17th April 2009 (Friday)
It's been a horrible day, weather-wise, with persistent rain ranging from annoying light drizzle to soaking torrential downpours - hence the best I managed was an hour or so wandering around the seafront at Weston-super-Mare. Nevertheless, that was long enough to come across a couple of fascinating finds
A couple of days ago I posted a picture of an early-flowering thrift (
Armeria) I'd found at the base of a garden wall, thinking it could well be
Estoril Thrift (
Armeria pseudoarmeria). I now know better, because today I came across the real thing! The one I found the other day is clearly just a garden form of our native
Armeria maritima, specially bred to flower early; the true
A. pseudoarmeria is far more distinctive than it looks from online photos, with taller flowering stems & much broader leaves, rather resembling those of a sea-lavender rather than the linear ones of the native plant. Annoyingly I can't get the bloody upload thingy to work on the site so I'm not able, at the moment, to post a picture; there were about twenty or so plants naturalised on a sandy bank along Weston-super-Mare seafront, certainly not a species I was expecting to come across this spring
That wasn't the only unusual Mediterranean plant in the area, either; some rather distinctive tulips, pink with yellow centres, had me baffled at the time, but back home in the dry I soon identified them as
Tulipa bakeri; it's a native of Crete, doesn't seem to have an English name (I guess
Baker's Tulip would be as good as any??) and isn't listed on either the BSBI database nor in Clement & Foster's
Alien Plants of the British Isles!! Of these, I did manage to upload a couple of pictures; as you can see, the flowers are a few days past their best. Altogether there were at least ten plants, maybe more (the rain was belting down by now, so I didn't hang about
)
(
"Baker's Tulip", Tulipa bakeri; the hand in the second photo is mine, it was the only way I could hold the stem still... )
After admiring these, however, I made a quick dash back to the town's railway station to catch a train home; pausing only to add another unexpected Mediterranean plant to my list, where some planted
Giant Bugloss (
Echium pininana) had produced three or four healthy-looking seedlings, perhaps the basis of a naturalised population? Oh;
Common Lilac (
Syringa vulgaris) is well established along the railways of this part of the country and, just about coming into bloom, definitely brightens up your journey
(
Common Lilac, Syringa vulgaris)