I don’t know what it is about Rue but its leaves lend their name to several other plants including a little fern called Wall Rue – Asplenium ruta-muraria that grows outside on a stone wall near our flat, and this plant, Rue Leaved Saxifrage – Saxifraga tridactylites that’s set up shop all along the road. You’d have to be quick to find it though because it’s an annual which flowers early and then pretty much disappears until the following spring. Once you get your eye in it’s easy to identify. The leaves really do resemble the leaves of Rue which, come to think of it is a neophyte that’s set up shop here in the south so you may never see it in the wild. But the giveaway are the sticky glandular hairs which are pretty clear in the photo. Plants have all sorts of survival strategies; but sometimes they just get lucky and this one keeps going by reproducing itself so early in the year that it escapes the attention of the council sprayers. Why our neighbours work themselves up into such foaming indignation about a few tiny plants in the pavement is beyond me, but they do – and they write furious letters to the council denouncing the evils of weeds and their effect on property values. Sure enough the assassins are never far behind although here they’ve given up on glyphosate and have resorted to salt. You can hear the plants laughing and after a brief period when they look dead enough to give the Council a break, they come back in full vigour.
Back at home our recent Dartmoor trip continues to refresh our minds like a bubbling spring and we’re already planning a return. Going through a previous set of photos and notes we remembered that we’d spotted about half a dozen Dunlin up near Great Staple Tor on a previous visit; completely unaware of their rarity we hid behind a rock and watched them for half an hour.
I’ve spent the day collaborating on writing a very short description of a walk for a field trip later in the year. You’ve no idea (or perhaps you have) what hard work it is to steer four strong individualists towards a common purpose. My forthcoming talk next month on the use of wildlife databases and apps to help nature lovers find what we’re looking for had to be cancelled because my co-presenter died suddenly and quite unexpectedly yesterday. We’d all turned up for another lecture and suddenly it was cancelled and everyone was in complete shock and disbelief.
It was Rob who first helped me to identify the Rue Leaved Saxifrage in the photo, and he was my go-to teacher for all botanical enquiries. He was an inveterate explorer and you would sometimes spot him rooting around for rare plants on the central reservation of a busy dual carriageway with buses, lorries and cars dashing past. He would cheerfully spend a year on a seashore project thirty miles distant, travelling back and forth in buses or on the train because he didn’t own a car. It’s funny isn’t it. I spent my working life looking after grieving people and yet when it comes close to me I’m useless at dealing with it.