17.
Of our Essex rarities, Tordylium maximum
has turned up again in the same patch that
Ron Payne found it in twenty three years ago
at Benfleet. Melampyrum arvense produced
thirteen plants at its last surviving site
at Ranks Green, and Laurie Forsyth and
Eleanor Bowker were delighted to find a patch
of Anagalis tenella appear from nowhere in
the clearing they had made to save Scutellaria
minor on Danbury Common. Despite the efforts
of the local water authority to face-lift the
upper reaches of Pincey Brook, around fifty
plants of the very rare Heleborus viridis are
poking their shoots through the layer of silt
and rubble dumped on top of them in a newly
discovered colony just east of Hatfield
Forest.
Pride of place for this year's
find must go however to Luzula forsteri,
Forster's Woodrush. While searching
woodlands along the proposed route of
the M25 on a Club outing Tony Boni-
face found a single plant in Codham
Hall Wood, and after lunch the party
found a very healthy colony on a
sunny bank in a small strip of
woodland further north. This plant
is on the northern limit of its
climatic tolerance in S. Essex and
has not been recorded from the County
since Forster found and described it,
new to science, in Hainault Forest.
He subsequently located it at Hadleigh
around 1803. There is however a
mysterious 10 km dot in the Atlas of
the British Fora for a post-1930 Essex
record which does not seem to have been
traced.
Last year was a killer for our
Essex bryophytes, but the wet spring Forster's
Woodrush