Autumn Gentians

John C. writes:

We don’t usually think of this time of year as a time to go looking for flowers but there are a number of late-flowering species that are as rewarding to find as the season winds down as the first spring flowers are as the season winds up. A particular favourite of mine is autumn gentian, Gentianella amarella. Whilst perhaps not as spectacular as spring gentians – which are rare in the British Isles – they’re not very uncommon and have, to my mind, a rather understated charm.

We know some sites in the Cotswolds where autumn gentians grow but these are very inaccessible, so last Sunday we visited an open-access area of downland near the Ridgeway to look for them as a recce for a possible future Club visit.

At first things didn’t look promising. Apart from some stunted harebells and a few yellow composites, as a result of the very dry summer everything was brown and dried up. However, after about 500 metres we found an area of short turf by the side of the path on an east-facing slope with a few shrivelled plants. Looking a bit harder we found a lot of plants. Probably eighty percent of them had finished flowering and looked quite dried up, but the remainder were in flower or about to flower. I was delighted to find them and there’s probably a good show at this time in a normal year. At only three to four inches tall, they seemed shorter than I would expect; I imagine that was as a result of the summer we had. As well as the gentians, there were some nice patches of eyebright nearby.

Plants weren’t the only things on the menu, however. We saw many – literally hundreds – of brown and black furry caterpillars, which we tentatively identified as Fox moth. There were lots of grasshoppers; Sue (of course) found crickets – long-winged coneheads – with her bat detector and rescued a chunky dor beetle from being squashed on the Ridgeway. Four kestrels were hunting, several red kites and buzzards were wheeling around and we were entertained by a dogfight between a kestrel and a raven; at one point a red kite and another kestrel decided to join in. They were last seen heading west, still engaged in combat!

Altough it had seemed an umpromising start, we actually spent a very satisfactory four hours, rounded off by the sight of a couple of hares in a field by the Ridgeway.

John Cobb, 17 September 2022