Plants

Dover Saint James

~ judyheiser ~ 2 Comments

This week we visited Dover Saint James cemetery, a six-acre site and one of four burial grounds that are situated on Copt Hill overlooking Dover.

Dover Saint James opened for burials in 1855

In recent years Dover District Council have reduced the amount of grass cutting and Saint James is fast becoming a successful example of how a cemetery can be managed to promote biodiversity:

In 2024 138 species of plants were recorded there including four species of orchid. This will no doubt have also fuelled an improvement in the number of species of invertebrates too – in August 2024 an adonis blue butterfly was seen there which is quite a feather in the cap for the place.

We had come for a Commonwealth War Graves Commission tour of the cemetery. There are around 750 graves under the care of the Commission in perpetuity there:

The tour was really interesting and we learned so much about what the Commission does, the rules it operates under and some of the stories behind the specific burials at Dover Saint James

There is an ethos of absolute equality. A private soldier can be buried next to a senior officer with the headstones for each looking the same. Moreover, should it be a burial of, for example, someone shot for desertion, you would not be able to tell that from the headstone. However, the family does get the opportunity to add a personal inscription at the bottom and we were shown a photo of the grave of Private Albert Ingham who is buried at Bailleulmont in France. He was executed by firing squad for desertion in 1916 and would have most probably have been suffering from what we now know is PTSD. The words that the War Graves Commission put on the headstone make no reference to this, governed as they are by the spirit of equality. But the family has added at the bottom: ‘Shot at Dawn. One of the first to enlist. A worthy son of his father’. I find that terribly moving.

There is an area put aside for military deaths resulting from the raid on Zeebrugge in 1918:

The raid was an attempt by the Royal Navy to block the Belgium Port on 23rd April 1918, which was being used by the Germans for a fleet of U boats and light shipping. The plan was to sink obsolete ships in the harbour entrance, trapping the German vessels in port, but unfortunately the blockships were sunk in the wrong position and the entrance was only obstructed for a few days. Of the 1,700 men involved in the operation, over 400 were wounded and more than 200 died. Most of the fatalities are buried in England either because they died of their wounds on ship or because the survivors recovered their bodies. Saint James is the resting place for fifty of the named and nine unidentified dead and the rest were returned to their families for local burial

Because there were so many fatalities, these have been buried in Saint James with one coffin on top of another to save space, with the headstone showing both cap badges together with details of the two deaths:

We were shown this photo of the Zeebrugge raid coffins as they were being buried:

There is also the Dunkirk evacuation section. Up until the Falklands War, there was a policy of no repatriation of bodies, so those that died in France in the Second World War will have been buried there. The Dunkirk fallen that lie in Saint James died on the small ships bringing them back to England, or subsequently at the military hospitals in Dover:

We have always enjoyed visiting churches and graveyards and now we will have a much greater understanding and appreciation of any war graves that we come across there.

One of the orchids that is found in Dover Saint James, and that we also have here in our garden, is autumn lady’s tresses. These tiny white spirals come up in their hundreds on our front lawn in late August and turn it into an exclusion zone for a while:

One of the spikes of autumn lady’s tresses now adorning our front lawn

It is an exceptional year for hedgerow fruit here:

The previous owner of the meadows still visits every year to collect sloes to make her sloe gin and has a memory of the meadows going back forty years. She reports that she has never seen such an abundance of fruit before:

The previous owner of the meadows collecting sloes whilst keeping the dog happy with treats

But there is worrying talk in the press that this fruit might be plentiful but it has come early and might lead to a significant hunger gap for wildlife later in the autumn.

Red admirals on the ivy alerted me to the fact that it is just starting to come into flower. The ivy bees will be here soon

There is a plant growing in the meadows that I have never paid much attention to before:

This is red bartsia, a member of the broomrape family which is a collection of plants that are partial or total parasites. Red bartsia is an annual and grows on chalky, nutrient-poor soils and is a partial root parasite of various short grasses. The UK has lost 80% of its chalk grassland since the Second World War and so many of its associated specialised species have suffered similar declines
There is a lot of red bartsia this year, especially down by the wild pond on the right here

The plant is named after Johann Bartsch, a botanist who worked with Carl Linnaeus in the 18th century. Linnaeus sent him on an expedition to Suriname where he died of a tropical disease aged only 29. Linnaeus named a genus of plants, Bartsia, in his memory.

When I ran the moth trap last week I caught a barred rivulet:

I do often get this moth, but this time I spent some time looking up what the larval food plants were for the moths that I had caught. I learned that the sole food plant for this moth is red bartsia and this got me interested in the plant

I also discovered that there is a solitary bee, the red bartsia blunt-horn, Melitta tricincta, that only collects pollen from red bartsia, although it may occasionally take nectar from other flowers:

Photo from Wiki Commons by Julia Wittman CCA 4.0 International

The distribution map for this bee suggests that there is every possibility that it lives in the meadows, but I didn’t know to look for it until now. However, despite hanging out with my camera by that large patch of red bartsia by the pond this week, I didn’t see one. It does feel late in the summer now though, and the flowers are definitely fading fast, so spotting a red bartsia blunt-horn has become a project for next year.

The trail cameras have generally been quiet this week but there has been continuing harassment of the kestrel by the magpies:

We haven’t done August’s tour round the dormouse boxes yet and there are only two photos from the wood this time. I think that the trail camera did really well to capture this migrating willow warbler in flight:

And juvenile green woodpeckers are turning on cameras all over the wood. I presume that these are the ones that fledged from the cherry tree back in June:

There is a feeling in the air of summer drawing to a close. The badgers agree with me and are starting to prepare their quarters for the winter ahead:

They have been dragging numerous loads of dry, sweet-smelling hay backwards and down into their sett

However, looking at the weather forecast, there does appear to be plenty of late summer sunshine still to come so we had best get out and make the most of it.