The lovely nodding heads of the columbine, or 'grandmother's bonnets', which adorn the hedgerows either side of our lane. There are loads more pictures of flowers in our gallery section.			Plant life From a flower to a forest - we have them all here. Pick up a book on wild trees or plants of the British Isles and the chances are we probably have most of them. Any walk is like strolling through these books in breathable, touchable space. Where do you want to go? What do you want to see? Because, unlike any other form of life on earth, plant life is there all the time - it's rooted to the spot. If you have never fallen asleep in a bluebell wood, then you have never dreamed - if you have never walked through a meadow full of dandelions, collecting what you need to make wine until your fingers are so sticky with pollen you can roll it into balls, what part do you play in things? To breathe deeply of the wild hawthorn blossom under a full moon is to be reborn. From the most delicate lichen to the mighty lime tree, all plant life is wondrous. It is the ecosystem. Everything else just moves through it, or concretes over it. We are fortunate still to have some ancient hedgerows here, they provided shelter to many herbs and flowers from the grasp of the strangling grasses. Although some hedge verges are being taken over by bracken and king ferns it is always surprising to see what variety of species can emerge from ground that has not seen light for fifty years, seeds can lie dormant for this length of time easily. Much of Britain has been pummelled under the hoofs of cattle for decades. A cow can exert a pressure of around 3 tons per square inch, but if you loosen land with a plough then, as if by magic, an abundance of species proliferate. A green field becomes a multi-coloured meadow - field poppies do exist. Whether you can't tell aaron's rod from teasel or an ash tree from a rowan it really doesn't matter. You can simply enjoy it for what it is - alive, abundant and wondrously varied. That's plant life.