plant photography – The Potwell Inn

This campsite in Pembrokeshire has the huge advantage of being about a quarter of a mile from a bus stop that’s part of a circular route around the local coastline. It’s called the Celtic Coaster and for £4 you can buy a day ticket that allows you to get on and off as many times as you like and at any of the stops. It’s ideal for walking and also ideal for shopping in St Davids because it runs every half an hour so if you get your skates on you can catch the bus to the centre, do a lively run around the shops and be back on the City Hall bus stop in time to catch the same bus back to the campsite. The lanes here are really narrow and often congested and parking in St Davids is as far from the shops as we are from the bus stop so it’s an environmental no-brainer to leave the campervan behind. Another plus is that the drivers are so cheerful and obliging that we usually get dropped off at the campsite entrance and yesterday we were such a merry bunch of passengers I thought we might even start singing. To be honest, the thought of that kind of atmosphere on one of our local city buses is a faraway dream; but a sense of community, shared values and belonging will have to be a part of any emergent culture to replace the hostile and suspicious communities of one that constitute the smouldering remains of culture wars.

But aside from that little redemptive challenge to the status quo, there was something else on my mind as we cut through Gospel Lane and down New Street towards the supermarket, because this wasn’t just about shopping but is also the scene of my ecological idiocy in 2019 when I uprooted a chunk of the plant which I subsequently discovered was the second of only two previous sightings. I’ve never shared the photos I took back in the van because I knew that the obvious question would be “why did you take this away to photograph it?” But I think I dare show one of them today because I found redemption on the car park wall! It’s not even a very good photograph – the lighting’s rubbish and it really doesn’t show enough of the key features, but that’s something you learn as you go along. Any way, if you scroll up to the top of this piece you’ll find what we found yesterday. That little solitary plant has now grown into the handsome stand we found yesterday. I could have done a celebratory jig but I lacked the nerve.

Photographing plants is a skill that takes a while to develop and I’m only just getting a grip on it. The Catch 22 is that you never know what the important features are until you know what the plant is. As some wag once said – the keys in the floras are only any use if you already know what you’ve got. So not being an expert I just take lots of photos from different angles, using a macro lens to capture fine detail and using a small ruler to measure some of the parts that I know will be important. With the Carrot family, for instance, the exact shape and dimensions of the seeds are crucial to getting an ID. The payback is that the closer you look, the more intensely beautiful the seeds become. You could spend a lifetime making handbuilt pots based on them and you’d never run out of inspiration. This is the point where science and art overlap. Here, for example, are the seeds of Rough Chervil that I photographed this week on the campsite. These days all my photos are taken on a Pixel 6a phone with an add on macro lens that costs less than £50. It’s a joy not having to lug a huge bag of kit around and all my stuff for an excursion fits into a small shoulder bag.

As we walked down to the bus stop I also caught sight of what turned out (after a lot of head scratching) to be Black Spleenwort. I really wanted it to be Lanceolate Spleenwort which would be a first record, but my selfish desires were trumped by good science. With ferns you really need to look at the shapes but also in microscopic detail at the way the spores are carried at the back of the leaves. If you’re at all interested in ferns – and I think they’re addictive – the little green swellings called “indusia” contain the “sori” the almost microscopic bundles of spores called sporangia, and which contain the spores themselves – millions of them! Here’s a selection of photos I took near the bus stop. It’s not all about glamorous adventures in the jungle!

The greatest advantage of the phone camera is the sheer convenience I suppose but it’s not always the best tool for the job. The upper two photos were both taken with my Pixel 3 phone – it was a sunny day, the subject, a beautiful wooly thistle – Cirsium eriophorum was sitting still, and depth of field, the extent to which the photo remained focused throughout the whole depth of the subject wasn’t a great problem. I knew what it was and in the perfect conditions it was a useful aide memoire of our walk. My intention in taking the picture was also to have a sample for the iRecord software while I’m learning to use it. I don’t suppose for a moment the County Recorder would be thrilled to receive yet another record of a pretty common plant, but I’ve discovered over many years of failures that it’s better to learn to use new software before getting things right turns an opportunity into a panic. The other reason for using the phone was because we were out for a fairly long walk and the thought of lugging a camera, flash unit and tripod up a steep hill was a bit daunting. However, no matter – it all worked seamlessly and I was able to snatch the shot without making my companions wait.

The lower photo was a different kettle of fish altogether. Yesterday we met up with our grandchildren and their mum & dad in the Forest of Dean – two trips in a week. My secret plan (well it’s not secret any more because I’m writing about it) is to encourage our oldest grandson to get involved in natural history – he’s really keen, and if we can release just one more young naturalist into the world I’ll feel my efforts have been worthwhile. So we were doing a very informal session on the difference between sedges and rushes – you know the rhyme, sedges have edges, rushes are round. These little mnemonics are really catchy and useful and of course they make the task of identifying plants so much simpler. If you can get the family right you can jump start the process of finding the name, and nothing fires you up more than a few early successes.

But in the process, I noticed a Euphorbia lurking in the margins of the track. They’re unmistakable as a family, but getting down to the species or further needs closer observation which would have taken more time than I had. So I took a photo – it’s photo number three.

One of the most difficult lessons I’ve found, in identifying plants, is to evolve a modus operandi for looking at them. Field botanists who know their stuff (exactly like birdwatchers) talk about the “jizz”. As you get more familiar with plants there are many that some lucky souls can identify from ten feet away but which will tie me into knots as I plough through the keys. I say to myself that it’s like practising piano scales, it’s hard, repetitive work but it’s essential. When there’s no time to identify a tricky plant on the spot I could, I suppose take a small piece home and identify it but – and it’s a big but – unless it’s so common I probably know it already – there’s always a possibility that I’m damaging something precious and so a careful photo that embodies the key features is the better way of bringing some evidence home.

What’s wrong with the photo, then? Well, it’s not terribly well focused and not of sufficient quality to enlarge greatly. I didn’t take any measurements and so I’d have to guess how tall it is and how large are those very odd flowers. I didn’t scuffle around at the base to see what was going on there (stolons? rhizome? – all that kind of stuff) and also I didn’t get nearly enough detail on the leaves, how they were attached to the stalk, whether they were opposite or alternate, I didn’t make a note of the soil or the neighbours or where exactly it was (edge of wood, middle of footpath, deep shade, on the edge of a pond) and I didn’t think to take a grid reference from my phone. Once again, it’s not the end of the world because it’s almost certainly a wood spurge – Euphorbia amygdaloides – but let’s say it was a rarity, for instance, then if I presented it to the county recorder for verification they’d probably tell me (in the nicest possible way) to get lost.

So – message to myself –

1. Take the tripod and camera etc.
2. Make the notes
3. Practice more

But finally, develop good habits. Habits – good ones, that is, are the foundation of all virtues because if you develop them well, you’ll do the right thing without having to think about it and that will keep you out of all sorts of scrapes – both botanical and ethical.

Enough! there’s just enough time to write about the journey home. We discovered that the old Severn Bridge was closed and so we were left with the choice between driving in the wrong direction almost to Newport and then heading back; OR driving up to Gloucester alongside the River Severn and along the edge of the Forest of Dean and back down the A38 with the Cotswold escarpment on our left. Well that was a no-brainer. Forest on the left, Cotswolds on the right and the glorious Severn between them, on a sunny day in high summer with the windows wound down in the campervan, tractors cutting and gathering silage in the fields all around and everywhere the delicious smells of summer and salt water and the joy of being out in it after weeks on lockdown.

Alleluia I say! And finally, some photos from the Bath Skyline walk.