Inaugral botany meeting at Maltby

Last weekend was the first official trip out for the South Yorkshire Botany Group. This was run in conjuction with the Rotherham Naturalists Society and took in three different sites close to Maltby, each conveniently in a different tetrad so the records would count as individual submissions.

I volunteered to help with the official recording, so spent much of my time shadowing Kay and Geoffrey, the BSBI recorder for VC63.  The official recording sheet was in abbreviated Latin, and you have to strike through those species that are found. A separate sheet is used for each site.  Although the text was tiny, it was useful to have all the potential species on one side of A4 paper - much easier to work with than my pre-prepared list that went to four sheets of A4, meaning I always seemed to be flicking between pages. The difficulty was that people kept yelling the plants' common names out to us, so we had to try and do a rapid translation into the scientific name.

The weather forecast was mixed with heavy rain expected, but we were lucky and it was relatively mild with just a spot of rain mid-morning.  We met in the private estate of Lord and Lady Scarborough at Sandbeck Park, parking at the old stable block and walking through a walled garden and around the lake. There was a blanket of different coloured bluebells in the walled garden, and many spring flowers starting to come through.  There was a beautiful array of fritillaries by the lake.

In the afternoon, we moved on to Roche Abbey, just a few miles down the road. After a picnic lunch, we had a walk around the site and found many interesting species including mountain currant and greater chickweed (pictured). There was also some Himalayan balsam starting to come through, that will hopefully be dealt with before it gets out of hand ...

Mid-afternoon, we lost some of the group including Kay and Geoffrey as they had travelled quite far. Those that were left walked a short way to Nor Wood. We managed to locate a rather poor specimen of Yellow Star of Bethlehem, but another elite plant was no longer visible. A couple of us had a wander through the wood and I completed a species list as best I could to record the site. By now, it was getting late, so it was by no means a complete list, but a good experience for my first recording effort.

It was a really good day, with 20+ people in attendance, and all very friendly and helpful. I feel my botany skills are slowly starting to improve, and look forward to the next event in a few weeks time.