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A Brimstone Butterfly – often the first on the wing in spring – seeks out life-giving nectar from a Dandelion flower. (Picture courtesy of Rachel Scopes, @r_scopes) collect seed, singe or rub off the ‘parachute’ bits, and plant them somewhere sunny (many seeds germinate in year 2) It used to be common for people used to grow dandelions for winter salad and for chemists to turn into medicines. Dandelion leaves are rich in iron, potassium and zinc. Lawnageddon was made for the Fairyland Trust by a team of volunteers. Our thanks go to them and Ben Partridge and his mum Jo for letting us borrow their garden – and Ben’s lawn-mower. A Small Tortoiseshell butterfly feeding on a Dandelion. This butterfly needs help – it is in rapid decline. (Photo courtesy of @CreweCitizen)

More About Dandelions - The Fairyland Trust

Each Dandelion flower is a miracle of nature’s engineering and is made up of up to 200 individual ‘ray florets’. It turns to face the sun throughout the day, which can help you tell the time. He loved TV work – its speed and camaraderie, the rhythm of the day, “the ruinous affairs that would flair up and collapse”. He was bookish but sexy, perched on the roof of a canal boat with an unnamed lady friend, or squatting on his haunches to read something out of a 17th-century herbal. But the shows were ahead of their time. send us your photos of bees or other insects on dandelions (and don’t forget to say where they are from) – or share them on our social mediaWild herds of elephants can be observed in several areas, particularly in such renowned national parks as Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary, in Kerala, and Bandipur, in Karnataka. The Indian rhinoceros is protected at Kaziranga National Park and Manas Wildlife Sanctuary in Assam. They weren’t ready to take the real jump and portray the natural world in the messy way that a) it is, and b) we perceived it,” he says. “They’re still very fond of humans knowing all the answers. The idea of Keats’s negative capability, of creative uncertainty – they did not find exciting.” wait for then to arrive and then do not spray them – start by not cutting your lawn and see what comes up. It might be a lot more than just dandelions – daisies, clover and other wildflowers may also spring up when they get the chance. Mabey also points out that in Cambridgeshire the poor used to harvest Dandelions on a large scale to sell to chemists who made them into liver and kidney tonic, and that in the C19th they were grown by the gentry for winter salad and against gout caused be excessive drinking of port, as they were good for ‘flushing out the kidneys’. He credits Kathleen Jamie with changing his thinking. “She pointed out, in fact, that nature also made you ill, in one or two of those wonderful essays in her first collection Findings, about her husband’s illness. I’m prepared to recognise that nature is entirely indifferent to us. And this hurts a lot of people, the current nature freaks, who think that out there is a” – he sounds mildly repelled – “‘ green warmth’ towards us. This is rubbish.

