Driving along the A4173 from Stroud to Gloucester, you’d never know there was a national nature reserve hiding behind the hedgerow as you drive past the Edgemoor Inn. On the opposite side of the road to the Inn, stretching from the road up the hillside, Rudge Hill is a wildflower meadow with more orchids than you can shake a stick at. There are special members of the orchid family growing here – helleborines – and a wooded copse where a a rare orchid is in all its glory.
Well, to be accurate, you can find both winged and wingless butterflies at Strawberry banks – I know this sounds like a cryptic crossword puzzle. Mmmm, there’s a thought maybe I could start a new career! The answers would involve a lot of letters so they’d also make good Scrabble words. The wingless butterfly I’m talking about is the Butterfly Orchid, a lovely, modest flower which is the latest of a host of orchids that grow at Strawberry Banks near Chalford. Common spotted orchids are also gracing the sunny slopes right now and it won’t be long before pyramidal orchids are flowering. As for the winged butterfly, this idilic limestone grassland is also a place where you’ll find plemty of them of them zipping around, especially on a warm day.
The end of May and beginning of June sees the butterfly world start to really take off. There’ve been a few lovely butterflies pottering around during early spring (orange tip, brimstone and peacock mainly) but now the most showy members of the insects rock up to Nature’s party.
Male adonis blue butterfly – credit:
Adonis was the God in the Greek myths that we associate with exceptional handsomenss and beauty, and the butterfly named after him is a stunningly eye-catching one. During the last week of May and into early June, this electric-blue butterfly (few photos really do justice to its colour) shines brightly on sunny days as it flies around looking either for a female to mate with or one of its favourite flowers to feed on. The female isn’t blue but mainly dark brown – a common story as the female of many species is a brown colour to keep her hidden from predators – though there can be a blue sheen on where the wings are close to its body.
At this time of year, there’s a female that shamelessly flaunts her figure to attract a male for the night. She certainly doesn’t hide her light under a bushel and turns parts of Stroud into a ‘green light’ district with her unbridled desires.
But a one-night stand is all she craves and once that’s satisfied, her light is extinguished as she crawls away to lay her eggs and then die. More tragic heroine in a Charlotte Bronte novel than a Jilly Cooper pot-boiler.
Beware of what’s hiding in the undergrowth: they’re black, very hairy and large – well, by caterpillar standards anyway. Woolly bear is the nick-name given to the caterpillar of the garden tiger moth because, as the name suggests, it’s covered with hairs – lots of them. It looks black but in reality the hairs are a mixture of colours: shorter black ones and ginger ones nestling amongst long white-coloured ones.
I guess you’ll recognise this flower straight away – during late April and May, cow parsley seems to erupt out of nowhere as if nature’s said to hell with the diet and sprayed frothy, whipped cream everywhere. I’m so pleased attitudes towards this underappreciated plant have changed from something local councils strimmed out of existence in the 1970s and 80s, to being left to joyously brighten verges and fields – not to mention being motorway service stations for huge numbers of insects.
So which name do you use? Cow parsley seems to be the usual one, however, I prefer Queen Anne’s lace as it aptly describes the beautifully intricate delicacy of the flowerheads. Each ‘flower’ isn’t really one flower, but hundreds of tiny ones in a cluster resembling an umbrella – it belongs to a group of plants which scientists call umbellifers, coming from the Latin umbella meaning a sunshade or parasol.
It’s the last flourish of orchids right now and Rudge Hill near Painswick is an ideal place to enjoy this. The flowers of fragrant orchids and common spotted orchids were starting to finish when I visited the site the other day, but pyramidal orchids are in their prime and looking sooo perky. It’s also peak time for meadow flowers and there are more flowers than you can shake a stick at showing themselves off in the sun with the accompanying butterflies dancing around.
Added to all this is a fantastic 180 degree view from the top, taking in Painswick, the church, Sheepscombe and into the distance along the Painswick valley. It’s such a sublime site, especially on a sunny day, that I dare you to not to break into a ‘Sound of Music’ moment: you know the one – the opening scene where Julie Andrews runs through the meadow on the mountainside, arms outstretched singing ‘The hills are alive….’. And then you can recover your composure in the fabulous Edgemoor Inn just across the road. So this is 4 star wildlife watching!
The roll-call of flowers is captivating as are their names: fairy flax, rest-harrow, yellow rattle, common scabious, bird’s foot trefoil, heath bedstraw, wild thyme, centuary, dyer’s greenweed, horseshoe vetch, rock rose, milkwort, lady’s bedstraw…I counted over 25 different species in flower the other day.
There were also twayblades – one of the orchids but easily missed as it has a flower stalk of small, green flowers. Look for two very broad leaves at ground level – these are the only leaves it has and the flower stalk grows upwards from the middle where they join. The name twayblade comes from the old English words for two and leaves.
You won’t miss the butterflies though that are flitting around everywhere. This hot, sunny weather is ideal for them. To have a good chance of seeing them, visit the reserve earlier in the morning before they’ve had the opportunity to really warm up. Once that happens, they zip about like bikes at the TT Races and it can be difficult to discover what they are as they won’t stay still. Flower spotting sometimes has a lot going for it! I saw marbled whites, meadow browns, common blues, and small heath. I didn’t see the Duke of Burgundy butterfly, however, which is rare now in the UK and declining in numbers alarmingly. Rudge Hill is a perfect spot for them and thankfully they’re flourishing here.
The Stroud district is sooo fortunate in having a wealth of different orchid species growing in lots of places around and about, and in having some that occur in great profusion. There are certain ones which are solitary souls, for example the frog orchid certainly doesn’t copy its namesake as a party animal, but others are real show-offs making everyone a winner in the game of ‘spot the orchid’. The end of June and beginning of July is the last time during the flowering season when you can enjoy one of these spectaculars as the pyramidal orchid livens up grasslands with splashes of its cerise pink flowers.
When it’s a warm, sunny day at this time of year, one of my favourite places to go for a picnic and to enjoy being in the great outdoors is Coaley Peak viewpoint. The 180 degree view over the Severn Vale is stunning, there are plenty of interesting wild flowers to admire, lots of space for kids to run around and, if you’ve got young kids who are Harry Potter fans, you can entice them with the idea of visiting the Forbidden Forest, too. It’s also a place where people with restricted mobility, and possibly even those in wheelchairs, could enjoy being outdoors and seeing some wildlife. Add into this mix the ice-cream van that’s usually parked there at weekends during the summer and what else could you ask for?!
Once the initial explosion of spring flowering has died back and the icing-like cover of white hawthorn flowers has melted from the hedgerows, the next splash of colour comes from the elder tree. The flowerheads are so large, round and flat that they look like giant plates from nature’s best crockery set. In reality, these white blooms are made up of hundreds of tiny flowers and are a magnet for a whole host of insects gorging themselves on the nectar feast they provide.
The elder bush likes growing in disturbed, fertile ground as do nettles which is why picking the flowers often involves trampling down a host of these stinging booby-traps first. The elder is a common sight in hedgerows, waste ground or shrubby areas, and flowers for the first two or so weeks of June. It was held in high regard by our ancestors who regarded it as one of the most magically powerful of plants. Perhaps this is the reason why Dumbledore’s wand (well-known to Harry Potter fans) – the most powerful of them all – was the elder wand!
A Year of discovering Stroud's wildlife 