Early summer is the kindest season for learning downland flowers. The spring flush has been grazed back, the turf is short, and the plants worth seeing are packed into the top few centimetres where you can get a proper look at them. You do not need a hand lens, a Latin vocabulary or a long list to tick off. You need to slow down, choose one plant at a time, and ask the same four questions of everything you find.
Start With Four Questions
Chalk grassland has a limited cast of characters compared with a woodland or a hedgerow, which is exactly what makes it a good place to begin. Most of what you meet in late May and June can be narrowed down in a few seconds of looking.
- Colour. Note it honestly, including the shade. Butter-yellow, egg-yolk-yellow and orange-yellow point at different plants, and so do blue, mauve and pink.
- Flower shape. Count the petals, and check whether the flowers sit singly or in a cluster, a spike or a rounded head. Pea-shaped flowers almost always belong to the pea family, and once you spot the family the rest narrows fast.
- Leaves. Look at the leaves at the base of the plant, not just the ones halfway up the flower stem. Are they opposite each other in pairs, or alternating up the stem? Simple or divided into leaflets? Hairy or smooth? Hairy edges and rolled-under rims are common downland adaptations to wind and drought.
- Where it grows. Slope, aspect and turf length matter as much as the flower. A plant rooting in an anthill on a south-facing slope is a different proposition from one growing in longer grass at the field edge.
Two practical notes before you start. Downland is at its best on a warm, still day, because many flowers close up in dull or wet weather. And on grazed sites, the richest plants are usually within a metre or two of a path, an anthill or a rabbit burrow, where the turf is thinnest and bare ground shows through.
Yellow Flowers: Two That Look Alike
Two of the commonest yellow flowers on chalk are easy to muddle at a glance and easy to separate once you know the trick.
Common rock-rose (Helianthemum nummularium)
A low, sprawling, semi-evergreen mat that hugs the ground. The flowers are bright yellow with five petals that look as though they have been crumpled in your hand and lightly smoothed out again — soft, papery and slightly overlapping. Some plants show a small orange flush at the base of the petals. Each individual flower tends to last about a day, so a good patch will show buds, open flowers and spent petals all together.
The leaves are the clincher: they sit in opposite pairs, narrow and oblong, dark green on top and grey-downy underneath, with the edges rolled so far under that each leaf looks as if it has a green rim. You will find it on closely grazed turf, often on south-facing slopes.
Horseshoe vetch (Hippocrepis comosa)
Also low and mat-forming, also yellow, but this one is a member of the pea family. The flowers are pea-shaped and carried in small clusters of roughly three to eight on short stalks held just above the leaves. The leaves are divided into paired oval leaflets along a central stem, and the tip of that stem ends in a single leaflet rather than a curling tendril. That absence of a tendril separates it from the true vetches at a glance.
If you are unsure, come back in July or August and look at the seed pods, which break into curved horseshoe-shaped segments and give the plant its name. Horseshoe vetch is worth knowing for another reason: it is the food plant of chalkhill blue and Adonis blue caterpillars, so a good patch of it is a good place to sit quietly for a while. Its yellow clusters can be confused with bird's-foot trefoil, which has narrower, less rounded flowers and pods that splay out like a bird's foot.
Pink and Purple: Wild Thyme
Wild thyme (Thymus polytrichus) is the plant most people find by smell before they find it by sight. It creeps along the ground with thin, woody-based stems and forms loose cushions in the shortest turf — on anthills, along path edges and around rabbit burrows.
The flowers are tiny, pinkish-mauve and two-lipped, gathered in a rounded cluster at the tip of each upright stem, and they appear from late spring into midsummer. The leaves are minute, oval and arranged in opposite pairs on the stem. Crush one leaf between your fingers and you get a clean, unmistakable thyme scent; that single test will settle the identification for good. If the plant has a strong scent and a woody creeping base, you are right.
Blue, Pink or White: Common Milkwort
Common milkwort (Polygala vulgaris) is the one that stops beginners in their tracks, because the flowers are genuinely odd. They vary in colour — blue is the most familiar, but pink and white forms grow on the same downs, sometimes within a few metres of each other — and they are packed into a short spike at the top of the stem.
Each flower looks a little like a tiny pea flower with a brush attached. Two large inner sepals stick out sideways like wings, and the lowest petal carries a small fringed crest. You need to be on your knees for that detail, but the wing-like sepals are visible from standing height. The leaves are small, narrow, untoothed and alternate up the stem rather than paired. Look for it in chalk grassland and on dry heaths from May into August.
Green and Easy to Overlook: Salad Burnet
Salad burnet (Sanguisorba minor) does not look like a wildflower at first, which is why it gets missed. The flower heads are small, rounded and green, sometimes washed with a dull red-purple, and they sit on thin wiry stems that lift them clear of the leaves. From a distance they read as pale knobs floating over the turf.
The leaves give it away. They are divided into opposite pairs of oval leaflets with toothed edges, and when you rub one you get a fresh cucumber smell. It grows on dry banks, rough grass and chalk turf, and it flowers through early and midsummer. It is edible — the young leaves have a long history of use in salads — but on a nature reserve or a Site of Special Scientific Interest, look and smell rather than pick, and never eat a plant you cannot identify with total certainty.
A Simple Field Routine
Five plants is plenty for one outing. Try this sequence and you will remember more than if you try to name everything:
- Stand still for a minute and scan for colour rather than walking and searching at the same time.
- Pick one flower and photograph it from above, from the side, and with a leaf or two in the frame.
- Check the base of the plant for the leaves that matter.
- Note the habitat in a few words: turf length, slope, bare ground, aspect.
- Write down the date and the place. Returning a fortnight later and seeing the same plant in seed teaches you far more than a book does.
Stay on the paths where the site asks you to, keep dogs close during the ground-nesting season, and leave the flowers where they are. Downland has shrunk dramatically over the past century, and the fragments that remain are often small; a few hundred pairs of boots a season can make a real difference to a fragile slope. Take a photograph, a note and a smell, and leave everything else behind.
Photo: Jonas_Fehre / Pixabay
