Rosebay Willowherb

Rosebay Willowherb seeds, Epilobium angustifolium. High Elms Country Park, 22 August 2011.

A photo from last Autumn. Rosebay Willowherb is also called fireweed. Some say it is because the seeds blowing away from the vivid flowers look like smoke from a fire. Others, that it likes to grow where there has been a fire.

It is certainly an early urban coloniser. In London, after World War II, it grew in the craters where buildings had been blown up in the Blitz. Where I grew up, near Newcastle, we often saw it where rows of houses had been demolished.

The flower of this species is what the crab spider I posted recently was sitting on.