Off to see Anna’s parents’ new house, in a new county. Great Malvern is beautiful. The hills looked like this…
The foxgloves looked like this…
Would be grateful if you could tell me what this one was…
And Malvern looked like this…
All the photos can be seen here.
Isn’t that speedwell? I’m no expert, mind.
Ah, you got my hopes up, there, but the speedwell doesn’t match the pictures here:
http://www.all-creatures.org/picb/wfshl-slenderspeedwell.html
The speedwell’s petals are bit more elongated, and they have little pokey things poking out of them (stamens and pistil, apparently). But you do have the accolade of being the best guess yet.
Hmm. That is indeed an accolade, as long as I’m not the only guess to date, that is.
*looks around comments box*
In any event, I’m afraid it was my only guess. What you need is a handy book
in fact, isn’t that your fella on the cover?
Yes, gosh darn it, it is. And tantalisingly out of reach.
Actually I bought a handy guide for a friend at Christmas – Wild Flowers from Collins Nature Guides, by W. Lippert, D. Podleich. It handily groups the flowers by colour, so people like me can say “Er, it was sort of blue-ish”, and dive into the sort-of-blue-ish section. (Whereas grouping by, say, DNA code, I find somewhat problematic.)
Speedwells have 4 petals, this has 5; probably escaped garden forget-me-not , there are 3 wild species but wrong habitat
Thanks for that, Liz. Forget-me-not seems close. We started looking at forget-me-nots and widened the search to borage. We now think that it might be green alkanet, which is part of the borage family, and therefore a sibling of forget-me-not.
A picture of green alkanet is linked from here (click on pentaglottis sempervirens):
http://www.floralimages.co.uk/index3.htm#Boraginaceae
and more pictures linked from here:
http://www.bioimages.org.uk/HTML/T1195.HTM
The green alkanet pictures above suggest a slightly more ridged petal. But the leaf, buds, stem and the white bit in the middle are all identical.
