Rare Plants by Peter Marren: special offer for BSBI members

A new book about Britain's rare wild flowers is always going to be of interest to plant-lovers, especially when the book is written by one of our top natural history authors who is also a BSBI member - and when fellow members can look forward to a hefty discount when they order their copy!

Peter Marren has more than twenty nature books under his belt, numerous articles in broadsheets and a regular column in British Wildlife magazine. He has been a BSBI member since 1975, and in 1999 he won the 'Presidents' Award' for his book Britain's Rare Flowers; the award is made each year by the Presidents of the BSBI and the Wild Flower Society to the book deemed to have made the most useful contribution to the understanding of the flowering plants and ferns of Britain and Ireland.   

Peter's new book, due out this month, is Rare Plants, an account of Britain's threatened plant species; it's part of the British Wildlife Collection from Bloomsbury Publishing, who describe it as "a beautifully illustrated account of some of our most endangered plant species, exploring why they matter and what opportunities we have to protect them before it’s too late. Prize-winning author Peter Marren describes the allure of Britain and Ireland's vanishing wild flora, from the simple joy of plant hunting to the wonder and (sometimes) weirdness of the plants themselves, as well as their important place in our landscape and culture. He also explores the condition of rarity in the context of our changing world and climate: why do plants become rare, what threats do they face, and what opportunities do we have to protect them before it is too late? The book concludes with an overview of different conservation techniques, using test cases such as Lady's Slipper Orchid and Starved Wood-sedge, and asks at what point careful management becomes gardening, and how far we are justified in intervening in the life of a wild species".

Rare Plants is published in hardback on 28th November and features more than 300 colour images - check out the sample pages below. The RRP is £40 but if you're a BSBI member, you can claim 20% discount and pay only £32. Just go to the password-protected members' area of the BSBI website and follow the instructions to claim your discount. Not yet a member? Join us this month and as well as the discount on Rare Plants, you can also take advantage of our autumn membership special offer and start enjoying all these other members' benefits straight away. 

BSBI membership: save money with our autumn special offer

Sea Rocket Cakile maritima in Cornwall
Image: David Steere 

For the last two years, we have launched our autumn membership special offer by saying that 'in a rapidly changing world, our wild plants have never been more in need of the support, understanding and appreciation that BSBI is uniquely placed to provide'. 

You won’t be surprised to hear that we’ve seen even more evidence over the past year about how our climate is changing: thousands of you went out recording for the 2024 New Year Plant Hunt and found a total of 629 different species across Britain and Ireland managing to flower in deepest midwinter. Amazing but also a bit worrying? And our Plant Atlas 2020 analyses and summary reports flagged how British and Irish wild flowers, and the many other species of wildlife who depend on them, are increasingly threatened. 

We have never been more reliant on, and grateful for, the contributions of BSBI's fabulous volunteer members. That’s why today we are inviting you to join our growing ranks, if you haven't already, and asking our existing members to help us spread the word about the benefits of BSBI membership - for you and for our wonderful wild flowers. 

So, at a time when we are all counting the pennies, why join BSBI? And why now? There are three good reasons!

First of all, if you join BSBI in October, your membership starts at once so you could enjoy up to 15 months of membership benefits for the price of 12 months. You wouldn't need to renew your subscription until January 2026.

Secondly, we've expanded our range of membership benefits in the past year and there are even more in the pipeline:

• Members receive three issues each year of BSBI News, our colourful magazine packed with information about British and Irish wild flowers: visit our sampler page to check out the latest sampler, and take a look at some of the free articles from recent issues – that will give you an idea of the contents.
• New for 2024/25: Members can now apply for access to the BSBI Distribution Database – with more than 50 million plant records, it’s one of the largest databases of biological records in the world. As members, you’ll also be able to download our new recording app so you can upload your plant records direct from your phone or computer to the BSBI Database, ready for verification by our experts. 
• Membership gives you favoured status when applying for BSBI training and plant study grants - if you're thinking of doing a plant ID course, such as BSBI's online Identiplant course or one of the many courses offered by external providers, you can apply for a grant of up to £250 to help you. These grants are also available to non-members but members are prioritised in the award process.
• Membership brings you big discounts on the series of BSBI Handbooks; pre-publication offers for members are usually around a third off. There’s a Handbook on Roses due out early in 2025 and there are several other titles in the pipeline.
• Members have exclusive access to almost 100 expert plant referees to help you with identification, to members-only volunteering opportunities and to 100+ scientific papers free to download from the password-protected members' area of our website.
• Membership also brings you big discounts on selected botany books, such as Frustrating Flowers and Puzzling Plants by John Warren and the forthcoming second edition of Harrap’s Wild Flowers, as well as other ad hoc offers and discounts from our partners. 

