July 2025 Ramsbury Nature Notes by Peter Marren

Ground elder

By the beginning of June, the wonderful hawthorn blossom, and the foam of cow parsley that lines our lanes, were over. In their place came a notable blossoming of elderflower, privet and honeysuckle, the last two lending their sweet scents to the summer air, especially on warm, windless evenings. In my neighbour’s garden, a stump which has been topped by ivy for the past decade is now a mass of honeysuckle, a scented froth of pink and yellow. Honeysuckle climbs in a spiral, thus producing the wood for those elegant twisty walking sticks. Two beautiful insects depend on honeysuckle. The flowers are visited by elephant hawkmoths, whose long tongues can reach the nectar embedded deep inside the flower. And the leaves are the sole foodplant of the white admiral butterfly; though probably not in your garden for it’s a forest insect.

Meanwhile, cow parsley has been replaced on the verges by hogweed and ground-elder, massed umbelheads in the same family as carrots and parsnips (indeed we have the wild ancestors of carrots and parsnips in the parish). Ground-elder was introduced long ago for pottage. When young and tender, the leaves taste much like spinach. A notorious garden weed (because it’s almost impossible to get rid of), ground-elder is now among the commonest flowers of grass verges in midsummer. Both it and hogweed attract many insects, not so much in search of nectar as pollen. To a beetle or a hoverfly, their sour scents spell not sugar but protein, the building block of life. Beetles scrunch up the pollen grains with their powerful jaws. With their hoover-like mouthparts, the flies suck it up.

Have butterflies recovered from last year’s disastrously wet spring? My impression is that some have, but others haven’t. Orange-tips, and now marbled whites and meadow browns, are out in their usual numbers, but whites, common blues, and commas are not. And for the first time I didn’t see a single grizzled or dingy skipper on Spring Hill. Hopefully, they were keeping their heads down and will return.