February 2026 Ramsbury Nature Notes by Peter Marren

Petty spurge

It is mid-winter, cold and frosty, and with less than eight hours of daylight. Wild plants seem to be asleep. Except that in many cases they aren’t. These days, annuals such as groundsel, shepherd’s purse and red dead-nettle flower as freely in winter as in summer. Under south-facing brick walls, which act as storage heaters, the vegetation can even be quite lush. Near the Paddocks, for instance, there was a dense flowering of petty spurge, a humble relative of the bush-like spurges of the Mediterranean and the cactus-like ones of African deserts. Like all spurges it contains sticky, milk-white latex that maybe helps this plant to withstand the cold.

Some fungi are also fruiting well in the cold, especially bracket fungi on logs and stumps. A brown mushroom, super-shiny as if sprayed with lacquer, and growing in clumps on dead or dying trees is the velvet shank, also called the winter mushroom. In Asian cuisine it is gathered for soups and stir-fries, and a close relative is cultivated for that purpose. Another winter fungus to spot is the delightful scarlet elf-cup, thimbles of bright red among bright green moss.

A very surprising winter plant is the bee orchid. Not the flowers, which appear in midsummer, but growing as a rosette of greyish green, strap-like leaves. These manufacture food for the plant for months before its brief flowering (by which time the leaves are usually battered and even blackening). Maybe those astonishing bee-like flowers require a lot of stored energy and so it must start early. We are lucky to have several colonies of bee orchids, though they are easy to miss, and vary in numbers from year to year. Muntjac deer are active in winter and often enter gardens where they are partial to tender leaves and flowers. I often spot a buck muntjac in the wet field opposite my house, and sometimes see it slinking across the road, snuffling as it goes. Its barks are a familiar sound, proclaiming my garden as its rightful territory, and to attract females to its patch. Unlike other deer, muntjac breed all year round. No wonder it is now probably our commonest deer, despite being here for less than a century (a Chinese native, they originated as escapes from Woburn Abbey).