Notes from a hedgerow

Wherever you look on The Lizard there is colour. The cliffs are covered in wild flowers as are the verges and hedgerows. Sometimes it makes navigating the narrow lanes of Cornwall even harder as my attention is diverted by the profusion of flowers to either side of me. Mother Nature manages to attract the eye even further by interspersing opposite colours of the colour wheel spectrum. Pink and yellow don't clash in this environment; they complement each other.

Last Saturday morning I took a walk up to Lizard village in the sunshine having decided to take clippings of all the wild flowers I didn't know the names of or, with a couple of sparser populated ones, take photographs. As you can see in the photo my wild flower knowledge was sorely lacking as I didn't even recognise honesty without its distinctive seedheads.

So, for all you budding botanists, this is what I found on my half-mile walk to Lizard:

• sea campion
• red campion
• common vetch
• horseshoe vetch
• sea holly
• cow pasley
• wild carrot
• thrift (sea pink)
• red valerian
• tree mallow
• violet (not sure which one)
• sheep’s sorrel
• marsh gladiolus
• three cornered leek
• broom
• navelwort
• hottentot fig (both yellow and pink)
• foxglove
• ribwort plantain
• charlock
• clover
• ground ivy
• honesty
• daisy
• buttercup
• hedge bindweed
• nettle
• dandelion

This one doesn't look like it belongs in a Cornish verge, in fact looking in my wild flower book, it shouldn't be here, but Marsh Gladiolus is flourishing on The Lizard.

Apart from wild flowers, another thing I have found on my walks is that you can't tell what the weather is by the way people are dressed. On this particular day I was wearing a t-shirt and shorts carrying a sweatshirt just in cases and coming towards me on the path were a couple in full winter clothes and the woman was actually holding a woolly scarf around her face. I used to find this at Kynance Cove Cafe. You'd get people coming up from the beach in t-shirt and shorts and people coming down from the cliffs in waterproofs and trousers.

Having accomplished my mission in Lizard to buy a newspaper and a pasty, oh and stop for a chat with Louise at The Cowshed, I wandered home to learn a little more about wild flowers from my newly purchased Wild Flowers book before they became an unidentifiable mush in the bottom of my basket.

Love from The Lizard Girl