Autumn Asteraceae

This morning I accompanied a classful of students out to the fields between the university and the MoD. I felt rather ancient because wherever I looked I was thinking "Ah, I remember when it was fields all round here" - but actually, that wasn't so very long ago, and it is sad that every area of greenery between Bristol and the motorways seems to be getting filled with tarmac and unimaginative architecture. But at least the grand plan for the stadium seems to have been shelved, and so there is still habitat for many creatures and plants. We even saw a couple of deer leaping away.

I was pleased to find five decently flowering members of the Asteraceae, and these would make a good start to a collection. Apologies for the hasty photographs. You will be able to make your specimens look much better than this.

This one's Bristly ox-tongue (Picris echioides). It's got the most superb and strange bristles that come out from little blistery bases. It looks pretty mean and is reasonably painful to pick up. You'd imagine it deters all but the most determined herbivore. It has many other interesting features which you could examine under a handlens. I think my next post will be encouragement to buy a handlens. You can admire the red-striped strapshaped yellow petals, and the fuzzy pappuses that carry away the surprisingly orange seeds on the wind.

Not everyone likes it: this Manual Of Weeds (of 1919, I love old books) has "descriptions of all of the most pernicious and troublesome plants in the United States and Canada." Pernicious and troublesome probably means it's very good at clinging on in all sorts of places and is supremely well adapted to grow quickly and set seed successfully. It's libellous surely.

This one is Common fleabane (Pulicaria dysenterica). 'Pulicaria' means to do with fleas (pulex is Latin for flea), and 'dysenterica' is because Linnaeus (who named the plant and about a million others - the binomial naming system is his invention) heard the plant was used to cure dysentery in Russian soldiers fighting in Persia. So there you go.

It's noticeably soft - the stem is covered in woolly hairs. They feel nice to me but they're probably there again to put off predators (perhaps tiny buggy predators rather than big mammalian ones).

I have other photos but as yet another work crisis is looming, I will just list them for now, and hopefully you will be inspired to go and find them yourself. Make sure you find one that's still in flower though, and not too sorry-looking.
Creeping thistle (Cirsium arvense)
Common ragwort (Senecio jacobaea)
and Smooth sow-thistle (Sonchus oleraceus).

Also on the way back to the office I found plenty of Groundsel (Senecio vulgaris) some Daisies Bellis perennis) and Dandelions (Taraxacum officinale). So that's eight species already! It's almost too easy (shhh).

So I'd say, if you want to collect something colourful and botanical, get out there now and have a look for some Asteraceae. Soon. They're very easy to preserve. They're quite easy to identify. And they have lots of interesting features that you can illustrate and talk about in your field notebook. The variation of fluffy pappuses, leaf shape, petal shape - there is much to investigate closely. It's an interesting family and there are lots of species out there.