My Favourite Place: Ainsdale, Merseyside
When I was growing up, our house backed onto the sand dunes at Ainsdale and Birkdale Sandhills Nature Reserve, near Southport. It was a safe place to be so I messed about there a lot. It was our patch; I’d be out for hours, playing football and building dens, never realising what a special place it was.
We used to collect natterjack toads and sand lizards. Things that are very rare nowadays, were on my doorstep. We’d use funny flowers for sword-fighting, dried spikes of lupins as it turned out. And there was a big sycamore – it was ‘our tree’, and to me, it was wonderful.
I worked as a field botanist in the 1980s and when I returned to the place where I used to live, all of a sudden, the names of the plants popped out at me. I saw then what a magical collection of flowers was there, in combinations that you rarely see anywhere else.
There are wild plants, like marsh helleborine and grass of Parnassus, and also garden escapees. Santolina, Campanula persicifolia, wild asparagus, tuberous pea, white poplar; lots of introduced things. There were puffballs, too, I remember the thrill of poking them with my finger and watching the spores come out. And bloody cranesbill, beautifully contrasted against the sand. It’s my favourite flower of all time.
I’m always interested in how wild plants are presented ex situ and I’m drawn to displays that include species, not just varieties. There's one in Cambridge Botanic Garden about the botany of the Fens. I know nothing about the Fens so I was really interested to see how it was done, why we value them and should conserve the plants of the area. I found that really exciting!