Tag Archives: Wakehurst Place

Natural History

Wakehurst Wonders

Water Gardens and foliage of many shapes and colours at Wakehurst Place
A grassy dell on the side of the main valley, with Oaks and Rhododendrons
Azure Damselflies in cop, well seen from the handsome boardwalk at the far end of the gardens. The blue male has a U-shaped mark at the front of his abdomen; the green female has a thistle-shaped mark in the same place. Unlike the Common Blue damselfly, she does not have a spine sticking down out of the second-from-last ‘tail’ segment.
Emperor Dragonfly habitat: the beautiful main pond by the Wakehurst Place lawns. Yellow and White Waterlilies are in full bloom.

Well, I was hoping to see some colourful dragonflies on this hot and sunny day in early June, and they exceeded expectations. On the main pond just behind the Wakehurst Place mansion, the bulky shape of an Emperor Dragonfly, with its big apple-green thorax and downcurved blue abdomen, patrolled up and down over the Yellow and White Waterlilies, both gloriously in bloom. A single Broad-Bodied Chaser unmistakably whizzed low over the water.

The Water Gardens glittered in the sunshine, the little waterfalls tinkled pleasingly, and a few damselflies busied themselves among the vegetation.

Traditional Sussex Craftsmanship: Boardwalk, with green-oak posts and rails (cloven not sawn, making them elegant, rugged, and strong as the grain runs unbroken the whole length of each rail) at the water gardens.

Down at the reedbed, the broad and elegantly-fenced boardwalk with its traditional green-oak posts and rails let us get as close as possible to the dragonflies down there. A Large Red Damselfly perched for a moment beside my hand on the rail. Azure Damselflies skittered about, some in cop, some ovipositing. A solitary Banded Demoiselle male, unmistakable with his big indigo wing-patches, fluttered back and forth.

The other side of the boardwalk, a male dragonfly hovered over open water in the dazzling sunlight. I did my best to focus on the shimmering target. An Emerald! The Downy Emerald has been recorded here at Wakehurst Place, but this is also within the very narrow territory of the Brilliant Emerald in England, basically a bit of inland Sussex and Surrey, with another haunt in northwest Scotland. There is no sign of a downy thorax here, I don’t think; nor is the abdomen bronze-green, but rather a rich deep, iridescent, green; and it has the smooth spatulate outline of a Brilliant Emerald. Exciting!

Well this looks to me like a Brilliant Emerald Dragonfly! Sorry about the blurry photo – such things are never easy, but this one is rather interesting.
The meadows, too, were glorious in their early summer best, full of red clover, buttercups, and plenty of stalks of Common Spotted Orchid among the slender grass stems.
Spotted leaf of Common Spotted Orchid, in case you aren’t familiar with it!
Natural History, Nature Reserves

Wonders of Wakehurst Place … and Loder Valley

Wakehurst Place (mansion)
Wakehurst Place (mansion)

Wakehurst Place is Kew Gardens in the countryside of Sussex, glowing on a cool but very sunny April day with spring all around: cowslips, primroses (pin and thrum, some antique school botany coming back to mind), bluebells, dog’s mercury, wood anemone; and a fine chorus of birds, with chiffchaff, blackcap, song thrush, blackbird and an assortment of noisy pheasants and wood pigeons for good measure.

New Oak leaves and flowers
New Oak leaves and flowers

Everything was coming into new leaf or into bloom: some plants like this Oak tree were doing both at once.

Wollemia nobilis, Australia's Wollemi Pine, in full fruit
Wollemia nobilis, Australia’s Wollemi Pine, in full fruit

Being Kew, there are some very special plants about, not least the one-step-from-extinct Wollemi Pine from Australia, here growing happily with odd-shaped cones of both sexes in the English countryside.

White-tailed Bumblebee pollinating Purple Toothwort
Garden Bumblebee pollinating Purple Toothwort

In the attached Loder Valley nature reserve, a special treat: the Purple Toothwort, a parasitic plant in the Broomrape family, scarce in Britain and a new plant for me. It wasn’t present as a lone stalk: there were good big clusters of it on a steep clayey bank. I’m not sure what it was parasitising, though at this time of year it must surely be a woody plant, and brambles were close by.

Lords and Ladies, new spathe and spadix
Lords and Ladies, new spathe and spadix

By a gatepost, a large and fresh wild arum seemed to deserve its country name Lords and Ladies, standing gracefully fresh.

Blue Sky, White Birches, Bluebells
Blue Sky, White Birches, Bluebells

Back in the park, the silver birches perfectly set off the sea of bluebells.

long trailing beards of Usnea lichen on oak trunk
long trailing beards of Usnea lichen on oak trunk

Great trailing beards of lichen draggled down an oak trunk: it’s a rare sight in Europe, and all the more surprising in Sussex, not far from the pollution of Gatwick airport. Perhaps the prevailing winds keep the air clean, but in that case why are lichens so few in Hampshire and the southeast generally?

Coco de Mer or Double Coconut
Coco de Mer or Double Coconut

The park contains the extraordinary Millennium Seed Bank, complete with windows onto the world of toiling botanists, drying seeds and elegant specialised equipment – a gadget for pouring agar into stacks of Petri dishes, among others, and a dramatic selection of the world’s most bizarre seeds, like the very large and remarkably bottom-like Coco de Mer. It’s not one of the seeds in the seed bank just yet, as it is ‘recalcitrant’, refusing to be dried out so it can survive for centuries – it just dies instead.  Love stronger than death, or something.