Good time to learn more about wild flowers in my small Devon wood

The better weather and the longer days have been good for flora in the woods. We've been making daily checks on the Early Purple Orchids. They have now sprouted spikes that cover the flower stems but we'll have to wait a week or two for any flowers to emerge.

Primorsoe alongside Early Purple Orchid with spike

We had fun trying to identify a bushy little plant up the woods. It had leaves not very unlike the wood anenome but it threw up small flowers on a long stalk. On closer inspection what looked like a single flower from above was actually 5 flowers arranged on a cubical head in opposite pairs facing horizontally with the fifth facing upwards. A simple way of getting an ID would have been to post a pic up on the Wild Food and Hedgewitchery  Facebook Group where the reliable Marquis de Stowe and others provide more or less instant answers. However, and especially in these current times, the learning is the fun bit. We therefore went to the field guides for our own enlightenment.  In my experince, it's a good idea to have a number of diffrent field guides and reference books as not all of the many we have featured this plant. It turned out to be Moschatel - Adoxa moschatellina. It has a number of common names like 'the Townhall Clock' because of the arrangement of the flower heads as described above.

Good fun identifying this plant and learning about it. Once you can put a name to something  your awareness and appreciation of it changes and we now on our twice-daily walks through the woods notice them more and more.

Moschatel - looks like a single flower from above but has 5 flowers, four arranged like a townhall clock on a tower (see pic below).

Filling gaps in the beach tree line

The top edge of our small Devon wood is marked by a stone wall fashioned in the Devon style. It starts in the eastern corner, rising gently then steeply until it meets the high face of the old quarry. The wall and quarry top have old beech trees leaning precariously over and into our wood. They stand magnificent: great limbs reaching up and stretching out. Their twisted gnarled roots weave through the stonework and rockface, impossibly anchoring these huge structures to the ground. Those at the quarry top start with a 20' advantage over those at the beginning of the boundary wall. Add to this their own height of another 20' or so and to stand beneath is humbling. Some whole trees and individual limbs have inevitably fallen and lay moss-covered on the woodland floor. Stumps torn from the earth stand upended, half buried. As newcommers we don't know how long the fallen trees and limbs have lain there, perhaps many years as the dense wood of the beech does not easily succumb to decay despite the damp. Whether it was the tenuous hold the roots had in the stony ground, high winds, proximity to the edge or a combination of all that led to their demise, is hard to tell. However, an investigation reveals spalting caused by a fungus that weakens and eventually destoys the wood.

The beech-topped old quarry

The old stone wall unable to withstand the trees.

As we have been making the most of the wet dormant season planting our own saplings, we decided to relocate some of the self-set beech found scattered around the wood. We earmarked 4 small shallow-rooted specimens and they cleanly uprooted with little resistance. We planted them in one of the gaps in the wall described earlier. Alongside the giant mature beeches it's hard to believe these spindly specimens grown from a small beech nut can grow so large. Maybe just one will survive and grow to maturity. Alas, we will never know. 

Magnificent beech atoop the old quarry