March 2026 Ramsbury Nature Notes by Peter Marren

Hazel catkins (Corylus avellana)

February is snowdrop month, a sign that spring is on the way, that the days are getting brighter despite the cold and, this year, the near-incessant rain. Snowdrop flowers are worth a close look (pick it and take it apart, there’s plenty to spare). If you peer into the open flower you find a marvellous symmetry: three outer, pure-white lobes, and then three inner ones forming a cup, each streaked with bright green on the inside, and with a V-shaped green blob on the outside where the lobe ends in a notch. Inside that lies a cluster of stamens, six of them like tiny carrots, arranged like a hexagon. And inside those lies the single style, shaped like an icicle. We call it the snowdrop, but the botanical name is Galanthus, the milk-flower. Enthusiasts who grow snowdrops are called galanthophiles. Two snowdrop folk-names recorded from our county are Candlemas-bell (Candlemas was on February 2nd) and shame-faced maiden. She is shame-faced because she is naked, for this flower lacks any bracts to cloth it when in bud.

The yellow lamb’s-tail catkins of hazel seem particularly prolific this year. Some bushes form a haze of yellow, some with a frost-like crown of wild clematis or old man’s beard. The dangling catkins disperse their yellow pollen in the wind, but I doubt whether one grain in a million, possibly even a billion, ever lands on the tiny red female flower of another hazel bush. There are few insects about right now but a few hardy flies do feed on hazel pollen, notably a little dark hoverfly called the hazel spot-tail.

While other wildflowers are in short supply in late winter, the logs and stumps are often festooned in fungi, encouraged by the wetness. On a single stump I spotted brackets, curtaincrusts, woodwarts and turkeytails, all busily consuming the dead wood and converting it to sawdust. Poke around a bit more and you may find slime moulds, variously coloured pink, yellow and grey, primitive forms of life that seem to straddle the divide between fungal and animal life. And under a beech tree I was pleased to spot a little brown toadstool that specialises in feeding on beechmast, growing out from the decaying nut like a fairy parasol. The smaller the fungus, the longer its name, it seems. This one is called Flammulaster carpophilus.