21. A flower... or flowers.

A short walk down my road supplied me with 20 pictures of 19 different flowers, some monoecious (bramble), some dioecious (holly), some with flowers with both male and female parts in the same flower head (nettles) , some with male and female flowers separated (oak) yet on the same plant. Some single flowers (clematis), some multiple flowers (inflorescence) Horse chestnut.

They are in fact all angiosperm plants and they all bear flowers, that's what makes an angiosperm and angiosperm...flowers!

Left is a picture I took of a female holly flower, Ilex aquifolium, male flowers would be on a separate tree. They are Dioecious plants.

  

The flowers of a Cherry Laurel Prunus laurocerasus, these racemes have multiple flowers (inflorescence) each on a short pedicel (stalk) from the main shoot or axis, and if enough are visited by insects each will develop into a laurel cherry. Which birds seem to like eating and then shitting on windscreen! 

They are edible for humans, but contain small amounts of hydrogen cyanide, and the pits contain much more as do the leaves. I have eaten them and to be honest you'd have to be really hungry, bland and a bit bitter.

Goose grass Galium aparine, this is the plant kids like to throw on the backs of other kids when they're not looking, as it sticks to clothing. The other name we called it as kids was 'cleavers', Throwing it in the hair of people with really long hair was also great fun (not so much fun for the person with long hair) the stems are covered in tiny hooks.

And again it has delicate pretty white flowers, hardly noticeable as the plant is the ground covering kind more than upright. It is called a weed, not a flower, but the picture does not lie, it does indeed have flowers.

Quercus robur the English oak tree or pendunculate oak, also bearing flowers. This isn't my best picture, but at the base of my index and middle finger is a small triangular shadow, just to right is what appears to be a small green catkin, this is the male flower of the oak tree, the female flower is tiny pinkish and in the axils of the new leaves, and the females turn into the acorns. 

This is called a monoecious plant (of one house) meaning male and female sexual parts are on the same plants, Dioecious (of two houses) is when male parts are on one plant and female on a another (Like Holly)

Ash trees seem to not follow the rules biologist have set them, can be wholly male, female, mixed, 90% male with a female branch, or alternate between all choices season to season, go figure. 

Sloe Prunus spinosa most importantly the source of the flavouring  Sloe gin, difficult to identify from many of the other cherries, bullaces, damsons and plums. Easy to identify in fruit though, if you eat another other plum like fruit it may be sweet or if under-ripe a bit sour. Sloes are unforgettable as the sourest thing you have every put in your mouth ever. 

So if it taste a bit sour it's a bullace, or wild plum, if your face feels like it's about to turn inside out...it's a sloe.


Blossom out before leaves

Hawthorn Crataegus monogyna, not quite opened up but will flower in a huge white spray of blossom in the next few days.


Leaves out before blossom.

Field maple Acer campestre with its terminal flowers just beginning to open, not an impressive flower, but a flower none-the-less. Green/yellow almost exactly the same colour as the new leaves, very small, inconspicuous and most people never notice these flowers, and each one that gets fertilized (unless eaten by birds) will grow into the familiar double samara fruit (helicopter)

Red dead nettle Lamium purpureum.

This looks just like henbit dead-nettle L. amplexicaule, but henbit doesn't have stalks (petioles) on the leaves from the square stem. red dead-nettle does have petioles.

It also has - rather than radial symmetry in the flowers - it has zygomorphic symmetry, only symmetrical in one plane, it is a mirror image either side of that single, bilateral line

Ground ivy Glechoma hedercea another member of the dead nettle family (Laminaceae) along with mint, basil Marjoram and sage. and many of the other herbs we use.

White dead nettle Lamium album. The name dead nettle refers to the inability to sting, once a real stinging nettle Urtica dioica has been pulled up dry for a day it cannot sting, the little sacs of poison on the stinging hair just shrivel up on a real dead nettle.

This dead-nettle is not related to actual stinging nettles very closely at all, other than in its appearance.

Just as Prince Harry and James Hewitt (Princess Diana's close friend) may look very similar, they are in fact completely unrelated. I wonder if anyone actually reads this?

Bramble Rubus fructicosus In this picture the flowers are just about to erupts from a closed protective calyx of a very pale whitish green, and each one - in turn - if fertilized becomes a blackberry. The flowers will be whitish/green when it unfolds

Forget-me not Myosotis arvenis 
I have little so say about these apart from they are charming, forming ground cover in a wood land clearing.

A sea of forget-me-nots 

Wild cherry Prunus avium. Does have small edible cherries, but they are not always seen...birds can eat the fruit before it is ripe enough for humans, so quite often the trees are stripped of fruit before they get a chance to become red and noticable. 

Horse chestnut Aesculus hippocastanum this is a classic flower on a tree that people do notice. upright racemes of white candlestick of bloom. If the flowers are indigo in colour - as a few street trees are - then it's not the common horse chestnut, it will be an naturalised introduced species the Indian Horse Chestnut Aesculus indica

Lunaria annua Honesty. This is a flower in the wild but not a 'wild flower' it's an escapee from gardens. Which why I wasted hours trying to identify it in wildflower ident' books. Only for someone to later tell my its what gardeners call a proper flower, not a weed or a wildflower. How was I to know?

Cow parsley Anthriscus sylvestris is edible, but why you would eat it beats me, I have tried it and it tastes like nasty very bitter carrot. The other reason I wouldn't eat it... is its so similar the hemlock Conium maculatum (which is poisonous) why risk eating a foul tasting plant that looks just like a very poisonous plant?

Poor old humble Cow parsley has developed something of a bad rep', not in europe where it is native and very common. But in the USA where it has made it onto several wanted posters different states, as an invasive species, other british plants on the list is what the Americans call 'English Ivy' or our regular plain old ivy Hedera helix

A Clematis escaping oversomeone's wall. I don't know which this is and to be honest having spent hours pointlessly looking for 'honesty' in a wildflower book, I was damned if I was going to waste hours on this sneaky harlot in various gardening books.
this is Clematis sp, a possibility of 300 species and further crosses or cultivars. closely related to buttercups and anenomies. 

Wild angelica Angelica sylvestris 
Part of the carrot family, wildely used in folk medicine and as a cooking ingredient.

Purple leaved plum Prunus cerasifera in blossom, notice how complex the flowers are compared to simple wild cherry. This will also bear fruit, but can be a little sour, sweeter than sloes (everything is sweeter than sloes, bah) but not as sweet as commercial cultivars.

The Prunus genus is a strange group in that we have been crossing them for hundreds of years making cultivars and hybrids, we tend to class them by fruit size and shape, Nectarines, peaches, almonds, plums, cherries, damsons, greengage, bullaces and sloes are all Prunus sp. They also hybridize in the wild which can lead to nailing a species being rather difficult.

Mitchell, A (1999) Trees Of Britain and Northern Europe. London. Collins