May 2021 Botanical Finds from Kent
Here is a selection of interesting plants I found this May in the Kent area, I hope you enjoy them. Starting off with one of the early flowering mouse ears, it's the Grey mouse-ear, a species only found in a few counties with North Kent probably having the largest population of them in the UK. A few years back I found a new colony on a field edge and despite being sprayed and suffering successive Spring droughts they have persisted. I couldn't find any in flower, but here's one in seed. Note how very hairy it is and that the hairs overlap the sepal tips by a long way. The hairs aren't glandular and the inflorescence is lax. All these features are different to the look alike Sticky and Little mouse-ear plants. Cerastium brachypetalum Midway through May, I found a patch of these plants on an ant hill at Longfield Chalk Bank where they have been absent since 2013. I thought they had died out here as Kent Wildlife Trust had failed to maintain a suitable habitat. Fortuna