Plants and Shrubs: Plant Life

The hedged stretch of Osmington Drove is an example of a country lane which has been left largely to its own natural growth – and a particularly rewarding one since it offers within a short space four widely differing habitats, each with its own characteristic flora.

From High Trees, the Drove starts as a wide open track, well lit but not outstandingly sunny, with rough hedge-side growth. On the left, I once found a solitary plant of the uncommon large cuckoo pint with its yellow spadix in place of the familiar purple one. On the right is a long thick spread of ground elder, a rampant weed which was fought unavailingly by the Cross sisters who lived in Broadmayne house; an astilbe that they gave me was riddled with the stuff. Its very young leaves are said to have a delicate flavour rather like parsley, and as one writer remarked, “gardeners will eat it with vindictive satisfaction.”

A line of beech trees whose dense canopy shades out most undergrowth succeeds this part of the Drove. Where the beeches end, there is a pleasant patch of naturalised snowdrops, and then comes a grassy rutted track running between thick vigorous scrub of bushes such as blackthorn, buckthorn (one of the only two plants on which the brimstone butterfly will lay its eggs), hawthorn, privet and elder. The narrow strip between the bushes and the path offers a home for strong-growing species which mostly share a liking for damp soil if they can get it, though they will do without if they have to – for instance, cow parsley, hogweed, rough chervil, burdock, hedge woundwort and the climbing bitter-sweet. The path, which has become narrower in recent years, opens out onto a final sunny stretch with wide verges, tall grasses and a rather restricted variety of sun-welcoming plants. By late June it is a tossing mass of tall creamy-white hogweed above the pink-purple spikes of the Yorkshire fog grass – a wonderful sight. On the left, the grass is being invaded by a spreading thicket of small blackthorns on their way to becoming an extension of the dense scrub. It is a situation in which the blackthorn, with its strong suckering habit, is pretty well bound to come out on top as time goes by, but at present it forms a charming covey of little white-flowered bushes dotted about in the grass.

The narrowing of the grassy track which leads to this more open stretch is presumably due to its less frequent use – as much a reflection of changing social habits, though an unplanned one, as the changes in the roadside verges within the village. Going for a walk is not a regular taken-for-granted affair today, except by dog walkers. Broadmayne’s inhabitants, in line with national trends, are either youngish and very busy, or older and less active, but also busy; we get about by car rather than on foot, and we increasingly see leisure pursuits in terms of organised group activities. (The rightly popular local walking group commonly takes its walks outside the parish).

In spite of its impoverishment, the village flora can still offer plenty of pleasure and interest. Most striking, perhaps, is the impact of the blackthorn when it is in flower along Chalky Road. It has been flowering hereabouts for more than two thousand springs, for blackthorn charcoal has turned up in Iron Age deposits at Maiden Castle near Dorchester. The sloes that follow the blossom were once used to make ‘British port wine,’ and can still produce a good homemade wine if sometimes a rather cloudy one. For sheer visual appeal, the hedgerow cow parsley is almost as notable; when a party from the Continent were making a coach tour of England’s more renowned gardens, it was the cow parsley that raised them to particular enthusiasm, with the owner of one estate begging for enough seed to line the drive to her chateau. Nettles are the chosen breeding site of three of the most spectacular of the common butterflies, the peacock, the red admiral and the small tortoiseshell. The peacock goes for nettles that will be in full sun at midday, the tortoiseshell prefers the edge of the nettle bed, and the red admiral will put up with some shade. The dandelion’s eye-catching flowers represent a startling waste of evolutionary energy, since they are wholly self-pollinated and apparently have no need at all to advertise themselves to insects. As a result, there are no dandelion hybrids, but botanists have identified several dozen sub-species, each the product of a sort of spontaneous genetic modification and each set firmly on its own private path to immortality. The flower of the wild arum, described by Hardy as being “like an apoplectic saint in a niche of malachite”, has the extraordinary property of generating its own heat to help spread its insect-attracting smell. Its acrid starchy tubers used to be the basis of a small industry at Portland, where they were washed and refined into harmlessness before being sent to London markets under the name of Portland Sago.

The little ivy-leaved toadflax in the wall near the war memorial in Main Street is a plant that takes particular care to give its offspring a good start in life. After flowering, its stems curl round out of the sun in search of some crack or cranny; for good measure it refuses to release its seed until the capsule is wet. The lesser celandine, which some Broadmayne gardeners struggle to remove from their borders, comes in two strains. One has narrow petals, grows in the shade, propagates itself by bulbils and rarely sets seed, while the other has broader petals, likes the sun, and produces seed, but not bulbils. Both are of the pre-vernal type of plant that gets its growing and flowering done early in the year while there is less risk of being crowded and shaded out of existence by taller plants. So the opportunist gardener can accept the celandine’s splash of bright spring colour in his garden as welcome gift from the gods, in the comfortable knowledge that the whole plant, flowers, leaves and all, will vanish from sight in May or June. One could go on forever. There is almost no weed, however common or however rare, that has not some endearing history or idiosyncrasy of its own.

Elizabeth Vince