other guiding an electric razor across the bristles on his upturned chin! He didn't see me
but I saw him! A lone cyclist shaking with fear and mouthing obscenities in the middle
of the A12 at four o'clock on a Sunday morning presents an incongruous sight! It's not
the best of ways to start the day.
Fortunately, the western boundary of the A12 at Ingatestone consists almost entirely of
fields and it is possible to walk alongside it and scan the verges through binoculars. As
elsewhere in Essex, Danish Scurvy Grass Cochlearia danica is the most successful
immigrant from the coastal saltings, the central reservation being pink with bloom in
April. Relatively few, though, grow on the verges on either side and I have only found it
once away from the A12 - on a housing estate a few hundred yards distant. Another
common but less flashy colonist is Buck's-horn Plantain Plantago coronopus, which
not only thrives on the stony margins of the A12 but on the salt splashed verges and
pavement cracks of residential roads nearby. It is very common on a slip-road verge of
the Al 2/B1002 junction at Heybridge (Ingatestone), a habitat which it shares most years
with Lesser Sea Spurrey Spergularia marina, Narrow-leaved Bird's-foot Trefoil Lotus
glaber and Grass-leaved Orache Atriplex littoralis. Nearby, on a similar verge, a colony
of Sea Mouse-ear Cerastium diffusum flourished for a few years in the late 1990s until
a run of very mild winters reduced the salt content of the bare soil where they were
growing.
Road works on the Al2 may be a pain to motorists but they present a window of
opportunity to plants and botanists. Recent repair work to the bridge over the A12 in
Fryerning Lane resulted in large strips of bare soil being exposed on either side of the
bridge supports. These were quickly colonised by a wide range of plants, not exclusively
salt loving but including many that flourish on the coast, Fennel Foeniculum vulgare,
Wild Carrot Daucus carota, Hoary Cress Lepidium draba, Sticky Groundsel Senecio
viscosus and Perennial Wall Rocket Diplotaxis tenuifolia among them. Our have car
will travel society offers wonderful opportunities for the seeds of many plants to hitch a
lift to pastures new and my only record from the parish of Corn Parsley Petroselinum
segetum - another species largely restricted to the coast nowadays - comes from a driveway
on the Tor Bryan estate! Likewise White Campion Silene alba, a common enough plant
in Essex but one that normally shuns the heavy clay soils in this area. Some people, I
know, are worried that the Continental varieties of some common plants, which are
currently Channel hopping on the wheels of cars, will eventually interbreed with or even
replace our native subspecies but that is more likely to happen through injudicious planting
of wild flower 'meadows', as anyone who has waded through two foot high swathes of
Bird's-foot Trefoil Lotus corniculatus in such places will be aware. The fact that many
species have successfully adopted a new means of transporting their seeds is evidence
of the dynamism and resilience of so many plants, which (along with their beauty) attracted
me to botany in the first place and if some of them come complete with a French accent,
so be it. I look forward to finding many more opportunistic plants taking their chance on
the A12 in future - but it won't be on my bike!
14
Essex Field Club Newsletter No. 44, May 2004