Happy New Year Everyone! May it be a healthy and peaceful one for all of us. 

Dear Readers, I have been writing the Bug Woman blog for more than ten years now, and one of my great joys has been a growing familiarity with my local weeds. And believe me, they can be very local – there are some plants, such as Gallant Soldier, that I generally see in Islington (about four miles away) but not, until recently, here in East Finchley. And on Monday I went out to look for plants in flower for the BSBI New Year Plant Hunt (incidentally, if you want a walk to clear your head after the New Year’s Eve festivities you still have 1st January to do it) – I do love a bit of citizen science, plus this was my first walk in the woods since breaking my leg.

What is it that I admire so much about weeds? Well, Green Alkanet, though hairy and a bit of a thug, is usually covered in bees early in the year, The blue flowers have an intensity that the camera simply can’t do justice to, and the leaves are apparently munched upon by the caterpillars of the Jersey Tiger moth, which has become so much more common in recent years in the south of England.

And while it’s difficult to sing the praises of Smooth Sow Thistle when it’s so often raggedy and covered in aphids, that is kind of the point. Many, many native species like it, and birds will sometimes take the tiny seeds. The leaves are often full of the trails of leaf-mining moths and wasps, and yet the plant survives and reproduces. I have to admire its fortitude, as with so many weeds that live in the harsh, desiccated, polluted landscapes of our cities.

Then there are the plants that love walls – many of these were originally mountain plants, but they found the cracks and crevices of London’s walls and pavements to their liking. There’s the Ivy-leaved Toadflax, which raises the face of its flowers to the sun when they need pollinated, and then turn them towards the soil when it’s time for the seeds to germinate.

Then there’s Yellow Corydalis (Pseudofumaria lutea), another Alpine plant that has been happily making its home in the UK since 1796. It is a most elegant plant, with leaves resembling those of a maidenhair fern, and I occasionally see it for sale in garden centres at what my Mum would have described as ‘a silly price’.

And finally there’s Serbian Bellflower ( Campanula poscharskyana), originally from the Dinaric Alps in the Balkans. This one is a fairly recent arrival, first seen in the wild in the 1950s. This plant, and its cousin Dalmatian Bellflower (Campanula portenschlagiana) pop up all over the place here in East Finchley, but never far from housing in my experience.

Then I spotted the two ‘weeds’ that I think of as being plants of lawns and grassy areas – the Daisy and the Dandelion. The Daisy is one of those flowers that I’m pretty sure you could find in flower every day of the year, bless it. Such a modest little plant, but as tough as you like.

And Dandelions are getting most confusing  from a taxonomic point of view, what with dozens of microspecies being discovered all over the country. Still, I’m pretty sure that this is, at least, a Dandelion.

And there was lots of White Dead-nettle in flower too, though not many bees around to pollinate them.

Which kind of begs the question – why do plants that are pollinated by insects flower at times when there are no insects about? Partly I’m sure this is due to confusion – the seasons are not as clear cut as they used to be and while day-length is important for some plants, temperature can also be a trigger. Then, some ‘weeds’ are liable to ‘hedge their bets’ by having as long a flowering season as possible, just in case some anxious bumblebee pops out for a sip of nectar. And finally, some plants don’t just rely on pollination for reproduction – they can also spread via rhizomes or other root growths, and while this doesn’t provide the variation that’s useful for a plant population to have resilience, it does at least mean that the plant is able to increase.

And so, it brings me great joy to walk around my local streets and see so many ‘old friends’. I find it inspiring that nature finds a way in such hostile and ephemeral environments as a crack in the pavement or the bottom of a wall. Do you have a plant that others view as a ‘weed’, but that you love? Do share….