Borders bouquets
Mention spring flowers and many people will picture a haze of bluebells. Bonny, without doubt, but you don’t always need to get the blues to be impressed by the new season’s colours. Both broadleaved and mixed woods
can have impressive displays of early blooming flowers, before overhead greenery shades the woodland floor. Woods from the North Isles to the Solway can hold floral surprises at this time of the year, including the primroses that quite literally have popped up beside a path where you didn’t expect to see them. In the Borders, many woods where
ash and elm are distinctive trees have been boosted by recent work to conserve and expand them. This means that each spring can bring fresh floral bonuses.WhitlawWood, a ScottishWildlife Trust reserve beside Hawick, is one of these ash-elm woods. Hart’s-tongue fern, with shiny green leaves, gives gloss toWhitlaw’s floor, in contrast to the soft tones of its wood anemones or ‘windflowers’. Herb Robert, with small, beautifully simple flowers, is another ofWhitlaw’s plants to savour.
Web tip:
www.swt.org.uk/visit/reserves/ WHW/Whitlaw%20Wood/
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Some other things to look for in spring:
Songbirds in full dawn chorus; ospreys arriving back from Africa; tadpoles in ponds; hawthorn blooming in hedges and along railway lines; and small tortoiseshell butterflies on the wing.
www.snh.gov.uk
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