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).