Often seen carpeting the floor of ancient woodlands, Dog's mercury can quickly colonise, its fresh green leaves shading out rarer plants. It is also very poisonous.

The sweet chestnut is famous for its shiny brown fruits, or 'chestnuts', that are wrapped in a spiky, green casing and make a tasty winter treat. Look for this tree in woodlands in South…

The turnstone can be spotted fluttering around large stones on rocky and gravelly shores, flipping them over to look for prey. It can even lift rocks as big as its own body! Although a migrant to…

Forming mats of straight, bright green stems, Common spike-rush does, indeed, look like lots of tightly clustered 'spikes' near the water's edge of our wetland habitats.

The Broad centurion, or 'Green soldier fly', is one of our most common soldier flies, and is often found in gardens. It has hairy eyes and a metallic blue or bronze body. It is an…

Great reedmace is familiar to many of us as the archetypal 'bulrush'. Look for its tall stems, sausage-like, brown flower heads and green, flat leaves at the water's edge in our…

Parsley fern lives up to its name - the pale green fronds form in clusters among rocks and look just like parsley. Look out for it in upland areas, particularly in Wales and Cumbria.

Introduced from Japan in the 19th century, Japanese knotweed is now an invasive non-native plant of many riverbanks, waste grounds and roadside verges, where it prevents native species from…

The vast, green mats that sometimes cover the surface of still water, such as ponds, flooded gravel pits and old canals, are actually Common duckweed. A tiny, single plant, it groups together to…

Despite its name, Spurge laurel is not a laurel - it just looks like one! It has glossy, dark green leaves and black, poisonous berries, and can be found in woodlands in southern England, in…

The pyramidal orchid lives up to its name - look for a bright pinky-purple, densely packed pyramid of flowers atop a green stem. It likes chalk grassland, sand dunes, roadside verges and quarries…