A Botanical Journey mostly from Kent & SE England

I hope you enjoyed Part 1. If you missed it please scroll down to the previous blog. Day 2 started off pouring with rain, no surprise so far this year then, even in the usually drier Kent it's been extremely wet this year. Having caught up on time, it gave me the opportunity to visit Cae Blaen-dyffryn, a stunning orchid filled meadow managed by Plantlife Cymru. On arrival, it was raining heavy drizzle, which made photography difficult, but I'd give it my best. Togged up in full waterproof and waterproof walking boots I entered the meadow. I knew there would be Lesser and Greater Butterfly Orchids here, but these have gone over in Kent and I wasn't sure if there'd be any to see here. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find literally hundreds of them in full flower, albeit soaked, in this meadow. Lesser Butterfly Orchids are quite scarce in Kent, but here, almost every other one was a Lesser form. They look quite similar to each other, but t

I wanted to visit a part of the UK where I would find new species, and as wild orchids started me off on my botanical quest, I thought I would travel to Wales to find the Fen Orchid, amongst others, which is a bit like the Musk Orchid mentioned in my previous blog. Over the last couple of months I researched nature reserves and places to visit and made some new friends online. This proved vital in obtaining accurate up to date information on where to go and what to see. In return, I helped or offered help to locate rare Kent plants. I set off just after 9am from North Kent with the intention of detouring en route to see Bee Orchid variants and arriving around 3pm in Wales. That was a pipe dream though, because, as usual, the M25 was at a standstill and I had to divert a few times, adding a lot of time to the journey. Anyway, I later arrived in middle England at my first destination which was a junction of two A roads cut through chalk with an orchid filled roundabout

Two years ago I found a new site for Musk Orchids not far from Holly Hill, West of Snodland, but I had heard of a place nearby where I might find more. Musk Orchids are simply a very small pale green spike with tiny green flowers on it that blend into the surrounding grasses. It also flowers at the same time as everything else that puts up a spike, such as Common Centaury, various St John's Worts, Yellow-wort and so on. This makes it extremely difficult to spot them except in the shortest of grasses. The only good news is that they prefer short turf! There were large areas of open grassland on the steep scarp slopes of the North Downs here to explore and the tiny Musk Orchids could be anywhere here. I'd looked in the area the previous 2 years and failed to find any except those mentioned above. Of course, I could always go East to Park Gate Down KWT reserve near Elham to see them, but what's the fun in that once you've seen them? Very obvious from the s