Buttercups and other things

[watervole]

Today was a good day. I felt a bit under the weather in the morning, but went out with Richard to the garden show where we were working. We didn't have an ideal pitch, but the day turned nice and sunny and it was a pleasant setting with lawns and trees. We recruited enough new members for the Wildlife Trusts to make the trip worth it (not spectacular, but not bad. I don't mind 'not bad' on a sunny day in a nice place)

We decided to go back via Fontmell Down (where Richard took that recent photo of me). My Achilles tendon was playing up a bit as a result of standing most of the day, but the walk on the down seemed to help a little. The view there is wonderful. You feel that the sky goes on forever and there's a wonderful sense of open space. There are also buttercups. Lots and lots of them, giving a golden tinge to the hillside.

I used to think all buttercups were, well, buttercups. Recently however, I've been trying my flower identification skills with the aid of a book. Identifying the first flower is an absolute pain as you wade through 'flower jargon' of sepals and petals and 'bulbous base' and 'pinnate leaves'. However, you eventually get to the stage (if you keep going back to the same flowers often enough in a field of mixed buttercups), where you can casually tilt the flower back, take a casual glance at the leaves and say 'meadow buttercup'. I'm upto four of them now. I can do meadow buttercup, corn buttercup, bulbous buttercup and creeping buttercup. I'm even starting to be able to make a guess from a distance (at least in the case of meadow buttercups) and get it right most of the time.

I'll nick a birdwatching term and say that flowers also have 'jizz'. In the case of the meadow buttercup, it's something about the height and the way the stem branches.

There's still a couple of varieties of buttercup that I haven't seen yet...

Comments

[temeres.livejournal.com]

Flowers do indeed have jizz. Flower families especially. It's not too hard to pin a leaf to some families even when there aren't any flowers.

I see you haven't had Goldilocks Buttercup yet. I remember my first. I was slogging up a steep hill on the North Downs when I spotted a yellow flower beside the road. So I stopped, got the book out, waded through all the ID criteria and decided it was a Goldilocks. And since I was young and foolish back then (I am no longer young), I had this golden rule of never walking up a hill. So I got back on the bike, struggled to pick up the slightest modicum of speed, puffed and panted all the way up to the top to find ... two great vergefuls of Goldilocks Buttercup.

I was out in Challock Forest today and made it a flower bash rather than a bird bash. Best find of the day was Bog Stitchwort, which is actually rather common but it's tiny and inconspicuous which makes it really cool because most people would never even notice it.

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

A few buttercups have just appeared in my garden. I was so excited to see something growing out of the grass that wasn't a dandelion.

[reapermum.livejournal.com]

So far I can do creeping buttercup (a common weed in our veg patch) and the others (in the lawn)