The First Brexit
Have you ever stooped to admire, and perhaps try to identify, a wildflower on mainland Europe? Have you ever wondered why so many such plants look familiar but aren’t quite ‘right’ - perhaps a niggling difference in flower or leaf, or in an unexpected location? As a young wildflower spotter, one of us can well remember standing in a French coastal ecosystem (aka at the seaside) and puzzling over what was growing at my feet.
Image above right: surely this is a meadow full of cowslips (Primula veris)? Well, actually these are probably the mainland European subspecies …
To get a handle on this, we need to look at the vexed subject of climate change. As many climate change deniers [Is that a word - it sounds more like the description of a pair of stockings?] keep informing us, ice ages have come and gone for millions of years, and what we are seeing now is just the end of the latest (and currently thought to be the planet’s fifth) global cooling/warming event. What deniers don’t mention is that the speed of retreat of our current ice age, and the simultaneous and extraordinary hike in temperatures across the globe, has been madly exacerbated by human activity.
But this blog is not about climate change as such but about one of the impacts of climate change: the rise in sea level. What we now think of as the British Isles were once firmly part of the Eurasian land mass. Around 450,000 years ago PB (Pre Brexit), however, melting ice and changing sea levels caused the separation of Britain from Europe by washing away the land bridge which connected our peninsula to the mainland.
From then on, so the perceived wisdom goes, our ecological development could no longer be strongly influenced by plant and animal species spreading by land from the east, but by internal, maritime and airbourne influences associated with being an island. As a result, many European plant species never made it back to Britain in time to be considered ‘native’. To drive the point home, Britain and Ireland have less than a quarter of the ‘higher’ plant species found in France. Although France has a much wider range of habitats, the difference in numbers of species is still staggering. Belgium has around the same number of higher plant species as the UK, but contained within far fewer different habitats. So, although Darwin and his origin of species theories made the Galapagos Islands famous, he might have spared himself, Fitzroy and the crew of the Beagle a lot of discomfort by just crossing the channel. Although Fitzroy’s work on weather forecasting might have been significantly delayed.
One of our reasons for going to Armenia (apologies, yes, Armenia again), was to look at the wild flowers and the trip was a classic illustration of this (I hope not xenophobic) view that European wild flower species are just not the same as British! Someone would shout ‘oh look Bugle’ but the suspicion that it was not going to be our familar British Ajuga reptans was always hovering in the air.
We think this is Ajuga orientalis (how romantic) but it could be A genevensis. Can you help us?
How did we work out the identity of the plants we saw? Let us first state very clearly that we are not expert botanists, that we would never claim to be anything close to 100% accurate and, if you can correct our dodgy identifications, then we would be delighted to hear from you.
Of course the wonderful ‘A Field Guide to the Plants of Armenia’ by Tamar Galstyan (published in 2021), and purchased on line, finally arrived at home after we ourselves had arrived in Armenia, so most of our identification work was carried out back at base, using our own photographs, plant identification aps, Tamar Galystan’s book and internet research. And no, we didn’t see these amazing Iris iberica subspecies elegantissima which are illustrated on the book’s cover.
Our first walk was though a rain dampened woodland of hornbeam and field maple, both we think, the same species with which we are familiar in the UK. But it was very exciting to know we were walking the Transcaucasian Trail, not the South Downs long distance footpath.
Now we can start enjoying the floral Brexit experience.
Left: Anemone caucasia - far bluer than our own wood anemone (Anemone nemorosa)
Centre: a small yellow Star of Bethlehem (Gagea bulbifera?). There are 7 Gagea species illustrated in the Armenian flora but Britain has just one (Gagea lutea).
Right: probably Caltha polypetala - Britain’s Marsh Marigold is Caltha palustris
The next day we progressed to an equally wet beech woodland with equally exciting signs - and plants.
Left: our path was lined by a mass of beech seedlings - evidence of what must have been a good mast year followed by equally favourable spring weather for germination. Which one of these will finally achieve dominance and a statuesque new beech tree? Probably none of these, located as they are so close to the path!
Centre left: a yellow anemone (Anemone ranunculoides), found in Britian, but probably as an escapee from doing ornamental duties in nearby gardens. Seen here co-habiting with, perhaps, a scarlet elf fungus?
Right: we think this is a Whorled Coralroot, Cardamine quinquiefolia, a native of this part of Europe/Asia but a stranger to the British Isles.
Emerging from the woodland we enter the land of the Cowslip. as mentioned above, Britain is home to Primula veris but Amenia hosts P veris subspecies macrocalyx. This description must surely refer to the Victorian style bloomers which encase the yellow petals.
By day 3, we were aspiring to higher things: a climb to the top of Mount Artanish, a fairly innocent looking hill but which tops out at 2,460m (over 8,000’). Although we didn’t start at anything like sea level, it was still quite a hike for those of us whose lungs had not really adjusted to the change in oxygen availability.
Thank goodness for an excuse to stop on this grassy, rocky hillside to take photographs of wild flowers.
The yellows:
Left: Potentilla crantzii (we think) snuggling up to what looks a bit like our own Germander speedwell (Veronica chamaedrys) but is probably Veronica multifida.
Centre: Adonis volgenis? This one is not in the Armenian flora and an internet search suggests that it is a Russian species which wandered westward.
Right: Pedicularis armenia or Crested Lousewort - from the name alone it is clearly not an English Lousewort.
And the blues:
Left: the amazing Pasque flower; not our own Pulsatilla vulgaris, but Armenia’s very own, droopy headed, Pulsatilla armena
Centre left: Onobrychis cornuta, a prickly purple version compared with our own rosy pink Onobrychis viciifolia aka Sainfoin.
Centre right: how amazing to see Grape Hyacinths in the wild. We saw Muscari armeniarcum (shown here) and the wonderfully named Muscari neglectum with flowers tipped in a paler blue, like a little pompom.
Far right: and finally a clump of purple Iris pumila, keeping snug to the ground.
We walked further and saw more but we will leave you now with one of the most extraordinary plants which we have ever seen: Diphelypaea tournefortii. It is included in the ‘Plants of Armenia’ but it took us a while to identify even its name. Further research was also hampered by a scarcity of information on the internet - we often couldn’t make head or tail of the short but very technical English websites, and many sites were written in Russian or Armenian and, assuming an equally technical approach, we lost the will to get it translated. So we leave you with a short item taken from Wikipedia, and with our photographs.
‘Phelypaea is a genus of flowering plants in the broomrape family Orobanchaceae, native to the Balkans, Greece, Crimea, the Caucasus region, Anatolia, the Levant, Iraq and Iran. They are root parasites which cannot conduct photosynthesis and are only seen above ground when flowering.
Currently accepted species include: [three cited, followed by a fourth:] Phelypaea tournefortii Desf. Transcaucasus, Turkey’. (en.wikipedia.org › wiki › PhelypaeaPhelypaea).
Tamar Galystan adds ‘Perennial … Hosts Tanacetum [Tansy], Achillea [Yarrow], Gorges, forest edge, meadows’.
I think we were very lucky to see it.
