Building site exotics

[Hornbeam]

Disturbed soil on building sites will often throw up dormant seeds of poppies and other annuals for short lived colourful displays. When topsoil is brought in from elsewhere for landscaping - anything can turn up!

Spotted these in today's rain where new flats have been built. They won't survive of course. Soon, the area will be sprayed and sown with seed for the inevitable low maintenance and boring lawn grass monoculture.

Phacelia tanacetifolia from western North America




Monkey Flower - Mimulus guttatus also from western North America, but quite common in wet places in the UK now.


Not sure if you want these added to the WAB Gallery???

[aeshna5]

Always fascinating to see what turns up on these disturbed sites-ruderal weeds, cornfield plants, garden refugees, bird-seed aliens, crop plants + others. Sadly too many disappear under bulldozers at their prime!

Phacelia is popular for fodder + as a green manure.

[AlanS]

Briefly donning my county recorder's hat (currently soggy), can I point out that we like to hear about these temporary sites? Often, the news gets to us too late.

The BSBI website (BSBI) has a list of recorders.

And, by the way, nice to see a correctly named Mimulus guttatus photograph. The majority, in books as well as on the internet, actually show a hybrid.

Alan Silverside

[Ipso Facto]

Originally Posted by Hornbeam

Spotted these in today's rain where new flats have been built. They won't survive of course. Soon, the area will be sprayed and sown with seed for the inevitable low maintenance and boring lawn grass monoculture.

At times like this, when the site is likely to be "bulldozed" or laid waste, is there not a case for transplanation of unusual specimens?

[Gill Catton]

Originally Posted by Ipso Facto

At times like this, when the site is likely to be "bulldozed" or laid waste, is there not a case for transplanation of unusual specimens?

not really unless its something nationally scarce, you never know there might be an environmental clerk of works you might take it upon themselves to collect seed or move plants. - I have done it myself, an awful lot of what was in my old garden was rescues from development sites (just teasel, dogwood, wild strawberry, interesting thistle seeds etc not anything overly exciting but pretty enough to me ) Though this is admittedly fairly unlikely.

The problem you see is that survey prior to development would have been of very different habitats and different species composition. Species of interest can be picked up on at this point and recommendations made for translocation. However, there is no way of knowing what might be in the seed bank that might appear when the soil is disturbed, so there's really no way of preparing a translocation at the stage at which they are planned - which is nearly always prior to construction....

I'm hoping that as things continue to change, environmental and ecological supervision of construction sites will become more normal and then more people like me will indeed be able to take it upon themselves to get a trowel out and move things of interest to a part of the site where they will be safe.

[Hornbeam]

The plants that suddenly appear on disturbed soil of building sites tend to be annuals. You can't transplant them successfully and so can only wait for them to seed. By which time they have often been destroyed

[Gill Catton]

Originally Posted by Hornbeam

The plants that suddenly appear on disturbed soil of building sites tend to be annuals. You can't transplant them successfully and so can only wait for them to seed. By which time they have often been destroyed

True, but you can move the soil in the immediate area that might contain more seeds. Not a definate solution, but better than nothing.

[snowdrop]

It may be just the fields and verges in my area, but where have all the daisies gone? There's plenty of buttercups, dandelions,dock, clover and nettles but only a few daisies dotted here and there.
I first noticed this when I took two of my great grandchildren into a nearby field to make daisy chains. We barely found enough to make a small bracelet. Since then I've scoured the landscape for these dainty little pleasures and to be honest I'm starting to worry how few there are.

[Hornbeam]

Some daisies just for you, Snowdrop.


Daisies can only grow where the grass is kept short as they cannot compete with taller plants. So lawns are ideal when they are regularly mown. Unfortunately, too many gardeners and park managers use chemical weedkillers and fertilisers - you know the adverts that tell you to "weed and feed" in one labour saving application The result is that the weedkiller kills the daisies and the fertiliser feeds the grass and the result is yet another boring patch of uniform green grass that might just as well be made of plastic.

[Hornbeam]

This is the same building site where I found the phacelias and monkey flowers. From bare scraped clay to this in just a few weeks! The new flats are on the site of an old gasworks and alongside the Stort canal.


There are opium and red poppies, red clover, oxe-eye daisies, medicks, weld or mignonette and lots more


But the residents will be moving in soon and the estate agents will want it tidy. So all this beauty will be destroyed and turf layed like this on the next site along...


Is that what people really want? And still the nostalgia for "Edwardian Country Diary" books, tea towels and gifts sell well. People seem to prefer the fantasy to the reality. Are they bonkers or am I?