THERE ARE still many wild flowers in bloom in the fields and lanes. Late blossomers include burnet saxifrage, which is the daintiest of all the white umbrella-like plants, with a thin but hairy stalk and clusters of tiny flowers. It can be easily be identified by the fact that at the top of the stalk the leaves are very small or completely absent, while at the base they are large and fern-like. Wild carrot, a member of the same family of flowers, has turned to seed almost everywhere along the grassy banks it favours, and on the top of each stalk there is what looks like a large mossy birds’ nest.
A common autumn flower, but one that is often overlooked in the rampant tangle of vegetation, is mugwort. It is a tall plant with a purple stem, but its numerous dark green leaves look dusty because of their woolly grey undersides, and its flowers, which are red and yellow but very small, are almost lost among the hairy grey bracts that enclose them. Less easily overlooked is autumn hawkbit, a small dandelion with bright yellow flowers that often grows in hundreds in open grassy spaces. The flowers are generally striped red beneath.
DJM