Slinfold

Field meeting reports

Meeting date: 30 March 2003

(Leader: Alan Knapp)

The anxious had put their clocks two hours back, mothers had declined invitations from dutiful offspring to Mothers’ Day lunches, faithful floras had been taken out of winter mothballs, and lovingly burnished hand-lenses glinted in the Spring sunshine: for this was the first field meeting of the season and, not unlike Chaucer’s pilgrims, the company set forth after the drought of March to pay their devotions to the hooly blisful Knapp. Some 20 assembled in Spring Lane by the Medlar grafted onto Hawthorn stock (+ Crataegomespilus dardarii) to be initiated into the BSBI Local Change Monitoring project.

We set off westwards down the disused railway line accumulating the commoner early species but looking also at all those planted ones which we had been glad to ignore in former days – particularly conifers. Fortunately, we had the benefit of Rod’s expertise in this field, even if he cheerfully declared all suspicious Prunus species beyond his remit. A long and delightful morning of sun, brimstones, bee-flies and most of the usual Spring woodland species, with good amounts of Adoxa moschatellina (Moschatel) and Ranunculus auricomus (Goldilocks), and one Primula x polyantha (False Oxlip).

In the shorter afternoon session we wandered around Slinfold village, visiting in particular the Euphorbia corallioides which was first noticed c.1808 and is supposed to have originated from Dr Manningham’s garden. For the benefit of those a little vague about this clergyman, a reminder of his dates (1684-1750) and his assessment by James Petiver as ‘a very nice botanist’.