The Barfords

Carex rostrata (bottle sedge) growing in an artificial pond

Sunday continued the run of highly successful Atlas 2020 recording meetings in north Oxfordshire, when as a a fortnight ago we had another haul of 300+ taxa. Three of us met at Barford St Michael, downstream along the River Swere from where we last met, but it was a disappointing start, the churchyard of St Michael's proving among the dullest I have yet visited in Oxon. We later visited St John's in the same tetrad (SP43G), but it was even worse. However, we did find a single plant of

Rumex pulcher

(fiddle dock) in St John's churchyard, identifiable despite having been mangled by mowing, and last recorded there in 1989.

This tetrad was on my list of priority squares for Atlas 2020, with almost no post-2000 records and several locally rare plants reported in the Flora of Oxfordshire that are the only historic localities for these plants in the hectad (SP43), e.g.

Carex rostrata

(bottle sedge) and

Triglochin palustris

(marsh arrowgrass). As with previous meetings, therefore, the goal was to fill in this gap in the tetrad map and re-find plants for the hectad. As other recorders have found, relocating old records can be very difficult, with most records from the Flora available only as digitised card indexes with no locality information other than tetrad or hectad. Therefore, do remember that in order that future botanists do not have to share in this frustration, it is important that if you find a plant that is uncommon in the county, or even just within the tetrad you are recording, that you record a precise locality.

I had not realistically expected that we would refind many of the rarer plants, and as we were not spoiled with habitats as wonderfully plant-rich as last time, serious leg work was required to cover as much potentially productive ground as possible. As last time most of the good habitat was located along the River Swere, particularly a small area of wet grassland around a spring, home to the Triglochin we sought, as well as other wetlands plants such as

Caltha palustris

(marsh marigold),

Stellaria alsine

(bog stitchwort) and

Valeriana officinalis

(common valerian). The nearby floodplain of the Swere had

Carex nigra

(common sedge), also on my hectad wanted list,

Myosotis discolor

(changing forget-me-not) and other commoner floodplain plants.

I had assumed that the historic record of

Carex rostrata

would have been from the floodplain also but doubted there would be anywhere wet and unpolluted enough to still have it. As it was it we turned it up growing in abundance in a pond formed by damming of a small tributary of the Swere. Where did these plants come from? Willows along the edge of the pond, however, had clearly been planted, and included several quite large specimens of

Salix pentandra

(bay willow), a rare willow in Oxon and also on my hectad wanted list. Growing in pasture nearby was a bedstraw that had the habit of

Galium album

(hedge bedstraw) but with leaves on the narrow and suspiciously parallel side for this species — surely, the hybrid with

G. verum

,

G. x pomeranicum

? Some came home with me to see if it will produce the intermediately-coloured flowers that would clinch this determination. Although records indicate that it has always been rare in the county, do keep an eye out for this distinctive plant in meadows and pasture on calcareous soils.

A couple of closing thoughts on other harder to identify plants. Now is the best time of year to find and identify members of the

Poa pratensis

aggregate, with both

Poa angustifolia

(narrow-leaved meadow-grass) and

Poa humilis

(spreading meadow-grass) recorded on Sunday. Though quite distinctive plants (especially

P. angustifolia

) they are only really obvious in spring and early summer after which they are swamped by taller things — see the Plant Crib for descriptions. Finally, roses will be coming into flower over the next couple of weeks and one can start to provisionally put names to bushes (e.g. we had

Rosa obtusifolia x canina

on Sunday). It would be really great to have some more rose records for Atlas, so if you find a rose that might be a bit different (mainly things with glands and hairs) then do take photographs and I can provide some advice — the things to look for are summarised in the BSBI Yearbook under the referees section or in the roses handbook. You can see what roses have been recorded in your area by looking in the tetrad lists available via the Atlas progress map.

Note: The next meeting will be on June 1st, which is a Saturday rather than the usual Sunday. We have been given permission to explore the grounds of Broughton Park — please email me if you would like to come along.

South Newington

Note: I have added a new function for the blog — hover over a species' scientific name to see a map of its current tetrad distribution in vice county 23. The data come live from the BSBI Distribution Database.

Above: grassland on the valley slope above the River Swere, with abundant Poterium sanguisorba. Several spikes of Carex caryophyllea are also visible. D. Morris. Below: Equisetum fluviatile and tussocks of Carex actua and C. paniculata growing in the pond. O. Pescott.

The numbers of botanists attending my recording outings continues to dwindle, with just Oli Pescott and myself meeting in South Newington last Sunday. However, what we lacked in people we made up for in plants, the tetrad (SP43B) yielding the richest crop of any recording meeting I have organised over the last few years. Meetings in this area continue to demonstrate that though this part of the Cotswolds may be far away for many of us it is well worth the journey (lifts can be arranged!).

As is traditional, we started with the local churchyard, unusually dedicated to St Peter ad Vincula, which proved to be among the better of those we have visited recently. Half of the churchyard had been left uncut and was covered in

Ranunculus auricomus

(goldilocks buttercup) and there were other typical churchyard plants such as

Leontodon hispidus

(rough hawkbit) and

Saxifraga tridactylites

(rue-leaved saxifrage). Exploring the village afterward, we had fun deciding whether members of the garden flora had gone sufficiently wild that we could record them — some such as

Geranium sanguineum

(bloody cranesbill) only just made it onto the list.

The River Swere meanders through South Newington, and the valley of this small tributary of the Cherwell north-west of the village provided a feast of native plants. We spent several hours exploring a fabulous meadow in the main valley and a wooded valley of a tributary to the north (both accessible by footpaths). The meadow sported an abundance of wildflowers, including drifts of

Conopodium majus

(pignut),

Geranium pratense

(meadow cranesbill) and

Poterium sanguisorba

(salad burnet), and numerous local species such as

Avenula pratensis

(meadow oat-grass),

Carex caryophyllea

(spring sedge),

Hypericum maculatum

(imperforate St John's-wort) and

Polygala vulgaris

(common milkwort), of which C. caryophyllea and P. vulgaris were new for the site and on my Atlas 2020 hectad wanted list. There were numerous other sedges in the meadow, particularly in a former course of the Swere, where we found

C. actua

(slender tufted-sedge),

C. acutiformis

(lesser pond sedge),

C. paniculata

(greater tussock-sedge) and

C. riparia

(greater pond sedge).

Exploring the valley to the north, we found large colonies of

Scirpus sylvaticus

(wood club-rush) along a stream and around springs, as we did earlier this spring.

Neottia ovata

(common twayblade) was on my Atlas 2020 wanted list for the hectad — it had not been seen in this tetrad before but the site looked suitable and we managed to find a single plant. Some other highlights included

Salix purpurea

(purple willow), another new species for the tetrad, and the hybrid woundwort

Stachys palustris x sylvatica (=S. x ambigua)

, which I had never seen before but which Oli knew from up north where it is more common. There are hardly any records of S. x ambigua from Oxon, so this was a particularly good record.

I had aimed to visit another site but I forgot how to get there, but exploring the lanes of South Newington turned up further nice plants such as

Helianthemum nummularium

. The site would have added a few more species to our list but as it was we returned to South Newington with a list of over 300 taxa and very happy botanists! The tetrad is now very well recorded and we recorded several species that can be really quite difficult to relocate once they have been missing from a hectad for some time, so an excellent contribution to Atlas 2020.

Scirpus sylvaticus. O. Pescott