10.
had a strong carnation scent with an undertone
of cloves. The spikes were in full flower and
going over rapidly in the scorching sun. Two
weeks later when I returned to take more
photographs and collect some flowers to make
detailed water-colour drawings they were all
brown and as dry as a crisp, but they had set
copious quantities of seed. On digging down
around a couple of plants we did however
manage to establish with some degree of
certainty that the host plant was Vicia tetra-
sperma. Remarkably this same species had
established itself on legumes in a garden not
far away in Upminster, the owner having been
trying to get rid of them all summer by
cutting them down. I was therefore delighted
when Patrick Smith brought a large flowering
spike into college one morning in September.
We are now convinced that this plant is a
form of Orobanche crenata Forskal, a species
not previously reported from the British Isles,
but rather common in
Spain and Southern France
as a Broad Bean parasite.
The successful flowering
of the plant in this
country can almost
certainly be attributed
to last year's long hot
summer.
Orobanche
crenata
The long hot summer also
seems to have been responsible for two other
additions to our Essex flora. By mid-July the
Epping Forest ponds were beginning to dry out
and one pond in particular became an expanse
of quelchy black mud. Among the prostrate
carpet of Potamogeton natans some way out from
the bank I noticed a small patch of an un-
familiar plant with conspicuous reddish stems.