This book might, at first sight, appear to be simply a book of photographs of British wildflowers, and to some degree it is. But for me that's only part of the fascination of wildflowers. In writing and photographing this book, I wanted to capture all the aspects of wildflowers that have held my interest for nearly half a century and that includes everything, from their beauty, captured in both imagery and poetry, to their detailed biology.
I've always had a deep interest in nature, in particular bugs and birds, as far back as I can remember. But until I went to university, plants were simply the things that some animals ate. Of course, in pursuing the caterpillars of different butterflies or moths, I had to learn something of the habits of specific plants. And I always enjoyed the great spectacles of bluebells, wild daffodils or ramsons in the woods along the River Tees and in the valleys of the North Yorkshire Moors, close to my childhood home in Middlesbrough. But, in the early 1970s, I travelled to the other corner of the country, to go to the University of Bristol, a decision partly driven by its proximity to Slimbridge, home of what was then the Wildfowl Trust (now the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust). This was set up by my childhood hero, Peter Scott, after he found a rare lesser white-fronted goose amongst larger flocks of greater white-fronts that traditionally winter on this stretch of the Severn Estuary. This area also draws wintering Bewick's swans and a host of waders and other birds, so I became a frequent visitor throughout my student days.
When I arrived in Bristol I was interested in birds, reptiles and insects, but on my first day there, feeling lost at having moved so far from home, I met with David Parker, who was to become my closest friend and fellow adventurer into the world of natural history throughout our undergraduate years. And he knew about plants. Gradually, by osmosis I began to pick up some botany, until I reached a threshold of knowledge that finally ignited my own interest. My passion for birds and insects remained (my Ph.D., also at the University of Bristol, was on dragonflies) but I began to spend more time searching out wildflowers, both rare and common, and to delve into their natural history and biology. That lifelong curiosity about the biology of Britain's wildflowers is one strand of this book.
I spent many happy years at Bristol University, moving on to post doctoral research after receiving my Ph.D. and I assumed I would pursue my interests in the natural world from within academia. But the BBC's Natural History Unit is just a few hundred metres from the university's biology department, and I began to appear on Radio 4 nature programs as a bug expert. Later I began to act as a natural history consultant for TV programs, including Living Planet, the big David Attenborough series that followed his ground-breaking Life on Earth. During this time I began to realise that I was far more of a generalist than a specialist. Since procuring grants for academic research meant becoming ever more specialised I jumped at the chance to join the Natural History Unit when a job came up.
Making natural history programs is a very satisfying experience. Apart from travelling to all kinds of places that I would be unlikely to visit otherwise, I discovered that film-making is a heady mix of art and science. I've had chance to work with top scientists in many fields, to showcase their work and to document the very latest discoveries. At the same time, the final program also needs to be a work of art, to be illustrated by stunning images backed by evocative music and the whole woven into a compelling story.
I had begun to photograph wildflowers during my undergraduate days, mostly as a scientific record of what I had found, but after joining the Natural History Unit, I had the chance to work with some of the finest wildlife cameramen on the planet and that helped me to develop a much better eye for images. Not long after I joined the BBC I met my wife, Vicky, who, though a mathematician and engineer by training, is also a fine artist. We would eventually end up running our own natural history production company together, but working with her also opened my eyes to even more possibilities in wildflower photography. It's far more of a challenge to try and capture the essence of each wildflower in an artistic way than just recording where it is living. In this way, I discovered that wildflowers could provide deep satisfaction for both halves of my brain - the logical, scientific side and the aesthetic and artistic side - in equal measure. For me, wildflowers can only be truly appreciated by combining both science and art. And that's what I've tried to do in this book.
Without knowing it at the time, I think the seeds for this book were sown back in 1989, when I came across a book called The Flowering of Britain, by writer Richard Mabey and photographer Tony Evans. It also inspired a documentary which aired as part of the World About Us series. In both book and TV program, the idea was to capture the beauty and natural history of Britain's wildflowers in both words and pictures. Making sure that every image in the book was a work of art proved quite a challenge for Tony Evans, though he succeeded admirably. And when I began the photographic side of this project, my admiration for Evans' work only grew.
