A Botanical Journey mostly from Kent & SE England

After leaving Dungeness I travelled the short distance to Greatstone-on-Sea. This is still within the Dungeness NNR but is a completely different habitat being made of sand. For getting on a mile or so there is a section of beach backed by long established sand dunes, which in turn are bordered by houses, gardens and the coast road. I took this photo as a habitat photo for Sea Holly, a Kent RPR species in itself, but the photo shows a typical part of the habitat, though there are many hills/dunes made of sand as well. Vegetation is well established, so there isn't much in the way of dune movement. One of the peculiarities of these dunes is the abundance of garden escapes which seem to thrive in sand. Rather odd really, as most people put them into well composted gardens, water and feed them and so on, yet many do as well or better on dry sandy soil with hardly any water! One such garden escape that you really cannot miss at this time of the year is this! It's a Bla

A large shingle habitat in Kent can only be at Dungeness, a huge peninsular of shingle deposited by the sea over at least 2 thousand years. Viewing maps from Roman times onwards, you can see how it has grown into the huge area it is today as shingle is swept from the Western side of Dungeness and deposited along the Eastern beaches. The whole area is a National Nature Reserve, within which there is the RSPB reserve. This is a fantastic place for botany, but wasn't where I went this day. Opposite the RSPB main entrance is another less well trodden part of the reserve called Boulder Wall and was a former ARC shingle quarry/gravel pit. The habitats range from the obvious dry, desert like conditions of shingle ridges, to sandy areas, left over from the gravel pit days and to lakes and ponds formed from deeper gravel extraction into the water table. This provides for a variety of species, many very rare in Kent.  It was a very hot and breezy day to start with, so as a result

As the title suggests I visited three distinct habitats on this day.  Part 1 of this blog details my first stop, which was to Kent's finest reserve for bog plants, Hothfield Heathlands, near Ashford. This area is managed by Kent Wildlife Trust and they are trying to reclaim the bogs from ever encroaching scrub. As such, there are often horses and cattle grazing on the reserve. I didn't see any today, but evidence of large animals trampling down the scrub was very apparent. While this may do some short term damage, it definitely opens up areas to other flowers for the near future. I don't think people realise that without management, virtually every habitat would be forest within 20 years with a virtually barren flora underneath! Erica tetralix Very obvious, and scattered all over the wetter areas were these flowering Cross-leaved Heath plants. They have pink (sometimes white) bell shaped flowers that look a bit like a bunch of grapes on a stiff stem. The key to