Somerset Rare Plants Group

The leaves will be on the trees soon; good news in most ways, but it means that mistletoe recording doesn’t have much longer to go. So far we’ve had over one thousand records, in spite of the restrictions in place, and the map is an impressive sight. Inevitably there are isolated places that not even SRPG members can reach, but if you think that there may be old records unchecked near you, Linda and I would be happy to check on your behalf. Val has prepared a map of past records to make this easier .

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There’s a salty theme in the latest updates to the Rare Plant Register: Artemisia maritima (Sea Wormwood), Cakile maritima (Sea Rocket), Euphorbia paralias (Sea Spurge), and Zostera marina (Eelgrass). Also added is Agrostis curtisii (Bristle Bent), a grass of poor acid soils.

The results are in! Click here.

As you can see there have been some changes. We hope that overall this will be a simpler layout of the pages and menus, which won’t require too many further changes to include new content. The “front page” will contain the latest news and announcements like this one. The mistletoe and first flowering sections are now under Activities > Projects. If you can’t find something use the search (magnifying glass) option on the top right of each page or contact the website manager.

The 2020 newsletter is now available on the newsletters page. To quote Dee, “It was pretty epic so I made two files. Part 1 is Reports, Part 2 is Articles. Hoping people will be able to find their way around it!”. Many thanks to Dee for her hard work in producing this record of the year of lockdown and to all the members who contributed.

Somehow or other my message didn’t make it to the AGM, but since I wrote it I may as well put it in here.

” I’d just like to say that starting up and running the SRPG website has been a great opportunity to learn a lot, and to get to know some interesting people. It wouldn’t have happened without technical input from Tony Price at SERC. So I’d like to thank him and all members for giving me that opportunity, particularly the lovely committee.

It is time for fresh challenges for me now. It is good to know that Val taking over is going to raise the site to new and dazzling levels.”

Our Excel-based maps of record and taxon counts per monad have been updated. They incorporate all records from 2000 to present.

You can now see all the photos entered for the competition in our gallery pages. Please have a look at the Photographic Competition page where you can also vote by email for your favourite.

Here are Simon’s thoughts on a first flowering project for the new year. The data entry spreadsheet (with explanatory notes) is available here:

Last year’s ‘first flowering’ project has run its course, and for most of us it’s probably a good moment to move on to other things. And yet, unfortunately for Vicki, it’s also true that this coming year—as in every year since 2008—I shall continue to record FFDs for 300-odd species in the Taunton area. To be honest, it’s hard not to do it once you’ve started, but I wouldn’t wish for a moment to inflict this obsession upon anyone else. However, we find ourselves at the start of another lockdown which could well continue until March; and while we have the Mistletoe, Viscum album, to keep us occupied, for now, it is nevertheless the case that some of us don’t have much of that species growing in our local patches. So we may still need something else to distract us. And, let’s face it, there is bound to come a day, probably between now and the end of lockdown, when we’ll stumble upon our first Barren Strawberry, Potentilla sterilis, or our first Lords-and-Ladies, Arum maculatum, and there will be this desperate urge to want to shout about it from the rooftops. That might be a slight exaggeration, but you know the feeling, I’m sure…

All of which makes me wonder whether there could be some members interested in carrying on with ‘first flowerings’ for a little bit longer. To be honest, I’m not sure any of us have either the time or the energy at the moment to conjure up weekly target lists and reports of what we’ve found, but maybe something a little less ambitious would still be worth considering? My proposition, then, for the coming months, is that, rather than trying to record everything, we could perhaps concentrate on recording FFDs for about 100-150 common species. The emphasis should probably be on things likely to come into flower in the next three to four months, to see us through at least to the end of the current lockdown. But the list will also include a fair smattering of later-flowering species, ending (as last year) with Ivy, Hedera helix.  It has been suggested that suggested that the list could be distributed as a spread-sheet, thus encouraging members to keep their records in a form that could then be easily combined at the end of the summer. We would then produce a summary of what we’ve found, including an assessment of how FFDs in 2021 compare with those we recorded last year. It might be particularly interesting to explore a little more deeply how FFDs vary across the county, to see whether some of the patterns spotted in 2020 are repeated again this year.

A spreadsheet has been created of species to look out for, listed in order of their first flowering in 2020. There are also a few notes attached to help people make sense of it all.  Apologies to anyone who’s favourite species didn’t make the list. I’ve removed most sedges, grasses and rushes as these can be particularly tricky when it comes to deciding if they’re flowering or not. Which means it’s a much more colourful list this year! Lots of big showy things that shouldn’t be too hard to hunt for. As explained in the text, I’ve skewed the list towards things that should start flowering between now and the end of April since this is the time when we’re most likely to be in need of some botanical distraction.