I've focussed mainly on our more spectacular wildflowers, in part because it gave me more opportunity to photograph them in a variety of ways. I spent eight years travelling around Britain to gather the photographs, continually challenging myself to see these wildflower spectacles through different eyes, trying to capture the beauty of individual plants or parts of plants as well as their harmony with the landscapes they were growing in.
After nearly thirty years of making wildlife films, it should have come as no surprise that things are never as easy as you imagine at the start. It's rare to find the perfect plants growing in the perfect spot and then to discover this unlikely scenario when the light also just happens to be perfect! Yet, continually trying to improve on the photographs over those six years was the perfect excuse to spend long days in the field and to travel to all manner of beautiful locations, from the machair grasslands of the Outer Hebrides to the chalk cliffs of Kent.
At the same time, I began to read through all the scientific papers I could find on my chosen plants, both here and elsewhere in their range. Although all the main subjects of the following chapters are either British natives or widely naturalised here, I've also included the story of these plants wherever they occur. This gives a more complete context for these plants and therefore a deeper understanding.
For example, sometimes, plants in the UK behave very differently to those in Europe or elsewhere. They may be on the edge of their range here, or be vanishingly rare, whilst growing like weeds elsewhere. And the details of their biology might differ, such as different pollinators occurring in Europe, which makes their reproductive strategies different there. Getting a sense of how these plants behave across their whole range is part of the fascination of observing these plants in our small corner of northwest Europe.
I make no apology for diving deeply into some of the biology of these plants. Though I've tried to tread the narrow line between over-simplification and biological accuracy, a general reader may sometimes find their head spinning by the details of such topics as polyploidy or heterostyly. Be reassured by the fact that it's just the same reaction triggered in many practising botanists when faced with these topics. Even though our flora seems very familiar and has certainly been very well studied, there's still a lot we don't know. And the sum total of our knowledge is being added to all the time. I've tried to reflect this in the text, which inevitably means some confusion and unanswered questions - at which point a reader can always just look at the photographs and admire the plants.
I've always had a deep interest in nature, in particular bugs and birds, as far back as I can remember. But until I went to university, plants were simply the things that some animals ate. Of course, in pursuing the caterpillars of different butterflies or moths, I had to learn something of the habits of specific plants. And I always enjoyed the great spectacles of bluebells, wild daffodils or ramsons in the woods along the River Tees and in the valleys of the North Yorkshire Moors, close to my childhood home in Middlesbrough. But, in the early 1970s, I travelled to the other corner of the country, to go to the University of Bristol, a decision partly driven by its proximity to Slimbridge, home of what was then the Wildfowl Trust (now the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust). This was set up by my childhood hero, Peter Scott, after he found a rare lesser white-fronted goose amongst larger flocks of greater white-fronts that traditionally winter on this stretch of the Severn Estuary. This area also draws wintering Bewick's swans and a host of waders and other birds, so I became a frequent visitor throughout my student days.
When I arrived in Bristol I was interested in birds, reptiles and insects, but on my first day there, feeling lost at having moved so far from home, I met with David Parker, who was to become my closest friend and fellow adventurer into the world of natural history throughout our undergraduate years. And he knew about plants. Gradually, by osmosis I began to pick up some botany, until I reached a threshold of knowledge that finally ignited my own interest. My passion for birds and insects remained (my Ph.D., also at the University of Bristol, was on dragonflies) but I began to spend more time searching out wildflowers, both rare and common, and to delve into their natural history and biology. That lifelong curiosity about the biology of Britain's wildflowers is one strand of this book.