Concerned about the environmental impact of your membership? By opting for digital membership and choosing eBooks rather than printed Handbooks, you'll be minimising your carbon footprint. 

But there's a third, very important, reason for joining the growing ranks of BSBI members - it's not just about all the many practical and financial benefits you'll enjoy. You'll also be helping us to support British and Irish wildflowers. 

How? Because while many of our >4,300 members carry out amazing work studying, recording, monitoring and helping to conserve wild plants across Britain and Ireland, feeding into projects such as Plant Atlas 2020, the State of Nature 2023 report, the many county Floras and the National Plant Monitoring Scheme in which BSBI is a partner, many others are simply happy to know that their subscription helps support our work to advance the understanding and appreciation of wild plants and to support their conservation across Britain and Ireland.

Check out our nature conservation policy and our strategic plan to find out more; find out how our botanical heatmaps, developed with Natural England, are helping ensure that we get the right tree in the right place (and not in the wrong place!); check out the members who won awards in 2023 for outstanding contributions to botany; or leaf through our latest Annual Review to find out what the Society achieved last year thanks to all our wonderful members.

Want to know more about exactly how we spend the subscriptions we receive from members and the funding from external bodies? Our Annual Report and Accounts are always published on this page, while our Ethical Position Statement and our Reserves Policy can be viewed on our Governance page. Want to check that we will always respect your privacy and handle your data with the utmost care? Check out our Privacy Policy and Data Handling Policy.

Ghost Orchid: feared extinct in UK,
not seen since 2009 until
it was rediscovered in 2024
by BSBI member Richard Bate
Image: R. Bate

If you are already a BSBI member, we'd like to say a huge thank you to each and every one of you for all that you do, and ask you to spread the word to friends and colleagues who you think might enjoy becoming a member - and don't forget that a gift membership of BSBI makes a great present for a loved one!

Our ranks are growing - by almost 30% in the last three years - so if you haven't yet joined us, why not head over here and become our next new member? 

We can't wait to welcome you and send you your membership welcome pack. 

Together we can keep working towards a world where wild plants across Britain and Ireland thrive and are valued - and so are the thousands of amazing BSBI botanists who support them.

Interview with BSBI President Micheline Sheehy Skeffington: Part Two

Micheline enjoying some urban botany
 on a post-industrial site in Wales
Image: L. Marsh

In Part One of our interview with BSBI President Micheline Sheehy Skeffington, we heard about her early days botanising and studying in Dublin, in France and then in the Indonesian tropical rainforest, but by 1985, with her PhD under her belt, she was back in Ireland as lecturer in plant ecology in the Botany Department of then-named University College Galway, UCG (now University of Galway).

LM: So Micheline, what happened next?

MSS: On returning from my year in Indonesia, I resumed my lectures and soon took on my first postgraduate student, Lieveke Van Doorslaer, a graduate of Trinity College Dublin. With the aim of helping conservation, we worked with Connemara National Park, Director Dr Noel Kirby who suggested we study the enigmatic Lusitanian heather Erica mackaiana, so widespread on Roundstone Bog. Using old 1870s OS maps, Lieveke’s extremely careful mapping of species and hybrid at its known sites, led to our suspicions that it might not be native. In fact, a paper sent to BSBI’s then scientific journal Watsonia was rejected on the basis that fossil leaves had been found in the Boreal era! This began my long on-going interest in Hiberno-Lusitanian species - and we did eventually publish the E. mackaiana paper in New Journal of Botany.

LM: I remember it well, we published the paper in 2016! It’s now available to BSBI members via the password-protected members’ area of the BSBI website (email me if you’re a member and you’ve forgotten your password or if you'd like to join BSBI and gain access). So what else were you doing at this point?

Micheline botanising in Connemara

MSS: As well as postgrad work on rare plant species (for example with John Conaghan, now BSBI County Recorder for West Galway, who researched the ecology of Slender Cotton-grass Eriophorum gracile and Broad-leaved Cotton-grass E. latifolium in Ireland), I soon realised that farming and farmers were critical to nature conservation and much of my subsequent postgrad and postdoc research focused on sustainable agriculture in Connemara as well as in the Burren, linked to its Farming for Conservation Programme. We also worked with farmers on conservation management in the fascinating ephemeral lakes, or turloughs, that abound in the Galway region - and, of course, on the River Shannon flood-meadows, or callows. Many of my postgrads are now highly-esteemed consultants or in senior conservation posts in National Parks and Wildlife Service, which is very nice to see; several are BSBI County Recorders! We have many papers in national and international peer-reviewed journals.

Micheline and family members
 at the High Court, May 2017

LM: That is an impressive list of publications! And then of course many people will be aware of your long but ultimately successful struggle for gender equality in academia. Could you tell us about that please?

MSS: Well as far back as 2000, I made my first bid for Senior Lecturer. Little did I know then that there was a very thick, opaque glass ceiling above me that took a sledge hammer to smash! By 2009, I had applied four times but was told that, though I was shortlisted for the second time (and therefore deemed suitable), I was not ranked in the top 17 who were promoted. When I asked how many of the 17 were women, the Registrar checked, paused and then said ‘One’. To cut a long story short, I made a cogent case to the Equality Tribunal on the grounds of gender discrimination, gaining access to all the anonymised shortlisted applications -and won in November 2014! But I knew that five other women were also better qualified than some of those men and the women eventually filed suit with the High Court and Workplace Relations Commission, so we mounted a four-year campaign in their support. 

Micheline and Rose Foley, finalising the book

Because this dragged on, it had positive national effects. For example, by 2018 when the university finally settled with the women, the Higher Education Authority had made funding for all third-level institutions contingent on getting an Athena SWAN award. So people felt this story needed to be documented, and journalist friend Rose Foley, who had been in the campaign since the start, was ideally placed to do this. 

Five long years of writing, interviews and research later, our book finally came out late in 2023! A cracking good read, it’s an important and insightful account of university politics and how winning against all odds is possible. It is in bookshops in Ireland and Britain, but also here on the campaign website, where the details of the campaign are also chronicled.

LM: Hurrah! And there (on the right) is the front cover of the book, called Micheline's Three Conditions. Although I suppose that as the grand-daughter of one of Ireland’s most famous suffragettes, we shouldn’t be surprised that you were so tenacious in your fight for equality! Could you tell us something please about your family heritage?   

MSS: I like to say I come from a long line of jailbirds and troublemakers! My grandmother, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington was probably Ireland’s most prominent suffragette and went to prison and hunger struck in the struggle for Votes for Women. When she married her husband, Francis Skeffington, they each took each other’s name to become the Sheehy Skeffingtons, as he himself was a staunch feminist. So, when I took my case, I felt I owed it to them and indeed my parents, to stand up to injustice. They were socialists, as well as wanting Irish independence, but Frank especially was a militant pacifist and was executed without trial during the 1916 Easter Rising by a British army officer, arguably as a result of his outspoken anti-militarism. My father, Owen, carried on their tradition and became an independent Senator, elected by Trinity College Dublin alumni. My mother, Andrée, co-founded the radical Irish Housewives Association and campaigned for price control of basic foods during the difficult 1940s and 50s. So, I had quite a legacy to uphold!

LM: Micheline, congratulations on all that you have managed to achieve for women in academia! You have also held several other high- profile roles, such as your ministerial appointment to the Heritage Council, serving on its Wildlife Committee from 1995 to 2000, and you have also served on the Advisory Board for the Burren LIFE project. Could you tell us more about these roles and how you were able to promote the causes of habitat conservation and sustainable agriculture?

Micheline and President Michael D. Higgins
during the 1916 Rising celebrations

MSS: I was one of the appointees of one Minister Michael D. Higgins to the Heritage Council, which had several committees, including Waterways, Archaeology, Architecture and Wildlife. There was a radical bunch of us on the Wildlife Committee. The Council is in an advisory capacity to the Minister and the Wildlife Committee commissioned key reports on the impact of agriculture and of forestry on the Irish environment; a comprehensive review of conservation designations in Ireland, as well as the much-used Guide to the Habitats of Ireland compiled by the late much-missed Julie Fossitt. We organised an international conference on Burren low-intensity farming that tapped into Brendan Dunford’s work. He then set up the Burren Farming for Conservation Programme, as it became, which has been one of the most successful EU LIFE projects, winning international awards. 

Micheline in Uganda

It was a privilege to serve on their advisory board and I also learned a lot about farming for conservation there. I also served as Council member of the international Tropical Biology Association (which I was keen to support because it helps train up young biologists in Africa and Asia, alongside a bunch of European students who help subsidise them. I taught on one course in Uganda, where I learned so much about its habitats, flora and fauna. Of course, I served many spells on the BSBI Committee for Ireland, including as Chair.

LM: So when had you joined BSBI and how did that come about?

MSS: As very new Botany graduates, myself and two classmates heard of a BSBI outing to the Aran Islands. Having spent time there learning Irish, I have a great affinity for the islands, and we enthusiastically boarded the small plane bound for Inis Mór. We learned about it, as our Professor D.A. Webb and Maura Scannell wanted to fill in gaps for their Flora of Connemara and the Burren. An illustrious group attended, including Mary (M.P.H.) Kertland, Éanna Ní Lamhna and of course Tim Robinson, recently moved to Inis Mór from England, who was mapping every corner and field of the islands and guided us round sites. ‘The students’ were credited with locating the Sea-kale Crambe maritima site on the beach there! I continued to join BSBI outings, getting more involved as a postgrad in the late 1970s and serving on the Committee for Ireland from 1981. 

Micheline and Mary Briggs
(BSBI's first female President)
at the 1995 BSBI AGM in Ireland

It was while chairing this in 1993-5, that I co-ordinated the first-ever BSBI AGM in Ireland. In fact, the previous year, in 1994, I had invited Tim Robinson to talk about the Roundstone Bog heathers and, as he rarely left the confines of Connemara, he persuaded me to organise the Irish AGM in Roundstone! That whimsical paper was published in the 1995 Irish Botanical News. Tim and his wife Mairéad became firm friends and we miss them very much.

LM: Ah yes, I was browsing BSBI News back-issues the other day and in the Reports of Field Meetings from this issue (on page 65) I can see that Sylvia Reynolds thanks you for “so ably organizing the AGM in Dublin”. So, you became increasingly active in BSBI, including as County Recorder for South-East Galway - when was that? And is that where you do most of your botanising these days?

Micheline and fellow botanists in Co. Clare

MSS: When I joined the Botany Department in then-UCG in October 1980 the Head of Department, Prof. Michael E. Mitchell asked me would I take over recording in the three vice-counties he was responsible for; SE and NE Galway as well as Roscommon! In those days recorders were scarce indeed. I took on the two east Galway vice-counties, but soon became aware of the amount of work involved and later gave up NE Galway, with some regret, as it had helped me explore parts of the county I didn’t know. As I live in SE Galway, it is easy for me to botanise in familiar territory -which comprises some of the low Burren, a great number of turloughs and part of the Slieve Aughty Mountains. Further east there is the River Shannon with its flood-meadows and a corner of Lough Derg. I love exploring this very varied range of habitats. With Cilian Roden, we’ve recently been exploring the Slieve Aughty Mountains for filmy-ferns, though these seem frustratingly rarer in SE Galway than in the more westerly part, in Co. Clare!

LM: And then in November 2022, you became BSBI President! We’ll cover that in the third and final part of this interview, coming soon, but for now, thanks for talking to us Micheline.

BSBI at the 2024 International Botanical Congress in Madrid: Days 5-7

This is the third and final report by BSBI trustee Richard Allanach from the XX International Botanical Congress in Madrid, following on from Days 1&2 and Days 3&4. 

Over to Richard:

"Amongst the five lectures and 54 symposia delegates could attend on Thursday there was still plenty of opportunity for botanists to meet and plan future activity. Current and future BSBI Presidents Micheline Sheehy Skeffington and Paul Ashton met with Xavier Pico of our sister society, the Spanish Botanical Society (SEBOT), to discuss future collaboration. Xavier is lucky enough to work in the Donana, a fabulous wetland area in southern Spain - home to lynxes, hoopoes and the sage- leaved rockrose. In the image on the right, BSBI correspondent Richard Allanach hovers to the right of the gathering.

Friday at the twentieth International Botanical Congress in Madrid was definitely Commonwealth Day. For reasons of narrative clarity we will describe it back to front. The major public lecture which closed the day was about RBG Kew's’ series of reports on the ‘State of the World’s plants and fungi’ in which BSBI is a partner and contributes data to the reports.

Headline – half of the world’s flowering plant species are threatened with extinction. Prof Alexandre Antonelli, Director of Science at RBG Kew, referred to the well known concept of floristic hotspots. The next International Botanical Congress in 2029 will be held in the middle of flowering season in the floral hotspot of Cape Province, South Africa (9,500 plant species, 68% endemic). As well as floral hotspots, Prof Antonelli introduced the concept of floral "dark spots" based first on the probable number of undiscovered plant species and secondly on our geographical knowledge of the spread of each species. Unsurprisingly, and thanks to the work of BSBI members over many decades, our islands were placed at the polar opposite end of the spectrum from the world’s dark spots. Prof Antonelli believes we have few undiscovered species (but see below). However then came a moment for Hiberno-Britannic pride. Whilst our islands and France are ranked equally for likely undiscovered species it is believed our geographical knowledge of the species we have is significantly better than our Gallic neighbours. Indeed a French delegate to the BSBI stand acknowledged that Plant Atlas 2020 was significantly better than anything our Trans-Manche cousins have, before he concluded that because of the greater floral diversity of France if they had produced a Flora similar to our own it would have taken four volumes rather than our paltry two.

An encouraging feature of the Congress was the number of delegates from India. Their team of 68 botanists was the tenth largest delegation and comfortably exceeded the sum of delegates from the entire continent of Africa. Naturally many Indian delegates came and talked to us on the BSBI stand. Hopefully this might lead to future collaboration.

Saturday: The first lecture of the day raised an interesting possibility that RBG Kew might be wrong and that our islands hold as yet unclassified new species. Prof Angela Moles of the University of New South Wales, Australia spoke about climate change and the movement of plant species. A paradox is that a third of studied species are heading in the “wrong” direction towards a warmer climate. She also spoke about a South African aster Arctotheca populifolia (beach daisy) which was first recorded in Australia less than 100 years ago. The Australian population was morphologically distinct, flowers at a different time of year and even when forced to breed in a lab experiment has a very low rate of setting viable seed. On that basis Prof Moles argued the Australian population could be classed as a new species. Given the propensity of our Victorian forebears to bring back specimens from all over their world and their subsequent escape into the wild surely some could meet the same levels of morphological distinctness and theoretical and practical gene isolation. They will have had decades longer than the beach daisy to become independent of their parent population.

If you had fallen asleep after Sandra Knapp’s opening lecture ‘Why Botany, Why Now?’ on the opening day of the XX International Botanical Congress and not woken up until twenty to four on the final afternoon you might have thought the entire event was dominated by BSBI speakers. In the final slot before the closing ceremony, BSBI President-Elect Prof Paul Ashton (image on right) spoke about how genes flow across our environment. Prof Ashton took three species: Water Sedge Carex aquatilis, Meadow Crane's-bill Geranium pratense and Downy-fruited Sedge Carex filiformis, and used his own research to report on their genetic diversity in our islands. His lecture was well illustrated with distribution information from BSBI's Plant Atlas 2020 and among other matters he concluded that in Britain, Carex filiformis was now fragmented into genetically isolated populations, with all the threats to future survival that poses. He concluded his lecture with a rousing call for conservation action directed to renewing the corridors that enable genes to flow between different plant species populations. 

After Paul’s lecture all that remained was the closing ceremony and the adoption of the rather wordy Madrid Declaration - doubtless many BSBI members will be pleased that improved support for herbaria made it into the first point of the ten points of the declaration".

Huge thanks to Richard for these reports from the International Botanical Congress!

BSBI at the 2024 International Botanical Congress in Madrid: Days 3&4

Following on from his first report from the XX International Botanical Congress in Madrid, we have another report from BSBI trustee, Richard Allanach. But first, a correction: we said that there were three people in the BSBI delegation: BSBI President Dr Micheline Sheehy Skeffington, Richard himself and fellow trustee Dr Sandy Knapp OBE, but Richard tells me that Prof Pete Hollingsworth CBE, Director of Science at RBG Edinburgh (and also a BSBI trustee), and Prof Paul Ashton, Professor of Botany at Edge Hill University and BSBI President-elect, are also attending the Congress. It's great to have such strong BSBI  representation at such an important event!

