There are flowers which grow on walls and there are walls which have flowers growing out of them and this is about both. Around 60 plants have been selected which often grow out of walls. Some almost exclusively are found associated with walls, others are commonly found on walls, but not always so, and there are also many many plants that might just grow out of a wall occasionally but not so regularly and these are not included, you have to draw the line somewhere and I drew it at 60.
This superb example of Great Mullein is growing out of a wall, unfortunately it does not make the cut, however a related species called Black Mullein does as that one is often associated with walls whereas this is the only time I have seen Great Mullein, growing from a wall..
The 60 or so that made the grade includes a few grasses which are after all flowering plants, but it also includes some ferns which are not. Plants which are almost exclusively found on walls are species like Ivy-leaved Toadflax, Yellow Corydalis and Mexican Fleabane, these three all happen to be introduced species, but some have become so much part of walls that ‘Wall’ is part of their name like Pellitory of the Wall, Wall Bedstraw, Wall Rue, a fern and off course the most famous one the Wallflower.
The other side of the coin is the walls and each plant has been photographed growing on a particular wall which may be famous, may be characteristic of a certain region ie dry stone walls which vary from place to place or it may be just somewhere that I visited. We will cover walls as far apart as Hadrian’s wall, The Antoine wall (which is even further north) to the sea wall at Baltimore in southern Ireland, and closer to home I will have the drystone walls of the Cotswold’s and the walls of the first Iron smelting works which is just up the road from where I live.
The flowers obviously predate the walls, so the plants we now find on our walls had to live somewhere before man started his constructions and this would have been cliffs and mountain sides, rocky gravelly places and then when man began to put up his buildings, fortifications, and boundary markers the plants were ready adapted and could take advantage of these new opportunities. A difficult habitat though and we will explore the challenges that colonising walls presents.
Walls and Flowers 