Cycling botanist Leif Bersweden toured Britain’s best sites searching for wild plants, hoping to understand them, the dangers they now face, and why so many of us have become disconnected from the beauty at our feet
Riding a bike has always been my favourite way to travel around. I spent much of my childhood cycling through the Wiltshire countryside, looking at nature, pausing by the roadside to explore sun-dappled woodlands or pockets of downland.
Over the years, I had many memorable encounters with wild things spotted from the saddle: plants, animals and fungi that I triumphantly identified (regularly incorrectly) and listed lovingly in my notebook. I found joy in this activity. It calmed me. It was a source of inspiration and entertainment throughout the year. And – unlike in school – I was never bored.
From a young age, my love for nature was focused on wild plants. In my local meadows and woods, there were plants that poisoned predators, fought battles and played mind games with pollinators. I discovered climbers and carnivores, puppeteers and parasites.Some were giants hundreds of years old, while others were tiny pinpricks a millimetre across.Their inability to run away meant I could get a good look at them, and I quickly lapsed into a familiar plant-hunting routine. Botanising – the art of simply walking along and noticing the plants growing around me – satisfied my need for quiet and desire to discover.
As I grew up and my initial curiosity laid the foundations for a deep sense of care, I began to learn about how vulnerable our wildflowers are. It bothered me that so few people seemed to notice the plants growing all around us, let alone take an active interest in them. The losses endured by wild plants in Britain and Ireland are stark, and the dangers they face on a daily basis – climate change, habitat destruction, declining pollinator populations – seem more worrying than ever before. And so, perhaps inevitably, my love for nature fuelled a need to share the importance and beauty of what we have with as many people as possible.
“We so often dismiss plants as being boring, but they have some amazing stories to tell”
But if I was going to encourage people to spend time noticing plants, I needed to understand why we have become disconnected from botany, and what it is about wildflowers that intertwined our lives with theirs in the first place. So I decided to go on some adventures.
In 2021, I cycled through the places our plants call home, learning about their ecology, their role in our culture, the threats they face and what it is about them that we have grown to love.
I botanised my way through an entire calendar year, walking along windswept clifftops spread with thrift and roaming through flower-filled woodland brimming with bluebells. I scrambled up mountains, climbed trees, squelched around marshes and bobbed about on lakes and ponds, documenting my adventures though the seasons as I tracked down the best of our wild plants. Along the way, I walked with people who still have a connection to their local flora; to prove to myself, if nothing else, that our instinctive love for the botanical world has not wholly vanished.
BOTANISING BY BIKE
Doing these journeys on my bike was a wonderful way to see the country and I came to know places in a way that I wouldn’t have, had I been driving. Cycling gave me more time to take in my surroundings and a greater appreciation for the relief of the landscapes I travelled through. The journeys themselves felt considered: rather than trying to get from A to B as fast as possible, I deliberately tailored routes to take in interesting habitats spotted on the map. I was able to hunt for plants while travelling, too, as well as at the start and end of my journeys.
Spontaneously hopping off my bike to explore small roadside copses and meadows provided some of the best and most unexpected finds of the year. There was a stunning collection of polypody ferns clustered along the top of a drystone wall in County Cork, hundreds of deep-purple northern marsh-orchids lining a main road in Cumbria and old, mossy woodlands tucked into the valleys of Snowdonia National Park. My delight at the foxgloves and red campion growing along the twisting, high-banked lanes in Devon wouldn’t have been the same from the seat of a car, nor would my experience of Shetland. Ever since my teenage years, botanising by bike has been my favourite way to explore the world.
One thing that was driven home during my travels is that we seriously underestimate what plants can do. They face all the samefundamental challenges as animals: they need to safely reproduce, deter predators and find food. But – unlike most animals – they have to face these tasks with the added complication of being rooted to the spot.
For a plant, this produces some serious day-to-day obstacles. They don’t have the get-out-of-jail-free card of being able to physically relocate themselves at will. Instead, they have come up with some ingenious ways of solving problems. I met wildflowers that mimic insects to attract pollinators, species that heat themselves up to more than 30°C to aid with scent dispersal, and floating aquatic plants that sink below the surface during the winter to avoid freezing. While botanising on the Lizard Peninsula in Cornwall, I found a colony of thyme broomrape, a highly specialised species that entirely lacks chlorophyll, obtaining all its nutrients and water by parasitising wild thyme.In the pine forests of the Cairngorms, I got to spend time with common cow-wheat, a plant puppeteer that uses ants to get its seeds underground with plenty of food to germinate. We so often dismiss plants as being boring, but they have some amazing stories to tell.
