The toothwort plant with white leaves, tinged with pink.
©️ Anne Rowe

Toothwort on Hothfield Heathlands in May

Volunteer Margery Thomas talks us through a fascinating species you can find on Hothfield Heathlands in May: toothwort! Read all about it and the recent bird counts at the reserve here.

‘HOTHFIELD COMMON bog plants’ is the description on a map of Kent and East Sussex produced by the South East England Tourist Board, probably in the early 1980’s, which includes the proposed line of the missing section of the M20 between Maidstone and Ashford, junctions 8 to 9. The caption sums it up really, one might think, except that it doesn’t. A significant feature of the reserve is the variety of rare and threatened habitats in one small site, including ancient woodland and hedgerows as indicated by the occasional colony of toothwort, Lathraea squamaria.  

A perennial (grows year after year) and a parasite, toothwort has no chlorophyll so is all creamy white and takes nutrients from the roots of host trees and shrubs, notably hazel, elm, lime, alder, willow, beech, walnut and blackthorn, where it enjoys shade and damp conditions. In March the thick rhizome or underground stem sends small white knuckles up through the leaf litter or moss, to uncurl into thick downy stems up to 25 cm tall bearing dense vertical rows of dingy white flowers crowded up one side of the stem, looking, wrote Richard Mabey in Flora Britannica like ‘dirty, mauve-stained molars’. It’s the lips of the tubular flowers and the protruding stigma that are tinged purple or pink. Bumble bees pollinate the flowers, resulting in capsules of very fine seed. Each seed has a tiny fatty structure, an elaiosome, which attracts ants who therefore help distribute them.  The seed of the dog violets found on the reserve also have elaiosomes. By midsummer seed has dropped and the stem turns brown and withers.  Only to quietly emerge the following spring, persisting for decades if undisturbed, and in the case of plants recorded by Gilbert White in Selbourne in 1772, for centuries as they were still there in 1997, the date of my copy of Flora Britannica. 

The toothwort plant with white leaves, tinged with pink.
©️ Anne Rowe

Lathraea is from the Ancient Greek Lathraios meaning secret, and squamaria means scaly. Roots growing form the rhizome have pad-like suckers, haustoria, at the tips, which dissolve root tissue to reach the sap and divert some nutrients from the host. The haustoria are withdrawn through autumn and winter. Toothwort is yet another plant on the reserve that is cleistogamic, producing subterranean flowers which are automatically fertilised, like Viola paulustris and V reichenbachiana.

The leaves of toothwort, lacking chlorophyll, are reduced to small scales on the rhizome and under each flower. This uncommon and unusual plant is in the Orobanchaceae or broomrape family, as is the hemiparasite lousewort Pedicularis sylvatica found on the margins of the bogs, and yellow rattle, Rhinanthus minor, not found here but familiar to gardeners establishing meadows, semi parasitic on vigorous grasses and used very successfully in the wild garden at nearby Godinton House.

Thank you to regular visitor Neil Burt for again reporting a bird count on an evening stroll on 7 April ‘Plenty of singing chiffchaffs, 2 blackcaps, green & greater spotted woodpeckers, 2 jays, goldfinch, 10 linnets, 4 song thrushes, 2 mistle thrushes, 4 teal, 4 mandarins, 5 yellowhammers, kestrel, little egret, 2 nuthatches.’ The following week the cuckoo was heard on the reserve. Listen out for nightingales now. After a disastrous 2024 for butterflies, sightings of orange tips and peacocks, in April were welcome. Sundew that overwintered rolled up into a hibernaculum in the sphagnum moss are now uncurling in the main bog, tiny plants visible from the causeway. Also unfurling are the young croziers of bracken as the volunteers well know. They have been busy repairing and installing fencing, gates, winching tree trunks out of bogs and popping trees out of dry ground, and reinforcing leaky dams with fresh bundles of brash. 

Come and relish the bird song, the bluebells, the translucent young beech leaves and, of course, the bog plants.

Cross leaved heath at Hothfield Heathlands
Ian Rickards

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