Senior Plant Ecologist Freshwater Habitats Trust
BSBI Recorder for Buckinghamshire. BBS Joint Recorder Herts.
Views my own.❤️Aquatic plants & many others.
Dr Astrid Biddle
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Beautiful, serene Lesser Water-plantain (Baldellia ranunculoides) in the New Forest.
Moments after taking this photo, I looked down and realised my movements had attracted Medicinal Leeches. At least three were climbing over each boot.
Medicinal Leech, realising my boots aren't worth bothering with.
Dredged out a few things.
Fennel Pondweed (Stuckenia pectinata)
Large-flowered Waterweed (Egeria densa)
Reconnaissance visit to Old River Lea, Hackney Marshes in search of Water-crowfoots -not found- but revealed Nitella mucronata!
I checked it repeatedly over lunch, partly because finding a stonewort in an urban London river seemed sufficiently improbable that I suspected wishful thinking on my part.
Although Nitella mucronata is not confined to pristine waters and can persist in somewhat enriched conditions, it was not a plant I expected to encounter in the Old Lea.
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An early morning taxonomy black hole. After discussing Valeriana officinalis agg, I tried to trace how the traditional British taxa fits current POWO treatment. V. officinalis ssp. sambucifolia is now placed within V. excelsa, apparently reflecting the relationship with the higher-ploidy aggregate.
More intriguingly, subsp. collina (2n = 28) appears to belong among the lower-ploidy elements. My suspicion is that we're not really in a position to assign the British collina concept with complete confidence without cytological & ideally molecular data interpreted alongside morphology and ecology.