I spent many happy years at Bristol University, moving on to post doctoral research after receiving my Ph.D. and I assumed I would pursue my interests in the natural world from within academia. But the BBC's Natural History Unit is just a few hundred metres from the university's biology department, and I began to appear on Radio 4 nature programs as a bug expert. Later I began to act as a natural history consultant for TV programs, including Living Planet, the big David Attenborough series that followed his ground-breaking Life on Earth. During this time I began to realise that I was far more of a generalist than a specialist. Since procuring grants for academic research meant becoming ever more specialised I jumped at the chance to join the Natural History Unit when a job came up.
Making natural history programs is a very satisfying experience. Apart from travelling to all kinds of places that I would be unlikely to visit otherwise, I discovered that film-making is a heady mix of art and science. I've had chance to work with top scientists in many fields, to showcase their work and to document the very latest discoveries. At the same time, the final program also needs to be a work of art, to be illustrated by stunning images backed by evocative music and the whole woven into a compelling story.
I had begun to photograph wildflowers during my undergraduate days, mostly as a scientific record of what I had found, but after joining the Natural History Unit, I had the chance to work with some of the finest wildlife cameramen on the planet and that helped me to develop a much better eye for images. Not long after I joined the BBC I met my wife, Vicky, who, though a mathematician and engineer by training, is also a fine artist. We would eventually end up running our own natural history production company together, but working with her also opened my eyes to even more possibilities in wildflower photography. It's far more of a challenge to try and capture the essence of each wildflower in an artistic way than just recording where it is living. In this way, I discovered that wildflowers could provide deep satisfaction for both halves of my brain - the logical, scientific side and the aesthetic and artistic side - in equal measure. For me, wildflowers can only be truly appreciated by combining both science and art. And that's what I've tried to do in this book.
Without knowing it at the time, I think the seeds for this book were sown back in 1989, when I came across a book called The Flowering of Britain, by writer Richard Mabey and photographer Tony Evans. It also inspired a documentary which aired as part of the World About Us series. In both book and TV program, the idea was to capture the beauty and natural history of Britain's wildflowers in both words and pictures. Making sure that every image in the book was a work of art proved quite a challenge for Tony Evans, though he succeeded admirably. And when I began the photographic side of this project, my admiration for Evans' work only grew.
I've focussed mainly on our more spectacular wildflowers, in part because it gave me more opportunity to photograph them in a variety of ways. I spent eight years travelling around Britain to gather the photographs, continually challenging myself to see these wildflower spectacles through different eyes, trying to capture the beauty of individual plants or parts of plants as well as their harmony with the landscapes they were growing in.
After nearly thirty years of making wildlife films, it should have come as no surprise that things are never as easy as you imagine at the start. It's rare to find the perfect plants growing in the perfect spot and then to discover this unlikely scenario when the light also just happens to be perfect! Yet, continually trying to improve on the photographs over those six years was the perfect excuse to spend long days in the field and to travel to all manner of beautiful locations, from the machair grasslands of the Outer Hebrides to the chalk cliffs of Kent.
At the same time, I began to read through all the scientific papers I could find on my chosen plants, both here and elsewhere in their range. Although all the main subjects of the following chapters are either British natives or widely naturalised here, I've also included the story of these plants wherever they occur. This gives a more complete context for these plants and therefore a deeper understanding.
For example, sometimes, plants in the UK behave very differently to those in Europe or elsewhere. They may be on the edge of their range here, or be vanishingly rare, whilst growing like weeds elsewhere. And the details of their biology might differ, such as different pollinators occurring in Europe, which makes their reproductive strategies different there. Getting a sense of how these plants behave across their whole range is part of the fascination of observing these plants in our small corner of northwest Europe.
I make no apology for diving deeply into some of the biology of these plants. Though I've tried to tread the narrow line between over-simplification and biological accuracy, a general reader may sometimes find their head spinning by the details of such topics as polyploidy or heterostyly. Be reassured by the fact that it's just the same reaction triggered in many practising botanists when faced with these topics. Even though our flora seems very familiar and has certainly been very well studied, there's still a lot we don't know. And the sum total of our knowledge is being added to all the time. I've tried to reflect this in the text, which inevitably means some confusion and unanswered questions - at which point a reader can always just look at the photographs and admire the plants.