Why the botany books are getting it all wrong now
The daffodils are out. The Olympic Park, London; the King’s School in Worcester; Blarney Castle in Ireland; and soon, no doubt, my back garden.
Over the decades this symbol of spring, of which it should be said there are many different varieties flowering at different times, has been coming into bloom much earlier.
This year the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland’s annual new year plant hunt recorded six different sightings of daffs, largely around the south coast. Your correspondent joined one such hunt (out of 800 nationwide) around Staveley village, North Yorks, earlier this month.
The results of the national survey are published next week so I shall not give too much away, suffice to say we comfortably logged the four most common species typically in flower: daisy, groundsel, annual meadow grass and dandelion. Far less common was dog’s mercury in bloom in the shade of a goat willow. Normally the highly poisonous plant’s clusters of small green flowers are a sight for spring.
I was accompanied on the walk by Kevin Walker, head of science at the botanical society, who says the weather dictates such rhythms. The decline in frosts means autumn stragglers, such as hogweed, yarrow and cow parsley, flower throughout the year, while in warmer winters the likes of bluebells, snowdrops and daffodils come out sooner.
The plant hunts, Mr Walker says, have exposed the fact that most botanical books that have the dates of when things should be out are all wrong. Our winter flora, it transpires, is far messier than the categories we created for it, yet these erroneous classifications have survived in some cases for centuries. Perhaps this is down to the fact that in January it is far easier to curl up with a good botany book than to go out hunting for plants in the wild.