Botany group field meeting on 21 June 2008 at Weald Country Park
Mary Smith 33 Gaynes Park Road, Upminster, Essex RM14 2HJ
Eight doughty people, including two guests, braved the penetrating drizzle and set off at
10:30am. Luckily, after the first hour or so, the day dried up and became quite pleasant
weather for botanising ie not a blazing June sun but warm enough not to need to wear
heavy clothing. Sadly, most of us had hot wellies, in which we soldiered on all day.
We started from the car park by the cricket field, and worked our way west across the
southern part via TQ 5793 and TQ5693, and just into TQ5694 for lunch at the visitor
centre, where toilets and cups of tea and coffee were much welcomed, and one had an
ice cream! After lunch, one left for home, but the rest of us turned east around the
southern side of the lake in TQ5694, and then another left us. The rest of us carried on,
completing the circuit round the lake, then around the lower, smaller lake, and then
headed north. Two more left us.
The remaining four intrepid botanists went up to the woods and heathy meadows in
TQ5695, and eventually got back to the car park soon after 6pm.
There were several lighter moments. Tony Boniface found some fungi, and had another
given to him, making a short list: Coprinus kuhneri and Agrocybe praecox (aka gibberosa)
in the grass and Cylindrobasidium leave, (aka evolvens) on a twig. A leaf from a Horse-
chestnut had reddish blotches with yellow margins, looking like a fungus attack, but
closer inspection at home showed tiny larvae crawling in the coloured patches. Tony
used the internet to identify these caterpillars, and discovered they were Cameraria
ohridella, a small leaf-mining moth from the Balkans, which is increasing in Britain and
was a full-blown pest killing conker trees. Soon after Tony left, another of our group
spotted Oyster Mushroom Pleurotus ostreatus on a stump of Horse-chestnut and another
person cut off most of the caps and took them home for tea.
A number of insects were noted: assorted Damselflies were admired by the lake, Black
Ants were seen on someone's hands, and Ken showed us a gorgeous caterpillar on Nettles
that would later become a Peacock Butterfly. Sadly, nobody was quick enough with a
camera to catch images of these.
Other entertainment and information was provided by David Bloomfield, who enlivens
any field meeting with his enormous ability to analyse the history of a landscape, and his
repertoire of anecdotes. He worked out that a heathy meadow was ploughed for crops
during WWII, by studying the precise contours of the ground, and he later told us that
part of the long grassy slope to the south of the lake was hollowed out in a huge curve so
that the lake could be seen from the Belvedere hill, which was made from the earth
removed. We wondered at the immensity of such a task, without any powered machines.
Essex Field Club Newsletter No. 57, September 2008
17