There are so many weird and wonderful hobbies in the world of wildlife, and in the first few months of my traineeship I wanted to try everything. Joining the Trust immersed me in what felt like an exciting hub of ecological knowledge and practice, and it seemed that every day I'd come home with a new calling in life after being inspired by someone highly skilled in a niche field. Be it with birds, bats, bugs or butterflies, I took the advice of my colleagues and became a ‘sponge’ to it all, soaking up as much knowledge and experience as my brain could handle. While I have gained a lot of valuable hobbies from doing so, there is one particular interest that has really hit home. Luckily for me, it does not revolve around something that will fly away before you have time to focus your binoculars, or scurry into the undergrowth before you can discern exactly how many legs and wings and body segments it has. This thing will quietly and contently sit in one spot for weeks on end, taking in the sun and waiting for you to find it. I am talking of course, about the flower.

My interest in flowers started when I was enrolled on the Identiplant course as part of my traineeship. Identiplant is a programme that was adopted by the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland (BSBI) in 2022 and intends to introduce the key skills of botany to beginner botanists. The course comprises 15 units, the first three of which familiarise the learner with the correct botanical terminology and how to use an identification key. The following 12 units all centre around one plant family each and comprise an information sheet and a question sheet. For each of these units, you are tasked with finding and examining certain flowers that belong to the family in order to fill out the question sheet and complete the unit. Whilst this may sound daunting, you are supported throughout the course by your own personal Identiplant tutor, who conveniently happens to be an expert botanist in your local area.

So off I went, armed with my 10x hand lens and a copy of Rose’s ‘The Wildflower Key’ (little did I know, this would soon become my most treasured book), on my inaugural flower hunt. The first flowers I was tasked with finding belonged to the cabbage family (Brassicaceae). Now that I have improved my botany skills and hope I have redeemed myself, I don’t mind admitting that the concept of a ‘cabbage family’ originally made me envisage an array of cabbage-shaped flowerheads of different sizes and colours. Nevertheless, with the help of my neighbour (who is aptly named Rosie) I quickly found the first flower on my list: Shepherd’s-purse (Capsella bursa-pastoris). Funnily enough, whilst I was partly surprised to find it was not an actual cabbage, it was growing on the inside of my neighbour’s polytunnel. Something I have often found satisfying about botany is how intuitively named the flowers can be. Sure enough, a diagnostic feature of Shepherd’s-purse is its little heart shaped seed pods, which, with only a little imagination, resemble a purse. Next to be found was wavy bittercress (Cardamine flexuousa) which has a prominent wave to its stem.

I found it difficult at first to match the complex descriptions of The Wildflower Key to the correct flower, but with a bit of practise in Units 5 and 6 I found myself becoming more accustomed to the terminology and my confidence grew. I soon regarded the course as some kind of ecological scavenger hunt, enjoying the thrill of finding a plant on my list after sometimes days of searching. I found it fascinating to look at the minute details of plants which I would have previously walked past. For example, Unit 7 (the campion family: Caryophyllaceae) made me notice the single line of tiny hairs that run down the stem of Common Chickweed (Stellaria media) distinguishing it from the otherwise almost identical Three-nerved Sandwort (Moehringia trinervia). Similarly, Unit 9 brought to my attention the tiny green tendrils which a lot of members of the pea family (Fabaceae) use to grip on to their taller knapweed neighbours. At the beginning of the course, I reckon I would struggle to name more than 25 wildflowers. Today, I have over 165 flower species logged on my mobile identification app, have more than 350 wildflower photos in my phone’s gallery, and could confidently tell you the diagnostic features of 14 plant families. I am still only scratching the surface of the botanical world, but I think I have made a good start. 

As well as being just generally interesting, wildflowers are an important asset to UK wildlife. A lot of wildflowers act as indictors of such habitat characteristics as: soil type, nutrient levels, and soil moisture.  The mere presence of certain plant communities can therefore tell you a lot about the habitat’s environmental condition, without the need to run expensive or lengthy tests. Furthermore, a central principal of conservation is that biodiversity supports biodiversity, and as such it follows that habitats rich in botanical diversity are hugely important for an abundance of other ecological communities. I’m sure the word ‘pollinators’ will by now have popped into your head. Take common bird’s-foot-trefoil (Lotus corniculatus) a widespread wildflower found in an abundance of habitats and sure to have been seen by most, whether they could name it or not. This one wildflower can support more than 160 invertebrate species, many of which are Priority Species under the UK Post-2010 Biodiversity framework and many of which are the pollinators we need for invaluable ecosystem service provisioning. Now take a meadow, full not just of bird’s-foot-trefoil, but more than 100 wildflower species, and try to imagine the vast biodiversity that it could support.

Alarmingly, more than 97% of UK wildflower meadows have been lost since the 1930s. What we have left of this precious habitat needs to be conserved, and luckily there are various methods of doing so. It is currently meadow cutting season for Wildlife Trusts across the UK and while that means our volunteers may be being berated by their families for traipsing little trails of hay into the house, it also means we are taking the actions necessary to preserve our wildflower meadows. Cutting the meadows after the flowers have had a chance to drop their seed allows us to remove vegetation before it gets the chance to return nutrients to the soil through decay. This in turn prevents the more robust species like scrub and coarse grasses from dominating the habitat, allowing the wildflowers to flourish. Durham Wildlife Trust is lucky enough to care for many reserves containing wildflower meadows, including Addison and Hedgefield, Hawthorn Dene, Lamesley Pastures, Shibdon Pond and Meadow, Westwood Meadow, Hannah’s Meadow, Chopwell Meadows, Bishop Middleham Quarry, The Whinnies, Tudhoe Mill Woods and Rainton Meadows, to name a few. If you would like to see a wildflower meadow at the peak of its beauty, I’d suggest you get there before the cuts, when you can still see the brown and orange flashes of a meadow brown between the buttercups, or hear the high-pitched buzzing of a carder bee.

Of course, you need not visit a wildflower meadow to find wildflowers. Up until last week, I had been searching for a specimen of Oxford ragwort (Senecio squalidus). It was the last flower I had to find for my Identiplant course, and it is easy to know when you have found Oxford ragwort, for it has little black spots under the flowerhead (black-tipped involucre bracts, if you will). As such, while going about my work on our reserves, I made sure to check underneath the flowerheads in every ragwort patch I came across. All of this was to no avail, of course, and it is unsurprising seeing as Oxford ragwort likes stony areas such as railways and roads. My luck changed when I found myself staring at one single ragwort plant that I happened to notice whilst getting something out from the boot of my car. I was in a random carpark in central Manchester. I could have parked in any spot. There was one plant in the entire car park. I lifted the flower head, and lo and behold, black spots.

As I write, there are three flowers belonging to the geranium family (Geraniaceae) wedged between two newspapers sitting atop my kitchen counter, with two ridiculously heavy science textbooks and a large water-filled pan lying on top of them. In a week or so I will send these pressed specimens off in the post to my Identiplant tutor as the final step of my final assignment, and the course I have loved so much over the past year will be complete. Eager to grow my skills in botany, I see the course as just the beginning. I am hoping to learn how to identify plants vegetatively over the coming months, to further learn what conditions certain flowers like, and to challenge myself with learning the Latin names. Who knows, maybe this time next year, I’ll even have moved on to mosses.