WITNESSING NATURE AT RISK
Yet despite the feeling of awe impressed upon me so often last year, time spent with our plants, or any part of nature, brings with it a greater understanding of the perils they face. Over the course of my travels, I experienced first-hand that all is not well. The issues were the same everywhere: chronic overgrazing, habitat destruction and endless application of fertilisers and herbicides – humans messing with the status quo. The impact of climate change was evident on all my adventures and most prominent in the extremes: in dry, freedraining grassland in southern England and high up on the crumbling slopes of Scotland’s mountains. We recently learnt that plants in the UK are flowering on average a month earlier today than they were in the 1980s, which has significant ecological implications for the delicate, synchronised relationships between plants and their pollinators. With their habitats disappearing and, in some cases, their very existence stigmatised, our plants are struggling more than ever. Seeing the impact of our actions and thinking about the future makes my heart hurt.
It still bothers me, now more than ever, that so few people seem to notice our wildflowers. But writing Where the Wildflowers Grow is part of my attempt to change that. Plants can be found everywhere we go. As an accessible and mindful activity, with no time-specific requirements, botanising can benefit us on a large scale and small, from improving our wellbeing to protecting the planet long term. We have something really worth protecting.Spending time with nature gives us purpose, challenges us while we are outside and leaves us feeling connected to our surroundings.For me, nature always has been – and always will be – everything.
The Plodcast
Go on a botanical adventure with Leif in the BBC Countryfile Magazine Plodcast, available on Acast and all good podcast providers.
Leif Bersweden is a botanist and author who has recently completed a PhD at Kew Gardens.
His new book, Where the Wildflowers Grow (Hodder & Stoughton, £20), is out now.
BOTANISING HOTSPOTS
1 SOUTH DOWNS NATIONAL PARK, HAMPSHIRE AND SUSSEX
I cycled the South Downs Way and passed many beautiful spring woodlands and old downlands buttered with cowslips. Ditchling Beacon is a lovely stretch of chalk grassland high up on the downs with orchids and vetches, while the ancient woodlands around Butser Hill offer carpets of bluebells in May. There are amazing plants all along the trail, particularly in the west, where there are fewer sheep.
2 MORFA DYFFRYN NATIONAL NATURE RESERVE, GWYNEDD
A big sand dune system full of damp dune slacks. In the summer, among the lesser spearwort and creeping willow, you will find wild orchids such as marsh helleborine and autumn lady’s-tresses, as well as other unusual species, including round-leaved wintergreen (pictured). The dunes are home to tough plants with amazing adaptations, such as sea-holly, marram and sea rocket. Be aware that there’s a naturist beach nearby!
3 LIZARD PENINSULA, CORNWALL
This is one of the most famous botanical hotspots in Britain and hosts an impressive list of plants. More than half of our native flowering plant species can be found growing on the Lizard, and some are found nowhere else in the country. With a warm breeze, glittering turquoise sea and carpets of yellow hairy greenweed flowers at your feet, it’s hard not to have a good time.
4 SCOUT SCAR, CUMBRIA
This idyllic limestone grassland high up on a plateau is totally worth the uphill climb. In June, the combination of bright-yellow rough hawkbit, pink wild thyme and white limestone bedstraw is an iconic sight. Keep your eyes peeled for dropwort, lesser butterfly-orchids and dark-red helleborines while meandering around the grassy paths.
5 INGLEBOROUGH NATIONAL NATURE RESERVE, YORKSHIRE
High in the Yorkshire Dales, Ingleborough NNR offers beautiful views and a suite of exciting plants. Purple saxifrage grows on the crags while the lower slopes have bits of limestone pavement harbouring rigid buckler fern and limestone fern. In May, it’s worth having a look for bird’s-eye primrose around the boggy flushes where water seeps over the rock.
6 BALLYNAHONE BOG, COUNTY DERRY
A large, lowland raised bog packed full of interesting species. The squashy hummocks of sphagnum bog-mosses are adorned with strands of wild cranberry and harbour carnivorous sundews (pictured). Try getting down on the ground and listening to water percolating through the moss – it’s a wonderful experience.
7 INVERESHIE AND INSHRIACH NATIONAL NATURE RESERVE, CAIRNGORMS
One of the few remaining pockets of Caledonian pinewood, this nature reserve feels old. The ancient, twisted pines are the highlight for me, but make sure to scan the ground for unusual ground flora such as twinflower and creeping lady’s-tresses. See if you can track down an aspen by listening for the wind in its leaves.