A large crowd of black horehound holds court just downhill of the small shelter for homeward bound travellers. It’s easily mistaken for nettles when you aren’t looking at it up close, but black horehound leaves are slightly fluffy and don’t sting you, and the flowers are hot pink instead of white. And wonderfully our clump is a popular ladybird nursery at the moment!

As I counted them up I thought they were nineteen orange and black bugs. An insect that I didn’t know. But when I got home and researched further I realised they were nineteen ladybird pupae, flanked by a smattering of ladybird larvae. Maybe this black horehound clump had plenty of aphids and so made a good choice for the adult ladybird to lay her eggs. I’m so glad these plants have been left this year rather than strimmed to the ground.

[This was May’s post. You can find April here. And January here.]

A central part of the project is regular surveys to observe what changes occur during the year. Our guess is that leaving it wild will encourage a greater variety of plants which will also support a greater range of insects and birds.

Our survey in early April showed big changes from the first one at the beginning of January. We recorded ladybirds, spiders, bees, hoverflies and a beefly, compared to none of these in January. They will have been hibernating and hiding back then.

Striking this time around was the wildflowers are now flowering; these weren’t big and showy, you had to lean right in and look carefully to see them, but as I peered in I could see that the delicate flowers of common vetch, chickweed, birdeye speedwell and dove’s foot cranebill were all there in blue, white and pink shades. And if you waited a moment you noticed the insects coming to drink their nectar.

Drifts of cow parsley were threatening to stun with a backdrop of white clouds in the coming fortnight, and tiny sycamore seedlings poked their heads through the compacted earth.

The project is an ongoing collaboration between Darent Valley Community Rail Partnership volunteers and Southeastern railway staff. We were so happy to find out that one of the Southeastern staff is an insect expert and he is going to carry out an insect survey and involve his children. He’ll add those findings to the iRecord database logged as “Sevenoaks Station Wild for Wildlife”, where you can already find the plant survey results.

One section of the bank was being taken over by long orchard grass preventing smaller plants from breaking through. So to give them a helping hand we’ve roughly sheared back the grass: now more species can have more light and space to establish and grow.

We’ll do another survey each month for the rest of the year, noticing what appears and reacting thoughtfully.

On a cold and sunny weekend I surveyed a 30 metre “weed-ridden” bank by a taxi rank at Sevenoaks Station. This is what I found as I opened my eyes and a plant ID app…..

Firstly a load of plants you might recognise…

1. Moss

   

2. Lichen

   

3. Red clover

   

4. Nettles

   

5. Bramble

   

6. Snowdrop

   

7. Buddleia

   

8. Burdock

   

9. Orchard grass

   

10. Chives

    

11. Rocket

How many of those did you know?

This border might have been partially planted up in recent years and so that could be where the chives and rocket came from - because it’s not usual for them to self-seed on an area like this so far away from any gardens.

Next a lot of plants that sort of all look the same but the Picture This app didn’t think so and nor do my eyes now I look more closely! (Do tell me in the comments if I’ve made any mistakes!) Do you know any of these?

12. Ribwort plantain

    

13. Yellow trefoil

    

14. Purple deadnettle

    

15. Cleaver

    

16. Common sowthistle

    

17. Cow parsley

    

18. Purple toadflax

    

19. Hedge mustard

    

20. Common mallow

    

21. Curly dock

    

22. Bristly oxtongue

    

23. Gray field speedwell

    

24. Vetch

    

25. Black medick

    

26. Chickweed

    

27. Black horehound

    

28. Black nightshade

    

29. Wood avens

    

30. Ragwort

    

31. Tansy

I was expecting not to know many of the names…. but wow there were so many different plants here. Some of the names are so evocative too “black medick”, “black horehound”….. I feel like I can go and research a witch’s potion now.

There are also trees there, but I could only identify one at this time of year:

32. Sycamore

And wildlife? Sitting quietly with a tea for 15 minutes, I spotted just a single Pied Wagtail flying between the taxi rank and up to the station building roof. What beautiful energetic birds they are. No photo of this one though!

I’ll be surveying this bank throughout the year to see what plants appear so subscribe here if you’d like to follow along…

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We’ve got permission to plant this bank up to support wildlife better. What do you think we should plant? I’m wondering about more herbs to continue the edible theme which would also give some flower for pollinators and maybe the commuters could enjoy them too! Or some small shrubs to give cover for wildlife. Tell me what you think…

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I was partly inspired to survey this bank after a foraging walk run by Gemma Hindi. She leads regular walks at Bore Place near Sevenoaks.

And finally DM me, comment or email me at lauramargaritaduncan@gmail.com if you’re local to Sevenoaks and would like to get involved. I’d love to find more people who want to garden-random-patches-of-land-for-wildlife in the area.

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See you next post!

How long did it take? I was away for 7 weeks in all but stopped in different towns and cities to visit friends and do some pro bono work. It took me 36 hours to get to my friends’ house in rural south Bohemia in the Czech Republic including an overnight stop. Then 4 hours to get to Vienna. Vienna to Braşov is a 12 hour overnight train, and the train itself goes on to Bucharest (but my Romanian friends were in Brasov so I stopped there).

Er, how did you get there, did you go via Paris for example? Yes, I did it like this:

London → Paris → Munich

[overnight in a cheap hotel near Munich train station]

Munich → Linz, Austria → Ceske Budejovice → and finally a bus to my friends’ house in Ledenice village

[stayed 3 weeks with my friends]

Here’s a video of music on a Tuesday evening in the delicious Ceske Budejovice (or Budweis) square to whet your appetite for an adventure:

Ceske Budejovice → Linz (with a stop to explore the city and an art museum) → Vienna

[5 days in Vienna]

Vienna → overnight train to Brasov

Brasov marked the end of my train journeys on this trip. I couldn’t work out how to get around the other places I wanted to go in Romania by public transport on the internet in advance so I hired a car and braved the Romanian roads and driving on the “wrong” side…... I both survived and proudly got my hire car deposit back! I flew back to the UK from Bucharest.

