A wildlife diary
Mary Smith 33 Gaynes Park Road, Upminster, Essex RM14 2HJ
April started with some glorious weather like high summer, but on the 7th we had 3
heavy hail storms with loads of thunder and lightning, and the lawn looked as though it
was covered in snow. Other areas, including near Chelmsford, had snow showers all
day, but no thunderstorms. The next night there was a hard frost to -4°C. Our poor plum
tree was in full bloom, but the hail and the frost have probably eliminated our crop
before it has started. Only a few days later, I planted the early potatoes and the temperature
was around 19 - 20°C all afternoon. They say that most countries have a climate, but
Britain only has weather. How true this is, but weather is much more interesting than
climate.
People have commented that this is a good spring for bumblebees. There are loads in the
garden, and out in the countryside, especially noticeable on sunny days. I am afraid I
cannot tell the kinds apart, mostly because I can never get to see them properly as they
move fast and I am not willing to catch them. The 7-spot ladybirds have also been
everywhere abundant, in spite of my fears that the early chill in February (see May
Newsletter) had finished most of them off. I have not seen the foreign one with brown
legs yet. A little later there were butterflies everywhere, especially on the sunny days. So
a good spring for flying insects generally, perhaps?
In our garden we have Primroses which have been there for at least 40 years (when we
moved in) and could be naturally here. About 20 years ago we introduced Cowslips,
and they thrive in big patches on the lawn. They look beautiful in late April and May,
but it does mean that lawn-mowing goes in funny patterns for several months. I was
delighted to notice that this year we have a plant of the hybrid False Oxlip (see plate 1),
with flat yellow flowers like a Primrose but several on the top of the same stem like a
Cowslip. It has chosen a strange place to grow, away from both its parents by the compost
heap. I cannot help wondering why it took 20 years for a hybrid to appear. It is this
hybrid, albeit sterile, whose Latin name is Primula x polyantha, that is the plant parent
of the familiar garden Polyanthas.
We have a theory as to why it took so long to get a hybrid False Oxlip. The seeds of
Cowslip that we were given by my mother (primary source or provenance unknown)
produced noticeably stouter, more robust plants than we were used to seeing in the wild.
Perhaps they were a foreign strain, we wondered. Or, looking back now, perhaps they
were all tetraploid (both British native Cowslips and Primroses are diploid), which could
account for the big plants. In the garden now, there are about 10 of the very robust
plants, all the others (well over one hundred) are much smaller and the same as the wild
ones. Perhaps most of the tetraploid ones have been lost, and the reverted plants that we
now have are diploid (meiosis happening twice in the production of gametes?). And
Essex Field Club Newsletter No. 48, September 2005 5