April Verges

​Editor: Numerous roads criss-cross the area covered by the 4B’s Biodiversity Park, many have grass rich verges some several metres wide and in April they are suddenly festooned with wild flowers. Many of the flowers mentioned by Peter in the excellent article below can be found in road verges in the 4B parishes. Our short video film records some of them. How many can you spot?

April wildflowers on path, road and field verges
Peter Conway
 
There are plenty of flowers on path, road and field verges in April: indeed, country lanes can be at their most cheerful this month. Yellow celandines are still at their height at the start of the month, blooming happily almost everywhere one looks. They tend to fade away or get smothered by other vegetation in the second or third week, but they can be found in places right up to the end of the month. Their leaves shrivel away once they have finished flowering, to leave no trace that they have ever been there, though this does not usually happen until May.

Other survivors from March that can still be found on verges are daffodils, violets (mainly dog violets at this stage) and primroses. Daffodils are past their best in city parks by the start of the month but can survive till the second or third week in rural spots. As with celandines, violets and primroses get smothered by other vegetation as much as anything, but can be seen in places right up to the end of April.

Of the verge flowers that appear in April, it is cuckoo flower, garlic mustard and stitchwort that make the best displays. Cuckoo flower (otherwise known as lady’s smock) can be seen in force right from the start of the month if March has been mild, and remains prominent all month. At its best it can create dreamy drifts of pink, particularly in roadside ditches. In the east Weald and Chilterns from mid month onward you can also find coralroot, a rare cuckoo flower relative: really a plant of woodland but found also on shady verges.

Stitchwort – a delicate white flower identifiable by its double petals – appears in places in early in April, but it really comes out in force in the second or third week - sometimes even the fourth - and by the end of the month seems to be everywhere. Garlic mustard (which is neither a garlic nor a mustard but whose leaves are supposed to smell a bit of both when crushed) comes out in the second or third week and lasts into May. Honesty, its more flashy mauve-flowered relative, can sometimes be seen a bit earlier - often, though not always, near houses. It gets its name from its large flat seed pods which go transparent later in the year.

Another common flower of verges and any spare bit of grass in April is the humble dandelion. So familiar it tends to get overlooked, it nevertheless steadily increases in number as the month goes on, forming dense yellow patches, until in the third or fourth week the sheer quantity can be almost overwhelming. By this time some of the flowers are starting to go over, forming their famous spherical fluffy seedheads. (Early in the month, and occasionally as late as the third week, the superficially similiar coltsfoot is also possible, but this is quite a rare flower in the south east.)

Ground ivy appears early in the month, if it has not already done so at the end of March, and though its little purple flowers are not dramatic on their own, it can form great mats as April progresses. The same goes for germander speedwell, a tiny blue flower that appears in the second half of the month, becoming very common by its end. Some field speedwell may also be seen, especially early in the month, on barer verges and disturbed ground, and in the same habitat you find mats of the very inconspicuous ivy-leaved speedwell, which has very tiny lilac flowers. It is often hard to tell if these are bloom: even when they seem to have gone over, there are often still some surviving, and these can last till the end of the month.

You can see white strawberry flowers all through April: in the first half these tend to be barren strawberry (a notch in its petals, which also have a bit of a gap between them, and a blunter end to the leaves) but towards the end of the month the true wild strawberry starts to take over. From about the third week (not till the very end of the month in colder years) you start to see the pretty blue spikes of bugle, which in the early stages of its flowering is possible to confuse with ground ivy, though its flowers are bluer. Occasionally from quite early in the month but more generally towards its end, herb robert dots shadier verges its with small pink flowers.

Flowers normally associated with woodland such as bluebells, wood anemones, ramsons (aka wild garlic), early purple orchids, goldilocks buttercup and (later in the month) yellow archangel can also sometimes be found on verges, usually either escapees from woodland populations nearby or relicts of former ones. Dog's mercury is a fairly common verge plant too: it is flowering in April but its flowers are green and very inconspicuous.
Some cowslips also crop up on verges. and occasionally they interbreed with nearby primroses to produce false oxlips, a delightfully silly mix of the genes of the two plants (usually primrose-sized flowers in cowslip shapes). In addition you get the occasional oilseed rape flowers, escapees from nearby agricultural fields (see Arable below).

