August 2016

If you were to drive (or walk) down Denge Marsh Road in Lydd, you would end up on a rutted track that takes you right down to the sea, not far from Dungeness Power Station.  In fact, the track runs between the power station and Lydd Firing Ranges.  As you may expect, it is a bleak and inhospitable place which is exactly the sort of place to find some of the best nature.  The flora there is unusual because the place is unusual, though much of it is familiar if you have spent any time around Rye Harbour or at the Dungeness RSPB reserve.  There are the usual shingle species like viper’s bugloss, sea beet and sea kale, and some that seem to turn up almost anywhere like scarlet pimpernel, woody nightshade, and rest harrow.

Recently however, I came across a species that I’d never seen before.  It was a very tiny plant with a low growing prostrate habit with evergreen, succulent-like leaves.  It had carpeted a large patch of ground and could easily have been overlooked and mistaken for moss.  There was a redness to it that made me look twice and it turned out to have what appeared to be bright red buds. 

Sea-heath - Frankenia laevis - with rabbit dropping for scale

Sea-heath - Frankenia laevis

Identification for me nowadays, consists of taking plenty of photos (assuming the subject stays around for long enough, which most plants do well), and then comparing them with the field guides when I get home.  So I did this with my mystery plant and chose a plant that looked the closest match, which turned out to be sea-milkwort.  Of course, to be certain it is best to get the photos looked at by an expert.  Though I know a couple of very experienced botanists I could ask, I decided that I may get a quicker answer on Facebook.

Now I know that sounds unlikely, but Facebook has grown up.  I know that a lot of people in the village use Facebook – it’s a good way to keep up with the grandkids, after all, but recently Facebook added a feature called Facebook Groups.  Groups are a way of letting like-minded people get together and share ideas and photos, and the wildlife and nature community has leapt on this as a way of helping each other identify things and to show each other what they’ve seen (as well as having the serious purpose of encouraging people to formally record their sightings).  There are groups for birds, beetles, insects, bees, wasps and ants, you name it, there’s a group for it.  I belong to the Wild Flowers of Britain group, amongst others, and so I posted the photos on there.  My suggestion of sea-milkwort didn’t last long.  The first alternative suggestion was mossy stonecrop, but this was also rejected in favour of sea-heath – Frankenia laevis.  When I looked this up, it turned out to be a rare plant that also had pale mauve flowers, which didn’t seem to fit with what I thought were bright red flower buds.  All of the Facebook groups are moderated by experts or at least enthusiastic and knowledgeable amateurs, so could they have got it wrong?

Sea-heath - Frankenia laevis

Well today, I went back to see if any of the red ‘buds’ had opened.  None of them had, and on closer inspection, they weren’t flower buds but leaves that had turned red.  I was disappointed and as I was about to leave I spotted some pale mauve flowers in a small corner of the patch, and sure enough they were attached to branches having both green and red leaves.  Sea-heath indeed.  The fingerprints on my index finger at the bottom give some idea of the size of this plant.

July 2016

Recently, I was doing a bee survey on the Rye Harbour Nature Reserve with the project leader of the short-haired bumblebee project.  Whilst there were plenty of bumblebees around, we were quite surprised to stumble across several bee orchids.  If you have never seen a bee orchid, you may wonder what it looks like, but it you have heard the name and then come across the plant, you would be in no doubt what you had found, because it looks exactly like a bumblebee drinking nectar from a pink flower.

Bee Orchid - Ophrys apifera

Bee Orchid - Ophrys apifera

The idea behind this, if you can call an evolutionary advantage an idea, is that the flower looks like a female bumblebee.  Not only does it look like a female bumblebee, but to a male bumblebee, it smells like one as well.  So the male lands on the flower and attempts to mate with the ‘female’ and in the process gets covered in pollen.  When he makes a second attempt at another flower, the pollen is rubbed onto the stigma of that flower and at least the plant is fertilized.  Hopefully, the male bumblebee will not keep making the same mistake and will eventually find a proper female to mate with.

We didn’t see any bumblebees on the bee orchids and I started wondering which species of bee actually pollinates the orchid.  When I got home I reached for my trusty copy of the internet and looked it up.  Sadly, the answer was a little disappointing – In the UK, the bee orchid is self-pollinating and it relies on the wind to brush the pollen onto the stigma.  Apparently, around the Mediterranean, there are species of bee that pollinate the plant, but my trusty copy of the internet was strangely reticent on exactly which species do so.

The bee orchid is a striking plant and well worth keeping an eye out for.  It is not a particularly rare plant and is quite widespread throughout England, though the books describe it as ‘locally common’ which means that you won’t find it everywhere, but when you do find one, you’ll probably find several.  It seems to like chalk soils and often appears on disturbed ground, though it doesn’t flower every year.  Perhaps that’s why it has suddenly appeared on the bund wall at Rye Harbour.