Do you not like flying? On the contrary, I really enjoy flying, especially if I can have a window seat and a cloudless sky! It doesn’t scare me and I don’t feel sick.

I don’t much enjoy the stop-start nature of moving through an airport though. Joining one queue after another….. keeping an eye on whether your gate is open yet….. I find it all so inefficient and frustrating.

But I mostly don’t fly if there’s another option because flying is so very bad for the environment. The carbon emissions of short-haul flights are about four times that of a domestic train1.

And my secondary reason is that I simply really enjoy travelling by train. I like that you get a view the whole time and can see the scenery pass and change. I like the slowness of it for a change. And I like that you are way more likely to strike up a conversation with interesting people or have a fun interaction. It’s a friendly way to travel. I look back fondly on interactions from this trip alone…

• The English married couple in their 60s travelling from Hereford to Verona. He had planned it all. She had no idea where they were headed! It was a birthday treat for her and she loves opera so their final destination was La Traviata at the Verona Arena (via dinner in London, lunch in Paris, overnight in Munich). So sweet!

• The three German men I got to chat and laugh with as we tried and failed to get some kind of drinks out of the fancy schmancy but broken train coffee machine.

• Martina the Austrian artist, one of my carriage companions on the overnight train (you always meet fun people on overnight trains!) who was on her way to create an immerse exhibition which I later got to go to.

What’s an overnight train like? Do you have to share with people? Do you get any sleep? Sharing depends on what you’ve chosen to pay for. Every woman I’ve shared an overnight train cabin with has had a wonderfully interesting story to tell - Chaucer could do a lot worse! I mostly sleep decently on trains, the rocking of the train lullabies me to sleep though stops and starts do wake me.

More questions? Drop them in the comments :-) Thoughts on train journeys? The comments are open for your response.

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Are you interested in maybe planning your own long distance or overnight train journey? You can start small and hands-down the best website to help you dream and plan is Mark Smith’s The Man in Seat 61.

If you’d like to read more about my Europe trip then I wrote an article about the green spaces I found and loved here.

Paris, France: Walking between Gare du Nord and Gare du l’Est I came across a community garden “jardin partagé”. It hovers over the train tracks with benches for travellers to take a break, grapes on vines, space to grow vegetables and even a children’s playground. I ducked under a tree for shelter from a sudden downpour.

Here’s where to find Jarden Marielle Franco: https://maps.app.goo.gl/4BD6sCaccx4qHt9GA

Linz, Austria: Small slightly messy and wild areas on street corners in Linz sparked some ideas for me….. What would it be like if butterflies and bees had stepping stones of nectar plants really close to each other in our cities? I would love to live in a city like that, with true corridors for nature side by side with humans!

Often in town centres the planting in flower beds and parks is formal and not nature-friendly. But Linz’s main square memorial was surrounded by verbena and marigolds, and plants of a variety of heights. By the Danube with cruise ships to my left and an unmown stretch of clover to my right a cabbage white butterfly fluttered right past my nose.

Ledenice and Mladosovice, Czech Republic: Across south Bohemia, Calla are rewilding former sand quarries. After I’d met Eda and heard about his work with Calla, I hopped on a borrowed e-bike and visited two of them. These are now homes for insect and birds, and they are a patchwork of different habitats in a small area.

The gentle energy and beauty of these places was the absolute highlight of my summer Europe trip.

Ledenice:

Mladosovice:

Vienna, Austria: Zentralfriedhof (Central Cemetery) is one of the largest in the world at 590 acres so luckily I could hire another e-bike to get me to the wildlife area at the far end as the hot sun shone down. Here there’s a wildlife pond, beehives, dead wood piles and wild areas. But interwoven within the graveyard there are numerous other natural areas too - like woodland burial sites and even an allotment.

Wildlife areas with salvias and so many butterflies:

Woodland burial area within the graveyard:

Allotment within the graveyard:

Iaşi, Romania: Iaşi in northeastern Romania has changed a lot during the years since I first visited in 1999. The changes have been very positive overall and there are plenty of pockets of nature around. It’s wonderful to sense bats flying at nighttime across the pedestrianised Boulevard Stefan Cel Mare in the centre, the Palace of Culture is now surrounded by gardens which are both human-friendly and wildlife-friendly, and more parks and the botanic gardens buzz with life.

Boulevard Stefan Cel Mare, Iaşi:

Braşov, Romania: For ten days I stayed in a 1960s Communist era apartment block. That sentence conjures images of concrete uniformity…. what I wasn’t expecting was to feel like I was staying in a tree house. The blocks were arranged with hedges, trees and the occasional bench for sitting with neighbours between them. And then there were pathways through to the market and shops set away from any cars. An excellent example of placemaking that values people rather than cars.

Experiencing these spaces made me realise how much I love places like this, and I’m now working on setting up a Community Garden at Bore Place in Kent which you might like to read more about. You might also like to watch the introductory video we’ve made here.

You can write your thoughts in the comments on the green spaces I’ve shared about or ones you’ve visited yourself:

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And finally, Chris Fitch wrote a whole book about this kind of thing “Wild Cities: Discovering New Ways of Living in the Modern Urban Jungle” and I read that Sir David Attenborough has a new documentary Wild London showing on New Year’s Day 2026.

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