A Botanical Journey mostly from Kent & SE England

We live in a rented house and as such we are not able to do what we want with the small gardens we have and have to keep them relatively "neat and tidy". This goes completely against what I want from a garden which should have space for wildflowers and nature in general. As such, I bend the rules as much as I can and leave so called weeds to flourish where I can. As lockdown commenced due to Covid-19 this was a garden safari to keep me occupied and to stop me dying of boredom. Here's what I found: This plant isn't really "wild" though I would describe it as "naturalised". This is a garden variety of Bugle which has purple coloured leaves unlike the native form. Other than that, it's pretty much the same as a wild one. You can see the coloured up leaves in the photo. These had spread all over the garden by themselves, away from where planted and one had even come up in a pavement crack. Ajuga reptans Bugle

What a horrible year this has become. I think we all saw the signs of impending disaster of Covid-19 coming out of China and then Italy and it finally hit us severely around the end of March when we got locked down. This trip was one of my first of the year and also the last before restrictions on movement were imposed by the Government to slow the spread of the virus. I hope the photos will bring some cheer. I'll keep the writing brief as I'm on a computer all day working from home now, so it's difficult to get motivated to go again on another computer! Viola odorata var. dumetorum White Sweet Violet I have the BSBI Viola handbook to spot all the differences and variants within Violas, but if you don't have the book, have a look at this blog which details the differences in an easy to understand way with photos. http://cambridgewildflowers.blogspot.com/2018/04/sweet-violet-viola-ordorata-and-variants.html Close to the white form were

Every year my partner and I find some amazing botanical treasures, but with each new find the one before fades into memory until they become forgotten, even after a short time. Thankfully, as a botanical recorder, I can jog my memory by looking back at my record sheets to renew my aging memory, so here are some of the highlights of our finds from 2019. 16/05/19 - Vicia panonnica Ssp panonnica   Hungarian Vetch- as described in BSBI News, Aliens and Adventives   On this day I found a substantial colony of V. panonnica on both verges of the B260 for a hunded metres or so east of the A282 bridge (nr Dartford). There were hundreds of plants in flower, which at first I thought were anthocyanin deficient V. sativa plants (Common Vetch). I posted some photos on Twitter of it and a botanist suggested V. panonnica which it subsequently turned out to be. However, this was not a first for VC16 West Kent as described below.     In 1977 V. pann