More Early Spring Wildflowers

Yet again I'm doing a big catch up post. I just can't seem to get organized and have let all my photos build up again. Here's a selection from a few recent outings, a couple in Purbeck and another in Oxfordshire and Berkshire. In Purbeck we were looking for some fairly common but pretty small and inconspicuous flowers and I learned not to lie on the ground using a hand lens at the side of the road. This can result in cars stopping, thinking you have been knocked down...Oops! In Oxfordshire we visited the Warburg Reserve to look for Mezereon and in Berkshire the River Loddon to see the Loddon Lily or Summer Snowflake.

Common Whitlowgrass - Erophila verna

Common Whitlowgrass with

Mossy Stonecrop - Crassula tillaea

Sea Mouse-ear - Cerastium diffusum

Little Mouse-ear - Cerastium semidecandrum

This is Little Mouse-ear and Lesser Chickweed you can see how small these flowers are by comparing them with the size of the sand grains. Lesser Chickweed is particularly inconspicuous as it has petal-less flowers.

Lesser Chickweed - Stellaria pallida

Hidcote Blue Comfrey  - Symphytum × hidcotense

Musk Storksbill -  Erodium moschatum 

Rustyback Fern - Asplenium ceterach

It was great to see an early flowering sallow with no less than six Red Admirals nectaring on it.

 

 

Few-flowered Garlic - Allium paradoxum

Summer Snowflake also known as Loddon Lily as it grows along the banks of the River Loddon in Berkshire and elsewhere in the Thames Valley. It is a rare native and can be told apart from the garden variety which is a common escapee by its minutely toothed flower stalks.

Toothed flower stalk.

Summer Snowflake - Leucojum aestivum

 Mezereon at the Warburg Reserve in Oxfordshire. 

This plant seems to be getting rarer in the UK as it seems to have disappeared from many of its recorded sites. It can sometimes be seen as a garden escape but the plants here are native.

Mezereon - Daphne mezereum