English hedgerow?

15th February 2013

You would imagine that however confident you are in identifying edible plants in the UK if you found yourself in some remote corner of the globe these skills would be utterly useless and that you would have to start from scratch.

Have a look at the following pictures;-

These pictures could have been taken along a UK verge or hedgerow in mid summer……..in fact they were taken alongside a southern Kenyan roadside last week!

Without a Kenyan plant guide, I have erred on the side of caution with most of them and only stated the genus but for most I was relatively confident that they were the same species as found in the UK.  In addition to the plants pictured there were many which bore close resemblances to other UK species so as to be reasonably confident of their family such as clematis, legumes, lamium, convovulus, etc.

It was a pleasant surprise to find a little piece of “England” over 6000 miles away under the equatorial sun.

Of course there was also a multitude of species which could not be identified by their latin name and probably had no European counterpart.

Kev Palmer