In early April 2000 I arrived in Berlin to spend the summer semester as Guest Lecturer (‘Gastdozent’) in Phonetics at the Free University. They put me up for the first couple of days in a hotel then asked me to go along to the Accommodation Office to sort out a long term solution.

The two nice women who ran the place asked me, to my surprise, what kind of place I was looking for, what I was used to. I happened to have a postcard on me showing our cottage in its summer splendour. “That’s what I’m used to”, I said. “But I’m not going to find that kind of peace and quiet in a big city, am I?”. “Wir haben eine kleine Überraschung für Sie” (“we have a little surprise for you”), one of them said, announcing that there was a nice room available in a guesthouse reserved for foreign lecturers; actually inside the Berlin Botanical Gardens, which was run by the University.

What a piece of luck. The house was behind the scenes, near various greenhouses where young plants were grown and right by great heaps of earth where dead flowers were dumped and others grew wildly, providing me with a never-ending supply of flowers to decorate my room.

Near the north entrance of the Gardens was a very well behaved German beech wood which, when I first arrived, was full of two types of anemone: the familiar white wood anemone, anemone nemorosa, and its cousin anemone ranunculoides, the yellow woodland anemone. (To remember the scientific name of the first was straightforward: they were the most numerous. For the second, the process was a little more bizarre: I imagined my uncle running through the wood with a bunch of them in his hand, shouting ‘Oi!’).

Some people in Britain right now have wood anemones in abundance. (Monty Don was pointing some out in Gardeners’ World yesterday evening).  We’re not so lucky in our wood: the only springtime plants which came out in abundance when we first moved here some 17 years ago were dog’s mercury, mercurialis perennis, (not just inedible, but actually toxic, to dogs especially) and stinging nettles, urtica dioica, (great for soups when very young, and can make an excellent addition to cheeses - ask for brandnetelkaas in Holland, though cheesemakers are starting to use nettles in Britain).

Cunningly, however a third plant has increasingly been beating both dog’s mercury and nettles to the starting gate in recent years: the one you see in the photo above, wood garlic, allium ursinum. From the photo you can see that it is now in flower; what you can’t see is that, from just a few square metres ten years ago, it now colonises quite substantial parts of the wood, extending its territory well before its two main rivals appear. (All the photos were taken on 26 April).

        

                                                   

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Good for the garlic.  For weeks now we’ve been adding it raw to sandwiches and panini (flowers as well as the leaves), and using it for cooking.  It’s a perfect example of what woodland plants have to do to survive and multiply: beat the rivals to it, and make sure they get going before the deciduous trees get into full leaf, depriving them of sunlight.

[Click here to see other photos I took yesterday, with Jane at my elbow to help me identify them.  Many are what can be called ‘marginal’ woodland plants: those (such as lesser celandine, primrose, dandelions and cowslips) which can’t venture far into the wood without the extra light at the edges, many of them only just coming into bloom or still in an earlier stage.]