Picking Wild Flowers &c.

Apropos Wild Flowers (which begs the Question, what is a Wild Flower?), we understand that it isn't normally an Offence to collect, 'fruit, foliage, fungi or flowers', if the Plants are growing in the Wild and what we collect is for Personal Use. However lots of Plants are protected by the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act. And it's apparently never OK to dig up a Whole Plant.

Which makes us Wonder: does a Local Authority have any responsibility to ensure the Well-Being of Wild Flowers? If the Local Authority doesn't appear to demonstrate any apparent interest and seems generally intent, wherever possible, on razing everything to the Ground, digging up a Plant (or Plants) and Replanting it (or them) where the Local Authority can't reach it, might be the only way to Guarantee a Plant flowers? Or Survives! Is that so Wrong? 

What has prompted these Musings?

We recently visited the Hillview Cemetery and as we had half expected, the so-called, Wild Flower areas, have been razed to the Ground. And it is not clear what is going on with the Wild Flower areas in Lesnes Abbey Park. Sadly, it looks as if Butterflies and other Little Critters in the Park will be few and far between now.

A few days ago, we visited the Thames Path in the Belvedere area where the last of the Cowslips had still been in flower with other Plants coming up nicely, to see that the Council Strimmers had just visited viz.

All gone although some of the White Ramping Fumitory escaped the Strimmers viz.

It will doubtless grow back back again. But no Cowslip Seeds this year. 

And with the Council boasting that they will provide £90,000 'on more frequent cutting of grass, verges and hedges', we wonder whether anything will be given a chance to flower?

Thankfully a nearby Slope was left untouched allowing for a Kidney Vetch to flower viz.

The nearby Footpath connecting Norman Road North and the Thames Path has recently been Strimmed as has the Footpath connecting the Crossness Nature Reserve to Belvedere Road (Strimming, and very thorough it was too, was underway when we visited and left quicker than we had intended).

All of this also meaning that many flowering Plants that might have provided succour to Little Critters &c. have gone.

But perhaps it all looks too untidy?

Prompting us to repeat our earlier Musings viz. 'Which makes us Wonder: does a Local Authority have any responsibility to ensure the Well-Being of Wild Flowers? If the Local Authority doesn't appear to demonstrate any apparent interest and seems generally intent, wherever possible, on razing everything to the Ground, digging up a Plant (or Plants) and Replanting it (or them) where the Local Authority can't reach it, might be the only way to Guarantee a Plant flowers? Or Survives! Is that so Wrong?'