Bloxham Atlas recording

It's already time for me to write another blog post about another Atlas recording meeting, held last Sunday. With fortnightly weekend meetings (listed in the events calendar), can I keep this up all season?

Sunday's meeting was in an even further flung corner of the county than the previous meeting. Three of us met at St Mary's church in Bloxham (SP43H), a rather grand edifice for a parish church. The churchyard further confirmed my experience that unimproved but heavily mown churchyard grassland in Oxon is characterized by a small number of hangers-on, species like

Leontodon hispidus

(rough hawkbit),

Plantago media

(hoary plantain) and in spring often

Ranunculus auricomus

(goldilocks buttercup). It was perhaps a little early in the year to be absolutely confident of the potential

Epilobium lanceolatum

(spear-leaved willowherb) which Oli Pescott found — definitely worth a visit later in the year to verify whether it was this locally rare willowherb. After the church we botanised the local streets, picking up spring annuals like

Saxifraga tridactylites

(rue-leaved saxifrage) and a host of garden escapes, such as the unusual

Geranium x magnificum

. We also found

Petroselinum segetum

(corn parsley), which is not that uncommon around Oxford but which hasn't many recent records from the north of the county.

In addition to its being hardly recorded, the main attraction of SP43T had been The Slade, a former BBOWT nature reserve and now an official Local Nature Reserve (LNR) managed by the parish council. This spring-fed site had once supported such wetland delights as

Molinia caerulea

(purple moor-grass), so although these had not been seen at the LNR for a long time it nevertheless looked enticing. We did not succeed in refinding any old wetland rarities but did turn up

Dactylorhiza fuchsii

(common spotted orchid),

Hypericum maculatum

(imperforate St John's-wort),

Silene flos-cuculi

(ragged-robin) and a lot of Rosa arvensis x canina (=R. x irregularis). This hybrid rose is very distinctive when growing in sunny places: looking like R. arvensis (field rose) on speed, it forms dense and often very extensive thickets with more robust stems than is usual in R. arvensis and many of the hips are small, black and abortive. Possibly R. x irregularis is under-recorded as I find it quite often, usually in more open places than is usual for

Rosa arvensis

.

The last nice plants of the day came from some hands-and-knees work in very nibbled sheep pasture, where we managed to find some small patches of

Saxifraga granulata

(meadow saxifrage). It was not quite in flower but was nevertheless great to see. On the whole we had to work quite hard for our records, so I was surprised to find after entering the data that we'd recorded 253 taxa (albeit with quite a lot of aliens), putting the post-2000 total to 297 — a valiant effort!

The next Sunday recording meeting will be on 12^th May. It'd be great to have more botanists along — hopefully the last two blogs have shown that there are plants up in the north of the county worth travelling for!

Tetrad distribution of