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April 2022 April 2022
and fragrant flowers, usually blue-violet or
white. The sweet violet has a long history of
use. Apparently, the ancient Britons used it
for cosmetics, the ancient Greeks used it to
make perfume and the Romans to make
wine! There are some on the banks and
grass areas at Snow Hill.
The generally more common dog violet is
similarly low growing, it has bluish-purple
flower petals, heart-shaped leaves and is
unscented.
The Tale of the Robin and the Beetle
Tony Bates, who takes a lot of wildlife
photographs, says that a couple of
days ago he found an unusual beetle
that he did not recognise in his
conservatory. It was not moving much
so he set up to take a close-up
photograph of it. The door was open
and he had just taken the picture when
his sharp eyed ‘pet’ robin flew in and
ate the beetle! He sent the picture to a
naturalist friend who knows his beetles
(there are many of them) and he
identified it as Oedemora femoralis. Apparently this beetle is quite rare with few
recordings in Dorset, perhaps Dorset robins are partial to them.
Coppicing on Kite Hill
John Sweeney has been following the tradition of hazel coppicing on Kite Hill for
the past few years. You may have seen the results of his hard work near to the old
woodsman’s / shepherd’s hut by the main path through the wood.
Coppicing is the woodland management technique of repeatedly felling trees at
the base (or stool), and allowing them to regrow. This provides a sustainable
supply of timber. The practice can be dated back to the Stone Age by the
discovery in Somerset of Neolithic wooden track ways constructed entirely from
coppiced material. As well as producing a timber crop, coppicing offers wildlife
benefits, as greater amounts of light can reach the ground following cutting. This
allows a range of other species to grow there, especially wild flowers that would
be shaded out by a dense tree canopy. The coppiced material can have a
number of uses including for charcoal, fence posts, hurdles, thatching spars, bean
poles etc.
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the churchyard the buttercups will have a wonderful flowering year. Much of this
buttercup land is shared with the dandelions, which are impressive in their own
right.
Is it obvious that most of the flowers mentioned so far have yellow flowering heads
which is all they have in common. For example there is very little else in common
as the colour, for example how can you compare a celandine and a dandelion,
but why do the majority of early flowering plants have yellow heads?
Lets move on to a more complicated
number of plants that are found on the
roadside verges and hedges of our
countryside. I am going to cheat slightly and
use somebody else’s’ work. So we turn to a
book, “A Natural History of the Hedgerow” by
John Wright. He quotes the following,
concerning a sixty metre length of a
hedgerow, that he and a botanists friend,
investigated, where they found ninety-nine
species of plant. This included 4 ferns,14
grasses, rushes and sedges, 5 shrubs, 10 trees
and 66 other plants.
Then later in the book he writes about the
numerous lichens, mosses, liverworts, ferns
and fungi, that are always present in
hedgerow. Later still he mentions all the
animals, birds and insects and how all these
different species are inter related and
dependent on each other. We live in a
wonderful world and our own county of
Dorset has some of the most intriguing, beautiful, diverse and natural
environments to be found in the country.
We must remember other environments throughout the world and in particularly
those of Ukraine, where so many war torn environments and their human
inhabitants are in great peril. May we pray for all inhabitants there, who are
suffering from the effects of this warfare.
MAY GOD BLESS THEM ALL!
Ted Cox
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