Marsh helleborine
The Marsh helleborine is a beautiful orchid of fens, wet grassland and dune slacks. Growing in profusion in places, look for reddish stems and white-and-pink flowers.
Water vole by Terry Whittaker/2020VISION
The Marsh helleborine is a beautiful orchid of fens, wet grassland and dune slacks. Growing in profusion in places, look for reddish stems and white-and-pink flowers.
Heather is also called 'ling'. Look for it on our heaths, moors and bogs, where its delicate, loosely arranged pink flowers attract all kinds of nectar-loving insects.
A common plant of disturbed ground like roadside verges and field edges, the spear thistle has purple, fluffy flower heads that appear in summer. Its flowers attract insects and its seeds feed…
A 'weed' of cultivated and disturbed ground, Round-leaved fluellen is a trailing plant with round leaves and yellow flowers that appear over summer.
Look for the delicate, pink flowers of Common bistort in wet meadows, pastures and roadside verges. It is also known as 'Pudding Dock' in North England because it was used to make a…
As the name suggests, the common medium stonefly is found in gravelly upland rivers and streams, often on bankside stones and plants. There are 34 species of stonefly in the UK, which are hard to…
Often seen carpeting the floor of ancient woodlands, Dog's mercury can quickly colonise, its fresh green leaves shading out rarer plants. It is also very poisonous.
The downy hairs that cover the pale pink flowers of Hare's-foot clover give it the look of a Hare's paw - hence the common name. Look out for this clover around the coast and on dry…
The bonnet-shaped, violet-blue flowers of Columbine can be spotted in damp areas in woodlands and in fens. It is also an attractive and much-loved garden plant.
The Yellow star-of-Bethlehem is a woodland plant that lives up to its name - it displays starry, gold flowers in an umbrella-like cluster in early spring.
The common spotted-orchid is the easiest of all our orchids to see: sometimes, so many flowers appear together that they create a pale pink carpet in our woodlands, old quarries, dunes and marshes…