A Botanical Journey mostly from Kent & SE England

This was my last outing before the very cold weather arrived with its copious amounts of snow, ice and biting Easterly winds. I was recording in TQ6969 North of Shorne. I found plenty of records in a completly unrecorded monad and will return later in the year to add to them. As much of the area I recorded was next to the A2, it wasn't very picturesque so I only took photos of the flowers, so here goes. Early Spring is the time Common Whitlowgrass comes into flower, but unless you have very good eyesight or frequently get down on your knees you'll miss them. The flowers are only a few millimetres across. Erophila verna A scruffy Dovesfoot Cranesbill in flower in the roadside verge. Geranium molle   These Hairy Bittercress also have very small flowers and were interspersed with the Common Whitlowgrass, like small white dots in the road verge edges. Cardamine hirsuta The wonder of a macro lens is that it can make sma

A few days before the Beast from the East arrived (for posterity that was a bitterly cold weather system with withering winds, snow and ice from Siberia), we had a day trip out to the East Sussex coast from Pett Level to Winchelsea then to Bexhill to see what we might find. The view East towards Camber. In a month or so there will be plenty of coastal plants to see, clovers, mouse-ears and so on. Even now there are the distinctive young plants of Yellow Horned Poppy to be found.  But we didn't go East, we went West to the base of the cliffs at Pett Level. These have a large layer of clay over the bedrock and cliff falls are common as a result. The fall shown below was extensive and took out a large area that had been full of wildflowers amd Greater Horsetail the previous year. However, there were still a few plants to be found like this invasive non native Hottentot Fig. This sprawled down the cliff smothering everything below it. It does have attractive flowers, th

Although Spring seemed to be in the air, it was still quite cold, though nowhere near as cold as at the time of writing (25/02/18) where we have bitter Easterly winds setting in. I'm getting quite practiced now at identifying plants to record them when they have no flowers, so I thought I'd have a stroll along the River Darent, a chalk stream near Farningham. I found numerous species around this bridge, including Lesser Water Parsnip, Fool's Watercress, Pellitory of the Wall and Hartstongue fern. However this isn't a bridge, but an elaborate cattle fence to stop cattle going along the river when crossing it. Apparently it was built over 100 years ago to impress upon others how wealthy the landowner was. I journeyed downstream, first passing through the gardens of the Lion pub through which the Darent Valley footpath goes. As is often the case, there were numerous stands of Snowdrops close to habitation. It's not unusual for these to spread into the wild f