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