And so it begins

The first recording meeting of the final season of Atlas 2020 in Oxfordshire was on Sunday. Meeting in Nether Worton in SP43, the location was evidently a little out of the way as there were only four of us, but if you thought that then you missed out on good botanising. Rather than the more usual square-bashing strategy, the aim of this meeting was to record an already quite well-recorded area in order to improve it further and also to pick up some plants that have not been seen this century in the hectad in Oxon, such as the woodland plants Viola reichenbachiana (early dog-violet) and Melica uniflora (wood melick). Previously these areas had been visited later in the year and we were therefore sure to pick up new things.

We started at the churchyard of the tiny church of St James' in Nether Worton (SP43F), a tetrad with a respectable post-2000 total of 168 but some missing vernal species. The churchyard was pretty undistinguished, with typical hangers-on of heavily-mown churchyard grassland such as Plantago media (hoary plantain) absent. There were plenty of naturalised non-natives to lend colour though, such as Cerinthe major 'Purpurescens', an annual bedding plant from the Mediterranean which appeared to have seeded from the adjacent garden and was a first for the county. There were also many plants of Ranunculus auricomus (goldilocks buttercup) here and in the nearby verges. We didn't stay long in the tetrad due to lack of promising-looking land accessible by footpaths, and instead headed west toward the Great Tew Estate via a detour north over Iron Hill Down (SP43A).

After a few kilometers on Iron Hill Down I was feeling pretty desperate as the place was an arable wasteland, though there were some springs with a few common wetland plants in one area. Crossing the B4031 south into the Great Tew Estate the spirits lifted, however, with a flurry of ticking of semi-natural woodland and grassland plants, like Sanicula europaea (sanicle) and Poterium sanguisorba (salad burnet). Thinking aloud I suggested that some nice grassland looked perfect for Ophioglossum vulgatum (adder's-tongue fern) and then promptly found several of the tiny fronds of this lovely vernal fern. Turned out this was a new hectad record!

Continuing into the valley bottom toward Great Tew we came upon a series of wet woodlands with springs and streams. Here we found a small population of Scirpus sylvaticus (wood club-rush), a scarce plant in Oxon. As a species of feruginous wet woodlands, this north-western part of the county with its iron-rich limestone is the main area where it has historically been recorded. The population we found was first seen in 2015. Some of the other highlights of this area included Polystichum aculeatum (hard shield-fern) and Hypericum maculatum (imperforate St John's-wort).

We concluded the meeting back in Nether Worton with a pretty diverse haul of records for early April. In total we collected 340 records of 236 taxa: 197 in SP43A and 127 in SP43F. This put the tetrad totals up from 214 to 284 in SP43A and from 168 to 214 in SP43F. Certainly better than I was anticipating after a pretty dismal morning! The next meeting will be on 21st April — I hope you can join me.