David Elston

Given my home parch is devoid of mistletoe, I make a point of looking out for it when visiting family in Hertfordshire. These ones were on some sort of maple, which was a bit unexpected.

Simon Milne, RBGE Regius Keeper, receiving one of two pre-retirement gifts from Matt Harding, BSBI Scotland Officer, in acknowledgement of his support for BSBI and the wider botanical community in Scotland. This gift? A data stick containing e-copies of each of the BSBI handbooks!

Matt Harding (BSBI) and Pete Hollingsworth (RBGE) bringing yesterday's Scottish Botanists's Conference to a close after an uplifting day of talks. workshops, poster displays and mingling amongst the ca 200 attendees. Meeting old friends and new at the SBC is highlight of the year.

Great start by Sarah Watts to today's Scottish Botanists' Conference, describing her research on restoration of Scotland's mountain woodland.

In Banchory with time to spare, I headed to Burnett Park, where the curling pond has (prob. native) floating club-rush growing side by side with (prob. introduced) frogbit. In woodland by the tennis courts is common wintergreen, a recent discovery: serrated wintergreen seems sadly to be long gone.

A good day for tiny plants at Sands of Forvie NNR today: after admiring the small adder's-tongues we went back to count them (22 plants), then noticed allseed (10 plants) which we'd missed a few minutes earlier. First allseed I've seen there after over 30 years of trying! My pinkie for scale.

Ouch. Probably many unhappy neighbouring landowners too!

Himalayan knotgrass along the Old Deeside Railway Line to the west of Aberdeen. Quite a large patch but hidden from view down the embankment and behind some bushes. Will control measures drive invasive non-natives to evolve to grow in hidden corners (as if they don't do enough of that already)?

Some lovely areas of wet heath near Boat of Garten had impressively large and dense mats of small cranberry. Given how healthy these mats looked, they had surprisingly few berries, but just a few had fully open flowers so perhaps more to come?

Perhaps you should subscribe to an acclimatisation plan involving cold showers and cooling fan on max followed by manual dexterity and acute vision tasks? Doubtless the Scottish Tourist Board would tell you it's completely unnecessary, but...

I'm sure Poland and Clement will have a character that can be used to separate Salix from Vaccinium....

Here's a nice juxtaposition from below Cairngorm earlier this week: bilberry (left) and bog bilberry (right), demonstrating differences in shape and colour of both leaves and stems.

Attractive colouration displayed by deergrass, dwarf willow and viviparous sheep's-fescue, plus curved wood-rush in a rocky hollow, some highlights of a walk from the Coire Cas car park to Ben Macdui summit.

I agree, NB also the blunt-tipped leaves.

Serrated wintergreen forms clonal patches, so several options for quantification. Do you count patches, flowering stems, leaf rosettes or estimate patch areas? Regardless, it's a lovely plant and an advantage of taking measurements is that you may discover other interesting things in the process!

Yup. Looks good to me, well spotted!

Plant distributions provide an endless source of wonder, and the BSBI Plant Atlas 2020 online site is a great resource for seeing them!
plantatlas2020.org/atlas

Here's the highlight from a bicycle-based tour of a rather unpromising tetrad inland from Catterline, Kincardineshire: a second county site for rustyback. Close to a house and farm, so perhaps a localised escape though not growing on the outside of a domestic wall.

Pleased to find a new site for alternate-leaved golden-saxifrage, in Glens of Foudland, North Aberdeenshire. Nearby, striking autumn colours of sheep's sorrel and either pale lady's-mantle (BSBI Handbook) or intermediate lady's-mantle (BSBI DDb) as vernacular names for Alchemilla xanthchlora.

Revisited an odd horsetail at Den of Maidencraig LNR, Aberdeen, which I think is shore horsetail, the hybrid of water and common horsetails. Like a long-branched common horsetail but with stems smoother, compressible due to a large central hollow and protruding cortex when pulled apart lengthways.

Close to my heart as well. Have just signed and hope others do too.

How about this for a monster sun spurge? In an arable field margin near Rothienorman, north Aberdeenshire, yesterday.

Spent today in the last two tetrads entirely in Kincardineshire with fewer than 30 higher plant records. Highlights a colony of blue water-speedwell in a little-used sand quarry (scarce in the county) plus a fragment of relic heath (heather grows much bigger when protected from browsing by gorse).

I'm the BSBI VCR for 91 (Kincardineshire) and 93 (North Aberdeenshire) so my 70 refers only to higher plants. I'd imagine that if considering recording adequacy more broadly then some breakdown by taxonomic groupings would be required.

In VC91 I use 70 taxa as a target, and have very few tetrads to get over the line (excepting edge squares and a couple in the uplands species-poor). In VC93 that target leaves over 200 in the 'to do' camp, so I'm focussing on under 30s. For the 3 just visited, the numbers of were 2, 2 and 0.

So that's 3 more tetrads struck off North Aberdeenshire's list of areas with inadequate higher plant records. Highlights from the largely aforested low hills west of Huntly were greater and lesser tussock sedges, late flowering grass-of-Parnassus and a hectad first for the bramble Rubus dasyphyllus.

Really enjoyed today's roses workshop led by Roger Maskew and Gareth Knass. Introduced to many new characters to look out for, such as leafy bracts. I clearly have much more to learn about this fascinating but challenging group, so am eagerly awaiting the publication of their BSBI Roses Handbook...

Parsley fern only grows at three sites in North Aberdeenshire, all are spoil heaps from former quarries. Nice to see it doing well at Hill of Foudland today, though its long term prospects here are surely bleak if the heath continues to spread over the currently bare stones.

Six-stamened waterwort, found floating in an artificial loch near Monymusk today. Third South Aberdeenshire site from the year 2000.

Came across an unfamiliar willow at Drumblade, near Huntly, this week. From a distance resembling crack willow, but the bark was smooth and grey. Back home, I'm thinking it's European violet-willow, characterised by: leaves pale below; pruinose stems below buds; and glands on inside of stipules.