Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
An intoxicating month of hidden menace
NATURE NOTES
The Bishopsbourne author and naturalist Jocelyn Brooke thought the very word July had an opulent golden warmth. Coming after one of the wettest Junes of the century, with almost six inches of rain in some parts of the district, I hope it does.
But he qualified that optimism in his book The Flower in Season by adding that July was a month dreaded by many Victorians as a month of mysterious fevers, decline and the dreaded greensickness, which may have been a deficiency of iron in the diet.
Nicholas Culpepper, the 17thcentury herbalist, suggested that the red centaury common on the downs was a cure for greensickness and that Italians used it in powdered form.
Brooke mentions that it was still used in east Kent to improve digestion in the 1920s.
Among the loveliest sights this time of the year are the glades of purple, pink and white foxgloves in woodlands on acidic or neutral soils and even on shingle at Dungeness. They do not like chalky soils.
The 19th-century Dover botanist Anne Pratt noted that in some countries foxglove leaves were made into a tea “for the sinful purpose of producing intoxication and degrading the being”.
It must have produced a massive hangover as all parts of the plant are poisonous, but it is also the source of the medicine digoxin, which is used to treat certain heart conditions.
There is a smaller yellow foxglove quite at home on chalky soils and locally common in northern France. Although it has been described as an introduction in Britain, it has been found on the chalky banks of the M2 near Canterbury, which suggests it has made its way here perhaps as seeds on the wheels of lorries.
A flower to look out for on shingle beaches is yellow horned poppy, quite a large plant with yellow waxy flowers on tough stems that after the flower falls become the long, distinctive seed-bearing horns.
This is another poisonous plant, capable of causing respiratory failure if eaten. According to the redoubtable Anne Pratt, the root “is said if eaten to occasion madness”.
Butterflies have had a hard time these past few weeks due to the excessive rain.
A few red admirals and speckled woods have been fluttering around the garden, along with the occasional tattered brimstone, but I’ve seen only single small tortoiseshells and peacocks.
July is the best month to see marbled whites. They emerged last month and usually hit peak numbers around the 15th. They are confident little creatures, beautiful and easy to photograph. Forty years ago they were quite scarce but are now relatively common in east Kent, especially in chalky areas, and may be seen until the end of August.
As their name implies, chalkhill blues occur on many of the downs across Kent, emerging towards the end of the month, with peak numbers in August and a usually rapid decline in early September.
Like the adonis blue, their distribution is dependent on the ready availability of horseshoe vetch, the food plant of their caterpillars.
Soon the larvae of migrant hawkers will leave their ponds to make their way up reeds, where they will shed their skins and emerge as one of our most beautiful dragonflies, the males with a blue, black and brown banding and the females with greenish yellow and brown banding.
In the early 1940s it was a rare migrant but it is now resident and quite common and widespread in Kent.
For those interested in our beautiful families of dragonflies, John and Gill Brook’s Dragonflies of Kent, published by the Kent Field Club is invaluable.
Many people have commented in recent years on Foxgloves are poisonous but a source of an important heart medication; inset, centaury was an ancient cure for stomach upsets used in east Kent until the 1920s
the decline of those gregarious chatterers the starlings. But there are signs of a recovery. For several years there was only one pair in my
neighbours’ magnificent tall, ivy-covered blackthorn. Now there are six, teaming up with many others to fly across a neighbouring meadow.