All Safely Gathered in, Mother?

By the session leader:

A glorious session today in the wildflower meadow above Brightwell cum Sotwell.  

We were pulling out ragwort and creeping thistle, of which there is less and less in the meadow each year.  Looking out across the meadow and watching the volunteers at work, it looked like we were idly wandering through the meadow gathering flowers.  Idyllic.

The only hazard: occasionally having to be careful where you put your feet.

Can you put names to the flowers in these photos?  (And identify which one of these was a target for removal?)  Answers below – I hope I’ve got them right!   

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1.       Purple Selfheal

2.       Mallow

3.       Knapweed and Oxeye Daisy

4.       Bird’s Foot Trefoil

5.       Ladies’ Bedstraw

6.       Black Medic

7.       Wild Parsnip?

8.       Scabious

9.       Pyramid Orchids

10.   Wild Liquorice

11.   Agrimony

12.   Teasel

13.   St John’s Wort

14.   Creeping Thistle – remove!

15.   Woolly Thistle

If it was hard enough to photograph all the plant species (and I know I didn’t get them all), it was even harder to capture images of all the butterflies and grasshoppers and other insect life.  They will keep moving around!  And blending in against the background.  

A Marble White on what by now all readers will confidently identify as Knapweed

There's a Marble White there somewhere!

A Meadow Brown demonstrating why it is called that

By the end, our idle meadow-wandering, up and down the steep slope in the heat, had given us our gym work-out – and our appetite for the AGM. 

How can one have an appetite for an All-Safely-Gathered-in-Mother?  (aka Annual General Meeting, which is such a feature of British social life.)  Well, read on!

Elucidation from C:

Yes, it’s true: after the session today, people voluntarily stayed on for a meeting.  No, not that kind of meeting, I mean the kind of meeting you’d want to go to.  With friends, over lunch at a nearby hostelry – that being the way we do our AGMs.

I had arrived first, to get set up.  When the clock got round to 1.20, and still no-one else had appeared, it was beginning to feel a bit like another meeting of the Shadow Cabinet:

A few ships short of a fleet

Though I did reflect that wherever it is that the Shadow Cabinet does meet, is not likely to feature a poster with an advertisement like this:

Then they all arrived at once.  Green-Gymmers, that is, not members of the Labour front-bench team.  And we had our meeting.  As between friends.  With lunch.   

And a quiz.