of home in the hedgerows, lots of different wild flowers, much more than in the field. I’ll do a post on these next.

The lack of diversity in the field next door is explained by Tom Doorley in his piece,
I mentioned, a while back, that we have let our fields struggle on without the aid of artificial fertilisers for several years. And that the resulting drop in fertility, keeping the grasses in check, has allowed a lot of wild flowers to flourish. I know that this is a luxury which few farmers can afford but I would like to think that, in every few square miles of the Irish countryside, we can let a couple of acres go fallow and allow the endemic flora to flourish.

So it seems that the field next door just needs to be given more time!

Later in the piece he comments,
This year, what has struck me most, is the buttercup crop. There are fields around here … which are veritable carpets of yellow. I just hope that it means a good summer.
I sincerely hope he is right and that that is what all those buttercups mean!

More weather like this weekend, yippee!