Learn more about the plants that can be found in Brighton & Hove.
There's a fascinating selection of nature and biodiversity to explore in Brighton & Hove.
Many plants play a critically important role in our natural ecosystems by providing food and offering shelter for native insects, birds, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals.
Biodiversity is our planet’s life support system. Restoring nature underpins the health and well-being of people and wildlife in an era of climate change.
Read about Brighton & Hove's Wilder Verges pilot project.
The Sussex Wildlife Trust recently shared information about the importance of wilder lawns. There's also further advice on actions you can take to support nature in your garden.
The Wildlife Trusts and the Royal Horticultural Society have produced the booklet Wild About Lawns – Bringing Lawns back to Life. The booklet contains information about how to wild your lawn.
Common knapweed is a stunning thistle-like wildflower with a vibrant pink-purple flower head. It can reach up to a metre in height. It flowers from June to September and really brightens up the later summer flowering period.
It grows in all kinds of grassland habitats, including:
Common knapweed provides a massive boost of nectar for our pollinators. It was found to be among the top 5 species for nectar production in a survey of UK plants.
This means it feeds:
It's well adapted to urban landscapes.
You can easily spot common knapweed on verges throughout the city and in parks and open spaces such as Sheepcote Valley and Wilding Waterhall.
Lords and ladies is a shade-loving plant mostly found in woodlands and hedgerows. It indicates older, less tampered-with soils.
As an early flowering plant, its vibrant green arrow-shaped leaves adorn the ground from March, while its distinctive tube-like sheath flowers appear from April to May.
Lords and ladies is pollinated by flies, especially midges, with an ingenious entrapment method using the sheath.
Its upright stalk turns to bright orange-red berries in the autumn. These are eaten by woodland birds such as blackbirds and thrushes, providing a good source of food in late summer and autumn. Birds then disperse the seeds from the berries, with new plants often emerging under hedges or in the ground under areas where birds perch.
Red dead-nettle is also known as Lamium purpureum. Red dead-nettle’s beautiful and delicate crimson trumpet flowers tend to appear from March to October and provide vital food for our wildlife all the way through the spring and summer.
The plant belongs to the same family as mint. A family trait is its square stems.
Red dead-nettle can be seen on verges, playing field edges and parks and gardens within the city.
Unlike the common stinging nettle, dead-nettle species like the red-dead nettle do not have stinging leaves and are soft and velvety to touch.
Red dead-nettle is an important early food source for bees and hoverflies as it produces both nectar and pollen. The plant has long flower tubes which means they're particularly valuable to long-tongued bees like the red mason bee and garden bumblebee.
The caterpillars of moths including garden tiger, white ermine and angle shades also feed on red dead-nettle leaves.
Wild carrot is an umbellifer – a family of aromatic plants with umbrella-shaped flowers.
Wild carrot’s white flowers can usually be seen from June to September, before eventually transforming into concave seed heads that resemble a bird's nest.
The nectar and pollen of wild carrot flowers is popular with beetles, flies, hoverflies and many other insects. It's also a food source for caterpillars.
Although wild carrot’s leaves and roots smell like the carrots we’re used to seeing at the dinner table, the roots don’t resemble the vegetable.
Wild carrot thrives best on grasslands, particularly grasslands on chalk soils and coastlines. This makes Brighton & Hove an ideal location to spot this seasonal species.
You should be able to find wild carrot in bloom at parks and open spaces throughout the city such as:
