Botanical snippets for January

Foxglove with terminal peloric flower
Image: P. J. Rudall 

A few botanical snippets to entertain you while we are still working through all your New Year Plant Hunt records!

From Paula Rudall at RBG Kew, this report about some weird and wonderful foxgloves.

Did you know that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, attended botany classes and went on field excursions? More here. 

New research project from Urban Pollinators - four wildflower meadows are being created in Bristol to examine the effects of urbanisation on urban pollinators.

Free access until the end of March to this paper in Plant Ecology & Diversity titled 'Hybrid swarms: catalysts for multiple evolutionary events in Senecio in the British Isles'. For more free access papers from Taylor & Francis (publishers of New Journal of Botany) head over here.  

Try this page for family-friendly events this year with a botanical theme at the South London Botanical Institute. 

Rock Samphire & Sea Plantain in Ireland 2014
Image: P. O'Meara

If you are planning to look more closely at ferns this year, particularly Male-ferns Dryopteris spp., you may want to try this ID crib which botanists shared recently on Facebook, as well as this from the Plant Crib.

If you are champing at the bit to find out more about what people saw on their New Year Plant Hunts this year, there are several blogposts by BSBI members in the list on the right, or try some of these by non-members who took part for the first time this year: an account from Clare in Northants.; another from a young naturalist in the Chilterns; and this report from the Isle of Wight, where Rock Samphire Crithmum maritimum was seen in bloom.

Finally, try this report from Tela Botanica if you'd like to know what French botanists have to say about the plants they are finding in bloom this winter.