The alder carr looks tired and dishevelled today, as if we’ve arrived the morning after the night before. Sedges and nettles have passed their peak – their stems lie splayed across the path. Even the sentry of the woods has forsaken its post beside the boardwalk. When I look over to greet this much-loved guardian (an elder alder with a woodpecker hole of a mouth and a twiglet wave), all that remains is a tangle of rotten wood and the crusty bracket fungus that almost certainly hastened its demise.
Beyond the boardwalk, we look out for small teasel (Dipsacus pilosus) – a specialist of damp calcareous soils that has been growing in this wood for at least half a century. Some years it favours an overgrown clearing by the path, where we can admire its dainty white flowers and the spiky spherical seedheads that sway above the nettles like medieval morning stars. But its towering stems are nowhere to be seen.
As a biennial plant, the small teasel is always on the move. In its first year of growth, it produces a basal rosette of oval-toothed leaves deep in the undergrowth. Small globular flower heads appear on prickly stems the following summer, after which the seeds set and are dispersed by gravity, birds or the chalk stream.
The small teasel’s itinerant nature means an annual hunt, but this year we can’t locate it from the main path, so I head tentatively into the chest-high nettles that have swallowed a track down to the stream. My legs start to sting, but I ignore them. Emerging beside the water, I notice a twinkling around my knees. Though the stems have reached only a fraction of their usual height, here by the water’s edge is a smattering of bristly flowers.
Close up, I can see the spine‑tipped bracts (modified leaves) that surround each tiny floret and give the spherical inflorescences their spiky texture. Though the species name “pilosus” means “softly hairy”, nothing about small teasels feels soft to me. But its continued presence is reassuring and I wade back through the nettles, smarting but happy.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