Flora Britannica: The Definitive New Guide to Wild Flowers

These days with wild food ever more popular, the leaves are sometimes served in sandwiches, being tastier than lettuce, and used in mozarella pie, pizza, and, fried as crisps. Dandelions are also famous for being used to make wine and as a coffee substitute. The couple moved to a friend’s house nearby, before taking on the farmhouse. Mabey recorded his return to health, and his psychological shift from one landscape to another, in Nature Cure – a book he describes as a “coming of age story, rather late in life”. Yes, it did,” Mabey says. “I knew I had no escape this time. I can remember very vividly the sort of get-out lines that I had with women before: ‘I just have to let you know I’ve got to look after my mum.’ And I can remember, I had a quite nice fling with [the actress] Liza Goddard for a couple of years, and she said to me, ‘There are two women in your life, Richard, and you’ve got to decide which one.’” Tropical thorn forests occupy areas in various parts of the country, though mainly in the northern Gangetic Plain and southern peninsular India. Those forests generally grow in areas with less than 24 inches (600 mm) of rain but are also found in more humid areas, where deciduous forests have been degraded because of unregulated grazing, felling, and shifting agriculture. In those areas, such xerophytic (drought-tolerant) trees as species of acacia (babul and catechu) and Butea monosperma predominate. The Great Himalayas have notable fauna that includes wild sheep and goats, markhor ( Capra falconeri), and ibex. Lesser pandas and snow leopards are also found in the upper reaches of the mountains.So I would hope that we might get our act together. But I think it’s very unlikely, because no species has ever acted as a species. Nothing in the natural world does – they act in terms of their own genes, and their families. The sense of species awareness is unique to humans, but whether it really has any firm bounds in our deep psychological make-up, I don’t know. It probably doesn’t.” When life went swimmingly, and work was good, I didn’t want it to be any other way – I was not in any way trapped in the house,” he says. “But when big challenges happened and it came to building a different life of my own I flunked. I became a serious commitment-phobe and had all kinds of catastrophically failed relationships, because I was terrified of starting off on my own.” It is almost impossible to get a sense of life in the Mabey household because the spectre of the father in his bed dominates all impressions of the family. Here was a gang of arty, neurotic children who all went on to do interesting things – but what inspired them is a mystery. There is no talk of a shared imaginative world, or games or books. By contrast Mabey’s childhood friends were “desperately important” to him: “My whole sense of being was with the friends I ran with.” He still knows many of them today. He is always at the centre of the disputes, but generally as a barometer of how to do it well. “What strikes me still about Richard’s writing are three qualities,” MacFarlane tells me. “A deep natural-historical knowledge, especially in terms of flora; the profound tenderness and compassion that he extends towards the more-than-human world; and the brilliant analytical capacity that often sets him thinking against the grain. He is a proper field naturalist, an ecological ethicist, a superb stylist, and – in today’s parlance – a disrupter. That’s a unique mix.” India forms an important segment of what is known as the Oriental, or Sino-Indian, biogeographic region, which extends eastward from India to include mainland and much of insular Southeast Asia. Its fauna are numerous and highly diverse. Mammals

The man who saw everything - New Statesman

Dandelions are food for at least 46 different types of moth (and that’s just the bigger types) whose ‘caterpillars’ munch on the leaves, stem or roots as youngsters Richard Mabey is to botany what Elizabeth David is to cookery, a lyrical inspirer of enthusiasm and interest.”Vegetation in the Himalayas can be generally divided into a number of elevation zones. Mixed evergreen-deciduous forests dominate the foothill areas up to a height of 5,000 feet (1,500 metres). Above that level subtropical pine forests make their appearance, followed by the Himalayan moist-temperate forests of oak, fir, deodar ( Cedrus deodara), and spruce. The highest tree zone, consisting of alpine shrubs, is found up to an elevation of about 15,000 feet (4,500 metres). Rhododendrons are common at 12,000 feet (3,700 metres), above which occasional junipers and alpine meadows are encountered. Zones overlap considerably, and there are wide transitional bands. Animal life It is unique in that it is not a botanical flora but a cultural one – an account of the role of wild plants in social life, arts, custom and landscape. It is also unique in that information has been supplied by the people themselves. Five years of intensive original research have aroused popular interest and ‘grassroots’ involvement on an exceptional scale. People all over Britain – both rural and urban – have been encouraged to record and celebrate the cultural dimensions of their own flora, and to send their memories and anecdotes, observations and regional knowledge to Flora Britannica. Dandelion flowers stare up at the sun and follow it around, they are yellow and each of them is a sun in miniature”. Geoffery Grigson, The Englishman’s Flora

Flora Definition and Examples - Biology Online Dictionary Flora Definition and Examples - Biology Online Dictionary

Some of these endemic species have become exceedingly rare. Most of the remaining single-horned Javan rhinoceroses, for example, are now restricted to the Ujung Kulon National Park on the western tip of Java. This nearly extinct species is one of the world’s most highly protected forms of wildlife. Another such endangered species is the orangutan, which is native to Borneo and Sumatra. Several orangutan rehabilitation centres and programs have been established in an effort to prevent the capture and slaughter of the animals and to train those that have been held captive to return to the wild. Dandelions have always been loved by many people for their beauty as well as usefulness, and are mentioned in many stories.

Dandelions ( Taraxacum) and its relative Cats Ear ( Calendula), are among the very best insect nectar plants. Just by letting dandelions grow and flower, you will be helping wildlife. Some gardeners think of them as ‘weeds’ but they are far better for nature than most cultivated garden plants.