A Botanical Journey mostly from Kent & SE England

This joint field trip involved a hefty climb down, and then up several hundred steps on the steep chalk cliffs of Folkestone Warren. However a surprisingly large number of people still turned up to punish themselves physically in the name of botany. Above are some of the group this day with the joint leaders Owen Leyshon (2nd from left) and Sue Buckingham (3rd from left).  The photo below shows how high these cliffs were and our route would take us down to sea level. Folkestone pier is in the distance. Rather than try and recall the order I found things in, I''ll just post them here in alphabetical order, so as not to miss anything important! As most will know, I photograph the everyday flowers such as this Agrimony as well as the rarities. Agrimonia eupatoria Pyramidal Orchids just coming into bloom. Anacamptis pyramidalis  A hoverfly bee mimic on Field Bindweed Convolvul

Amazingly, I've made it to June for my blogs and it's only the end of July! To be fair, I spend much of the summer immersed in recording under-recorded monads for the 2020 BSBI atlas. I also try to ensure I contribute to #wildflowerhour on Twitter to engage the general public with wildflowers. It doesn't leave a lot of time to detail my blogs in the summer months. This day,  we visited Monkton Quarry, a private charity run nature reserve in an old disused chalk quarry on the Isle of Thanet. It was a baking hot day (unbeknown to us, one of many to come). In the car park were numerous stands of Welted Thistles. Superficially, these looked like Marsh Thistles, but the welts run right up the stem to the flowers, whereas Marsh Thistles don't. There's also only a single flower on each stem, whereas the Marsh Thistle has several. Carduus crispus We still haven't identified these caterpillars, but it's the second year of