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Stony Stratford is a Georgian coaching town on Watling Street at the edge of the Great Ouse flood plain, its long High Street of brick townhouses, the Church of St Mary Magdalene and the Cock Inn — origin of the phrase "cock and bull story" — giving it a distinct historic character. The Great Ouse floodplain meadows and the Ouse Valley Park riverside scrub at Cosgrove carry willows, meadow wildflowers and hawthorn; the limestone garden walls of the old town centre hold ivy through to October; and the agricultural fields north of the town toward Cosgrove carry oilseed rape in spring.

Oilseed rape is grown extensively on the agricultural plain around Castlethorpe, Hanslope and the fields north of Wolverton, opening the main flow in late April; the Great Ouse floodplain meadows carry white clover and riverside wildflowers through June and July. The linear parks of the new city — Ouzel Valley Park, Loughton Valley, Linford Wood and Campbell Park — carry lime trees, hawthorn and bramble through a long urban season. Lime trees were planted extensively on the boulevards and parkway margins of the new city in the 1970s and 1980s and now carry a strong June urban flow across the grid squares; hawthorn and blackthorn are thick on the original field hedgerows surviving within the linear parks. Woburn Sands and Aspley Heath, straddling the Bedfordshire border, carry heather and gorse on acidic sandy soils — an unusual local forage note for a lowland Midlands city. Bramble is prolific on the Redway scrub and former railway embankments; ivy on the stone walls of the old villages closes the year.