September may feel like the tail-end of summer, but look closer and you’ll find nature still has plenty to show. While many wildflowers are fading, seed heads forming, and stalks turning skeletal, a surprising number of blooms thrive this month if you know where to look. Soapwort, golden rod, and michaelmas daisies are just hitting their stride, while wetlands burst with late summer colour from purple loosestrife to orange balsam. Even waste ground and railway embankments can surprise with ragwort, evening primroses, and rosebay willowherb. Seek out dirt tracks, woodland clearings, and marsh edges, and you may stumble across September’s hidden treasures—from parasitic dodder to the rare autumn ladies tresses.
Come back on September 2nd to discover the wildflowers that define the month!
Article
Wild Flowers
There are a lot less wild flowers to be seen in September than there were in August with many looking more bedraggled as they run to seed or develop their fruits. Walking around the city you tend to notice mallows, ragworts, sow thistles, evening primroses and mustards as well as a lot of nipplewort, hogweed, hemlock and rosebay willowherb. Plants that tend to go unnoticed are the goosefoots, oraches, mugworts, cudweeds, docks and knotweeds. As ever there are others which just continue to flower from previous months such as clovers, campions, woundworts, St John’s worts, plantains and heathers. Others may be making a second appearance, sometimes giving the impression of a second ‘false’ spring.
Fortunately one or two species seem to show a real affiliation to September itself. Soapwort, hemp agrimony, golden rod, various fleabanes and michaelmas daisies all now look their best. Lastly, there are also a small number that make sufficient impact for us to want to seek them out e.g. sea aster, orpine, dodder, autumn squill, autumn ladies tresses and possibly the rare fluellen. Good places to find flowers this month are not the usual ones.
The edges of lakes and rivers as well as waste areas, downland and heaths are all satisfactory as they were last month but now it is also worth taking time to look in unkempt woodland, hedges, clearings, marshes and even dirt tracks on downland, all of which can hold surprises.
Waste Ground
On waste ground yellow composites such as ragworts, sowthistles, hawkweeds, hawksbeards and lettuces all still reign supreme although many of them seem to disappear in cloudy weather as their flowers close. Oddly there are rather fewer dandelions and daisies. Skeletons of teasel, burdock and hemlock stand out interspersed with nipplewort, stinkweed and yarrow. Yarrow Achillea millefolium is named after Achilles who was taught its healing properties by the centaur Chiron. It has been said it purposely grows well in churchyards to reproach the dead for having not used it.
Its familiar flowers are themselves a dead white, although Gerard tells us there was a red form in the seventeenth century. It still seems to survive along Epsom gallops. Compass plants Lactuca serriola stand out due to their height (2 metres) and also because their upper leaves turn vertically towards the sun in a north-south plane. Its close relation Poisonous lettuce L. virosa is seen less but is still worth looking for along the edges of the lower Thames.
When railway commuters look out of their windows in the early morning they may see patches of evening primroses which opened their large lemon flowers at sunset the previous evening. Railway embankments are also still full of rosebay willow herb as well as ragworts and brambles.
Occasionally there is a dense sunshine yellow patch of golden rod Solidago canadensis. We may have to blame Tradescant the Younger for these as he grew them in his garden when they first arrived from America in the seventeenth century. What he didn’t know is that it seeds easily and once established goes on to form the dense clumps we see busily eradicating any other plants nearby.
Wetland Flowers
Just as in August, wet habitats tend to have a richer compliment of late summer flowers. Bentley Priory Park is reported to have over one hundred and fifty different aquatic and waterside plants. As ever the Wetland Centre at Barnes provides some easy botany for anyone wishing to see a representative collection of them. With little effort some of the more attractive species such as marsh woundwort, water figwort, arrowhead, yellow bartsia and purple loosestrife can all be found. For the more determined botanist there are also ten or more sedges including pale galingale, fox and hop sedge as well as four different stoneworts. Purple loosestrife Lythrum salicaria stands out the most as it forms sturdy, metre high clumps of imperial purple flowers. Its English name refers to its use in relieving stress and anxiety. This even extended to oxen who had garlands of its flowers hung around their yokes. It could also explain why Millais included the plant in his picture of the drowned Ophelia which hangs in the Tate Gallery.
If river walks are preferred, the most attractive of the balsams, Orange balsam Impatiens capensis can be found around Teddington lock. Greater dodder Curcuta europea can be found beside the river Mole at Stoke d’Abernon where it quietly sucks the sap of nettles. Along the river Wey near Wisley it prefers to parasitise hops. It is the dense tangle of red threads that are noticed first before its small pale orange flowers. Later the flowers disappear and the threads turn a dark brown. It has a close relation Common dodder C. epithymum which is still worth looking for on Wimbledon Common and perhaps even on Dartford heath where it chooses to parasitise heather. It has flesh-coloured flowers. These strangely coloured leafless parasites have always been despised often because they attacked and laid low clover fields and so were called beggarweeds or hellweeds.
On damp ground in woods you can still expect to see figworts and marsh thistles. Beside ponds trifid bur marigold Bidens tripartita is also widely distributed. Its burred fruits are often dispersed by human socks but if they fall into the water they can get attached to the gills of fish and kill them. If the flower heads are burned they are said to smell of cedar. Hemp agrimony Eupatorium cannabinum is also often seen growing near rivers where its leaves are sometimes picked with them looking so much like those of cannabis.
One of the great wetland rarities is starfruit Damasonium alisma which would now be showing off its star-shaped fruits if it hadn’t disappeared with most of London’s ponds in the last century. It had a preference for ponds regularly used by cattle which must have also hastened its demise. It could still be found on Mitcham Common in the 1940’s and perhaps some day it may be encouraged to return there.
