Jim Pearson: The Purple Fumitory
Purple Ramping-fumitory is a nationally scarce and endemic to the UK, the only place it grows naturally in the world. It is an annual plant which used to be widespread in the mixed farming and arable areas of Britain. However, during the last 50 years it has undergone a drastic decline throughout its former range largely due to modern farming methods such as the move to autumn sown cropping and the introduction of broad-spectrum herbicides which threaten its continued existence. It has also declined in areas where there has been high arable reversion to grassland
Rob Duffy: Sidewalk Botany Report January-March 2018
The year kicked off with the New Year Survey of flowering plants of the Liverpool Loop Line,…
Rob Duffy: Report of the 2017 Botanical Survey of the Liverpool Loopline
The Loopline had been surveyed, in the Childwall section (Liverpool 16), by Howard Harris (Liverpool Botanical Society) some years earlier and subsequently, by himself, leading the Liverpool Botanical Society (LBS), in the summer of 2014, in the same section, where a party of 12 listed some 170 taxa. ‘Sustrans’ held a ‘BioBlitz’ at West Derby Station later in the summer of 2014, where Rob Duffy and Steve Cross (The President of the LBS) were present. Rob Duffy conducted a survey in the summer of 2016 and listed, once again, 170 taxa, but on a longer stretch of the Line; this was to support the August 2016 BioBlitz by Sustrans. This was held at Warmington Road, Knotty Ash (Liverpool 14) and Dave Earle, the Vice County Recorder for Lancashire, attended. Some half a dozen species could not be corroborated in 2017, excluding the difficulty in separating Rubus fruticosus.