You continue to see red and white deadnettles – both of which have usually already appeared in March. The white ones can make quite large displays on verges later in the month; the red are out in force on broken or bare ground right from the start of the month and usually fading away as it ends. Ordinary stinging nettles rapidly grow taller during the month – only 10 centimetres or so high at the start of the month and up to half a metre by its end. Cleavers (also known as goosegrass) - the plant that sticks to your clothes - attain a similar height. Along with new blades of grass growing straight and tall, all these contribute to the growing lushness of verges. For now, however, this does not looks straggly or unkempt but instead fresh and optimistic.

Other wayside flowers in April include forget-me-not and its large-leaved relative alkanet, both of which are usually found near to houses, and both of which can form large patches. It is the garden forget-me-not, a version of wood forget-me-not, that you are seeing here. There are also smaller-flowered wild species such as field forget-me-not and early forget-me-not, which may appear later in April but are more usually seen in May.

In the second half of April the occasional red campion may just be seen, as well as bush vetch and, right at the end of the month, possibly common vetch. A much rarer member of this family is bitter vetchling which occasionally makes good displays on roadside banks in April. Towards the end of the month you start to see some bulbous buttercups on verges. Now and then you also spot the yellow-flowered greater celandine - nothing to do with the lesser celandine mentioned above but in fact a relative of the poppy.

The curious flowers of cuckoo pint are found in shady places in the second half (its name has a sexual connotation, as does the alternative lords and ladies), though they seem nothing like as common as the leaves were earlier in the year. It is also quite hard to find the spikes open, revealing the spadix, the central cylinder to which the plant's names refer. This produces a rotten smell to attract insects, which then get trapped overnight in a lower chamber, inadvertently fertilising the plant.

While we are on odd plants, spikes of horsetail appear in April, sometimes early in the month but sometimes not till the second half, their bulbous tips looking a bit like asparagus. These emit pollen (horsetail having evolved before there was such a thing as a flowering plant) and then later in the month produce green rings which will open up into the familiar fly-whisk leaves in May. Also distinctly strange is the parasitic toothwort, a pale pink plant that grows on the roots of hazel. Meanwhile, spring beauty, a rarity found on sandy soils, has tiny white flowers in the middle of large round leaves.

Among the smaller (and less noticed) flowers is tiny white chickweed - found on verges, on odd bits of wasteground and also in grassy fields. It is also common in urban settings, as is bittercress. There are two species here - hairy bittercress which has been around since February or March and is generally gone by mid April, and the more luxuriant wavy bittercress, which appears this month and is at its best in the second half: it is technically found on damper verges, though often seems to be in dry places too. Other urban verge weeds include shepherd's purse (distinctive due to its heart-shaped seed pods, the purse of its name), groundsel (an unromantic weed that can go from seed to flower to seed again in as little as six weeks and which some botanists reckon is the commonest British flower), and thale cress; also sometimes the very tiny white flowers of common whitlowgrass.

Yellow wintercress can also appear on wasteground (sometimes even in urban corners) later in the month, and Oxford ragwort, originally a railway line plant (see below), may pop up in other urban corners. You may come across shining cranesbill, hedgerow cranesbill and cornsalad (aka lamb's lettuce) too. A few straggly flowers of cow parsley may be seen right from the start of the month, and in the second half it can start to come out in force in places, producing lovely drifts of white. Looking like a yellowy-green cow parsley is alexanders, a plant more common in coastal areas but sometimes found inland, which is in flower all month. Towards the end of the month you may just see some hedge mustard.

In addition, the practised eye can pick out the growing leaves of rosebay willowherb and great willowherb, as well as the large leaves of hogweed and giant hogweed, the latter an irritant to the skin and looking a bit like rhubarb. Also rhubarb-sized are the enormous leaves of burdock. If you see a frizzy-looking version of cow parsley leaves, then that is hemlock. Greater plantain leaves increase in size on bare muddy paths and tracks, and silverweed foliage is very noticeable on short grass verges. In urban corners sow thistle plants (which look prickly but are in fact soft to the touch) are seen widely and by the end of the month some may be flowering.

Acknowledgement
The article was originally published on the Saturday Walkers Club webpage