Dene Park starts to look a little autumnal

Its a little while since I've visited Dene Park, and the leaves of the trees and some of the bracken are now starting to turn just a little, reminding us of the rapidly shortening days and the onset of autumn.

As I arrived in the car park several dragonflies were circling the gravelled area, possibly male brown hawkers, Aeshna grandis. Too fast to take photos I'm afraid.

As I got into the wood, there was some bird song, including magpies and the fine hooting of a Brown Owl
The number of plants in flower is gradually decreasing, but to compensate a late burst of Eyebright, Euphrasia, flowers have appeared in the verges and open patches, I didn't even know it grew here at Dene Park! Its official flowering season is July to September, so this should be the last flush of flowering.

The leaves are a glossy oval in overall shape, hairless above, but they are so very deeply cut- toothed, so that you almost lose the oval in the pattern of dentations. The stems and sometimes the leaves are purplish.

The flowers are really wonderfully coloured, with their pure white backgrounds, splashed with clear purple lines and yellow flushes seen here on the lower lips. The stamens or inner floral tube can only just be seen, a counterpointed very dark violet against the pale throats of the flowers.

The flower form is pretty fantastic as well, with the upper lip twice bi-lobed and upturned, and the lower lip projecting much further out and widely tri-lobed, each lobe of the lower lip also clearly divided into two, giving an overall appearance rather like an orchid!

Here is a flower from Polhill Bank yesterday to compare, in particular to note the obvious projection of the inner floral tube:

There are about 21 currently recognised species in the genus in the UK, with 60+ hybrids, and they are almost impossible to separate, so Francis Rose describes only Euphrasia nemorosa, as a typical species. It could well have been a different species that I was looking at today on the wet clay of the woodland in the Low Weald and perhaps yet another that I was looking at yesterday on the shallow and skeletal chalk soils at Polhill Bank.

Euphrasia is used by herbalists in poultices and teas to treat eye complaints, and is reputed to have a range of other medicinal properties as well. Its therefore definitely "a sight for sore eyes"!

The other new plant I saw today was Goldenrod, Solidago virgaurea, I usually only see Canadian Goldenrod, Solidago canadensis, a much bigger and overall very different plant. Francis Rose has Goldenrod as growing in dry woods, so it is therefore a bit confusing to find it in Dene Park, but there was no doubt that this is what it was. I'll try to remember to get a photo next time!

The first fungi of the autumn season have started to appear, and here is one I found just on the side of the path,

while this is a whitish bracket, porose on the underside, on a dead branch just off the path in the scrambles area

As I completed the circuit more patrolling hawker dragonflies, probably either Southern or Migrant Hawkers but including a low-flying one along the last uphill section of the path that looked completely black at first (and also second!) glance. I've absolutely no idea what it could have been - but what a great walk it turned out to be, in what seemed at first to be not very promising conditions!

Polhill Bank

After doing a bit of College work, some shopping, calling in at the Parish Office and painting some external windows, I took Monty for his afternoon walk up to a bit of the North Kent Downs I have never been to before, Polhill Bank.

The M25 cuts through the Downs here, but Polhill Bank also faces the Darenth Valley as well as the Gault Vale looking South towards Sevenoaks, so you get the contrast of peaceful rural views delighting the eye with the roar of traffic in your ears. The easiest way to access the reserve is to park in the A224 layby on the other side of the M25 cutting and cross the footbridge over the motorway towards the reserve, looking down on the rushing traffic of London's orbital motorway 70 - 80 feet below your feet.

A quick path through the beech-woods on the skeletal soils of the crest leads you through the reserve gate and out onto the steep Bank itself, with the view opening out in front of you:

Just as I arrived a brownish raptor with a white rump and a long tail flew over. It looked like a female or immature Hen Harrier, Circus cyaneus, but of course it couldn't have been - wrong place, wrong season!
There was still a good variety of plants in flower, including the Devil's-bit Scabious, Succisa pratensis with its undivided leaves, although I usually associate this plant with wetter soils. Here is the one large patch I saw with one female Common Blue nectaring on one plant:

It is interesting to compare the Devil's-bit with a true Scabious, the Small Scabious, Scabiosa columbaria, a characteristic flower of the chalk downs in Kent. The outer flowers are much larger than the central ones, and the stamens that you can see are clearly balanced on their central filaments. Note the greyish spider surprisingly well camouflaged against the blue background,

A commoner flower across the small reserve as a whole is the Eyebright, Euphrasia species, the tiny whitish flowers of which are everywhere you look, and a fantastic flower when you look at them close up:

and here is the ubiquitous Wild Basil, Clinopodium vulgare, with its dense whorls of flowers which however only open several at a time,

and another Labiate, the beautiful and very common Marjoram, Origanum vulgare, with its much lighter flowers in tighter packed terminal panicles, each with their beautiful projecting stamens, and the aromatic leaves with much less impressed veins (seen in the original photos). If you click on the photo and expand it up, you can just see a thrips or thunderfly on one of the flowers at the top right of the panicle:

This is the Dwarf Thistle, Cirsium acaule, a plant nearly completely specific to calcareous grassland,

and this is the odd-looking Carline Thistle, Carlina vulgaris, which may look strange but with its purple sheen, still very attractive to bees:

while this is Common Soapwort, Saponaria officinalis, a common plant on different soils in the region,

Here is the low growing Lesser Trefoil, Trifolium dubium, creeping along the ground,

and the even lower growing Hoary Plantain, Plantago media, with its attractive pinkish flowers the only plantain pollinated by insects as opposed to wind-pollinated

This is the Common Knapweed, Centaurea nigra, but here on these poor soils it grows to a fraction of the size I normally see it in the woods, The composite flower-head however remains unmistakeable:

and here is the Perforate St Johns Wort, Hypericum perforatum, with the characteristic black dots on the petal edges just visible if you click and expand the picture,

and finally I couldn't resist putting in a last flower, the Rock-rose, Helianthemum nummularium, although its a rather blurry picture, it is still so fundamentally characteristic of these poor chalky soils.

