6/9/09: Lesnes Abbey to Erith (part 2 - north of Eastern Way and along the sea wall)

Along Footpath 1, immediatly north of Eastern Way, were several Elders, heavy with fruit, and festooned with female Hop plants in cone, as here:

There was a Goat's-rue, several Sloe and a small tree with sweetish, round, miniature Plum-type fruits. A mixed group of Blue and Long-tailed Tits was active in Elders. A Heron was on a drainage channel bank.

Turning right at the junction of Footpaths 1 and 2 (opposite the Crossness gate, near the Wind Pump) I crossed the bridge over another drainage ditch and was delighted to find my first ever Strawberry Clover (Trifolium fragiferum). There were approximately three square yards of it covering the verge by a field gate.

Strawberry Clover - so-named because of the swelling red seed heads - growing on Erith Marshes

This Marsh OR Golden Dock (below - I am still working on identification from sample material collected) was nearby, along with Hoary Cress, Creeping Cinquefoil, Common Toadflax, Common St. John's Wort, 5 Tall Yellow Melilot and Sea Beet.

The Strawberry Clover was close to the track leading to this wildlife observation 'hide', from which one has a great :-( view of the new waste incinerator under construction. According to http://www.wastexchange.co.uk/detailNews.phpsc?doc=/GARWER/DOCS/news/98C-375-D77 'Once built, the facility at Belvedere will recover 62MW of electricity from an average of 585,000 tonnes of waste each year, brought in by barges on the River Thames from central London. Up to 85,000 tonnes of material can also be brought in by road each year under the planning consent.'

In other words a vast tonnage of resources will be sent on a one way trip to oblivion, and put beyond the scope of re-use by anyone alive today. It will also undermine recycling efforts by locking Councils into contracts to supply large amounts of material to burn for years to come. We are supposed to be impressed by a claimed thermal efficiency of 27%. There is no sign of a combined-heat-and-power link up. Oh, and don't we now realise that marshland is needed to accomodate flood water? So here we are, another grand example of the sort of crazed, disjointed, mid 20th century approach to economics and the environment that still hold sway in the parties currently represented in Westminster.

Looking back towards the 20th century. New waste (waste being the operative word) incinerator under construction on the marshes at Belvedere. Utter lunacy.

Taking the left fork as Footpath 2 headed up onto the sea wall, there was a Fennel plant, and then an extensive patch of Cypress Spurge (Euphorbia cyparissias), seen here in the foreground with Crossness Sewage Works to the west (another patch was found further east):

Looking across the Thames to Essex (below) we see the two wind turbines helping power Ford's Dagenham car plant

This white-flowered Sea Aster (Aster tripolium) was in full flower still, whereas the usual blue-flowered specimens were largely running to seed.

There were, to me, surprising numbers of Wild Carrot on the bank on the river side of the sea wall, not too far above the high tide line. There were several mats of Sickle Medick sprawling over the footpath on the river side of the fence by the 'Tech Guys' and 'Currys' warehouses (sort of contiguous with the site where I previously found the species off Church Manor Way - see post of 12/7/09). Unfortunately it was now too dark to get a photo.

Looking south-east across the Thames on the approaches to Erith (Littlebrook Power station chimney and QE2 bridge to the right), your correspondent (shadow) shoots the moon over Essex.

12/7/09: Encountering new species in Erith

Continuing my walk home from Lesnes Abbey (the long way round), I crossed Bronze Age Way into Erith (a road that is a classic example of crazed 20th century car-dependent thinking, long after everyone should have known better - and a blot on the landscape right next to a perfectly serviceable railway line).

This time I checked out the uncut field on the east corner of Church Manor Way, ringing with the sounds of a less usual type of grasshopper/cricket, whose whereabouts I just couldn't pin down, even though some sounded like they were outside the fence.

There were the usual suspects for the area such as Creeping Thistle, Common Mallow, Common Ragwort, Mugwort, Rocket and Field Bindweed, but also Wild Carrot, a clump of Horseradish and several Teasel.

Most distinctive were a couple of patches each of sprawling, floriferous legumes, one type with clusters of yellow flowers and one with strongly red-purple flowers. They were just a bit too far inside the fence to be able to get hold of and have a proper look, and I didn't have my binoculars. But the short of it is that my initial determination is Sickle Medick (Medicago sativa), a totally new species for me. Subspecies falcata is native to East Anglia but has been introduced elsewhere. Francis Rose ('The Wild Flower Key') says it hybridises with Lucerne to produce plants with flower colours extending to purple-black. It so happens that there are Lucerne plants just up the road, in a strip of land between Lower Road and Bronze Age Way.

Sickle Medick (???)

Hybrid (foreground) between Sickle Medick and Lucerne (???)

My primary objective had been to photograph the Ivy Broomrape (Orobanche hederae), in St John the Baptist Churchyard, Erith, at the junction of West St and Lower Rd. I'd visited two weeks ago, having read in the past that the species occurs here, but my mobile phone was out of juice at the time so I hadn't been able to take any pictures. I did, however, count some 378 flower spikes - and that almost certainly wasn't all of them.

The leafless ivy parasite Ivy Broomrape, St. John's churchyard

Ivy Broomrape occured in three places near where I lived in Bristol, but here the flower spikes were sometimes feet from the nearest bit of Ivy, coming up in grass between graves.

According to the London Wildweb website, 'ivy broomrape [is] a nationally scarce species, [here] growing on Atlantic ivy (Hedera helix ssp hibernica); this is thought to be a recent colonisation from a nearby native population.'

Now in flower, I was able to confirm that an umbellifer under the gate by the Scout hut on St. Fidelis Rd was Fool's Parsley (Aethusa cynapium), with its distinctive narrow bracteoles hanging down from the partial umbels. This is another of those species described as 'common' that doesn't crop up very often, and it's the first time I've found it in Bexley.

Fool's Parsley

There was a plant of Shaggy Soldier in the road gutter at the end of Pleasant View.

This extensive, dense webbing, was draped over Cotoneaster at the bottom of Stonewood Rd, with no obvious occupants - but I didn't take a particularly careful look.

The narrow bank at the foot of Bexley Rd, high above the descending Fraser Rd, had an interesting flora, and there were hints of past cultivation before, one suspects, it was deemed too dangerous to continue.

There were about nine violet-blue-flowered plants of Viper's Bugloss (a better view to confirm ID was achieved with binoculars on 26 July), a new Bexley record for me, plus lots of Opium and Common Poppy, 'feral' cabbage type plants, some white-flowered Red Valerian and an unidentified (presumed non-native) grass with very large seed heads.

Opium Poppy seed heads

Viper's Bugloss (Echium vulgare) with Prickly Lettuce

An interestingly 'exotic' grass