However on several of the Kent Wildlife Trust chalkland reserves all this diversity is uncder threat from this one yellowish invasive grass, Tor-grass, which threatens to out-compete and overwhelm the floristic diversity of the chalk downland, unless the grazing is very carefully and flexibly managed:

Although its nearly the end of the butterfly season, and the day was very breezy, the open ground was packed with Meadow Browns, Maniola jurtina,

some generally rather small Gatekeepers, Pyronia tithonus. This one is slightly unusual in that it appears to have only one white spot on the dark eye.

and the occasional Common Blue, Polyommatus icarus, like this female, (postscript - it is possible that this is a fairly faded female Chalkhill Blue, Polyommatus coridon, perhaps indicated by the slight indication of lines running across the outer white fringe of the forewing)

Eden Valley walk - The River Medway

After dropping Simon off in Leigh to catch his lift to the airport for his cricket club tour to Portugal, I moved on to the other side of the village to walk Monty upriver along the Eden Valley Path towards Penshurst. Most of the walk was on the Penshurst Estate owned by Viscount de Lisle. The first stage was along the North bank of the River Medway which is quite narrow here, although we are only a few miles upriver from Tonbridge:

The river lies in a valley that is controlled by the Tonbridge flood relief scheme,

and from time to time the whole area is deliberately allowed to flood to prevent the waters rising in the middle of Tonbridge - hence these barriers used to close the road when the flood gates are closed to block the flow of the river a mile lower down, just upriver of Tonbridge

The banks of the river are very steep and the river looks as though it is quite regimented and "canalised" but there is still quite a good mix of vegetation, such as teasel, willowherb, ragwort, the exotic Impatiens and many others,

The Impatiens noli-me-tangere is particularly popular with bumblebees, despite being a non-native:

There is also the occasional clump of hemp-agrimony Eupatorium cannabinum with its pinkish flower-heads each with 4 - 6 tubular pinkish flowers gathered into much larger loose umbels, not very daisy-like in overall appearance. One of the give-aways is the Y-shaped stigma that you can see projecting from some of the flowers, unusually long in Eupatorium

As the flowers develop. more and more Y-shaped stigmas project, until the umbels as a whole look covered in white fluff.

There was also one patch of yellow loosestife with a few flowers left. but most have now been fertilised, producing the odd rather distinctive globular fruit (one celled capsules, each with many seeds) with their clasped sepals and projecting styles. This is indeed a rather strange member of the Primrose family!

On the river itself the banded demoiselles Calopteryx splendens dance along like little helicopters with wings a-blur over the water weed

The river is also lined on one or both sides with poplar and ash trees, with the occasional dead stump left with an inviting woodpecker hole, perhaps useful for bats, or even a little owl,

The plants and other wildlife of "lettuce land".

In the dusty margins of the fields, by the banks of the irrigation reservoir, alongside the blowsy hedgerows, and along the banks of the River Bourne a surprising amount of activity in and around the intensive cropping of lettuce can be found:

The first bit of colour was from the bright pink and white of the field bindweed:

and here is a Hawkbit, although not so commonly found here at the moment:

This Birds Foot trefoil on the other hand is widespread:

Lettuce land

On Thursday morning I was mainly tied up with parish administration and sorting out my own (and Simon's) car insurance for next year. On Thursday afternoon the ground was quite muddy after heavy rainfall and the windy overcast conditions pointed me towards the SouthEast of the Parish onto the better drained farmland where L. J. Betts grow outdoor lettuce. Much of this specific parcel of land has only been used for lettuce for the last four or five years, and production has been greatly facilitated by the construction of a new reservoir, funded by Europe:

The lettuces are planted out using a mix of Sphagnum and Sedge Moss peats that creates a solid cube of peat that is half buried in the soil, and the seedling roots through into the soil from there:

The fields are planted out semi-mechanically on a field scale:

Half grown, the bands of red and green varieties make an attractive pattern set out in the middle distance across the fields:

Although close to, the lines are a bit "wobblier":

Quickly the lettuces become ready to harvest, usually by youngsters from Eastern Europe, working in cutting gangs feeding the cut heads in their plastic sleeves onto the conveyor belt feeding the heads into the harvester/packing unit:

The lettuce growing is rotated around the fields, normally with cereal rest crops, which are in turn harvested, both for grain and straw. Here are some traditional straw bales cut from a "rest" field. You can see the rich flat land of the Medway river terraces in the foreground where the lettuces and cereals are being grown, with the Lower Greensand Ridge rising up in the background:

On the farm to the South, owned by G. M. Day and Sons Ltd, field beans have been used as the break or rest crop, in a main cereal and oil seed rape rotation. The beans are sprayed to dessicate them just prior to harvest (hence the dark brown to blackish colour of the plants), which makes the crop easier to combine. The beans go to animal feed, while the plants are ploughed back in as a sort of green manure:

And finally on the farm next door, owned by the Teachers family, the winter barley has already been harvested and the land disc-ploughed. Today it is already being cultivated and sown with next year's crop in one multi-purpose pass, although which crop it will be is unknown to me as yet:

The black-headed gulls await with interest the grubs that the cultivator turns up - what a feast it is for them!

Tomorrow I'll load up the photos of the wildlife that I managed to spot in the margins of the "lettuce land" fields despite the strong breeze and limited habitat available!