So, over to Richard for his latest report - and he also took the photos on this page:

"The issue of how Ireland was revegetated following the last Ice Age was one of the exciting topics addressed at the XX International Botanical Congress on Tuesday. Reviewing Ireland's tree species, Colin Kelleher of the National Botanic Gardens of Ireland, concluded that the majority of trees would have arrived from the continent via Britain. 

"It was left to BSBI President Micheline Sheehy Skeffington (image on left) and her research colleagues from the Universities of Corunna and Santiago de Compostela to reveal the origins of the Irish population of Arbutus unedo (the strawberry tree) which in all probability arrived with copper prospectors from the Iberian peninsula around 2000 BC. 

"Whilst this was news to the delegates at the Congress, BSBI members had advance notice of their findings: Micheline gave a short talk on her findings to the 2023 British and Irish Botanical Conference in Newcastle, and also published a paper in British & Irish Botany, the BSBI's online scientific journal.

"On Wednesday the XX International Botanical Congress's programme of talks, workshops and symposia stopped at lunchtime. For some delegates this was an opportunity to take a siesta in Madrid's sweltering 35 degree heat. However for many of the ardent young botanists attending - including four of the British delegation, workers at Kew Gardens and Sheffield University - it was just swapping one type of work for another and a chance to visit Madrid's Botanic Gardens. The three pictured (image on right) were examining the nut-like cones of Taxodium distichum, a much finer tree than its cousin, the all too common Leylandii. An example of a blooming international co-operation stemming from this Congress, we have (from left to right) a delegate from Spain, from Colombia and from Germany".

Many thanks to Richard for this latest report from Madrid. If you're also following latest updates on X/Twitter at #IBC2024, you may spot a few other notable British and Irish botanists/ BSBI members, including Dr Jonathan Mitchley, of Botanical University Challenge fame, and agricultural geneticist Prof Pat Heslop-Harrison; their Twitter accounts will keep you updated on what these luminaries are hearing, seeing and talking about at the Congress. 

BSBI at the 2024 International Botanical Congress in Madrid: Days 1&2

The Botanical Society of Britain & Ireland is honoured to support - and attend - the 20th International Botanical Congress in Madrid this week. 

Our President, Dr Micheline Sheehy Skeffington, and two of our trustees - Dr Sandy Knapp OBE and Richard Allanach - are present, and Richard has sent the following report and photographs from the first two days of the Congress:

"Three thousand botanists gathered together (image on right) in Madrid yesterday for the opening of the twentieth International Botanical Congress. The opening address was given by Sandra Knapp (image below left) of the Natural History Museum in London, who among many other roles is also a trustee of the BSBI. Sandra's title was 'Why Botany, Why Now?' She spoke for an hour throwing out ideas as rapidly as a bank of gorse throws out seeds on a warm summer's day. 

The International Botanical Congress only takes place every six years. The last event was in China and the next will be in South Africa. Botanists from Britain and Ireland make up the fourth largest delegation to the Congress.

The BSBI's poster (image below left) on our Plant Atlas 2020 project was unveiled at the XX International Botany Congress in Madrid on Monday. It immediately caught the interest of two passing specialists in the Droseraceae. The Australian botanist was interested in the contrast between the distribution of sundews in our islands and those in Australia. 

Whilst here sundews seem to prefer the wetter, colder areas where the botanist's boot sinks deep into the underlying bog, in Australia they have a much wider distribution with some establishing themselves on rocks where they are exposed to drought for months at a time. The word from our Trans-Atlantic sundew expert was that our Plant Atlas was 'cool'."

Many thanks to Richard for this report! Readers of this blog already know that Plant Atlas 2020 is very cool, but it's good to know that botanists from the other side of the world are in agreement. You can follow the latest news from the Congress on X under the #IBC2024 hashtag.

New pocket guide to British and Irish Wild Flowers and Plants

A new ID guide to the British and Irish flora has just been published in the WILDGuides series from Princeton University Press, who published both Plant Atlas 2020 and popular recent titles such as Britain's Orchids. 

British and Irish Wild Flowers and Plants: A Pocket Guide is available now, and covers more than 1,000 of our most common wild plants. It also features BSBI plant distribution maps (and the eagle-eyed among you will spot the BSBI logo on the book's cover!); the authors are Rachel Hamilton, Chris Gibson - both longstanding BSBI members and highly respected field botanists - and Rob Still, the man behind WILDGuides. With more than 3,000 colour photographs, plant descriptions and simple visual keys to families, the authors are confident that this new ID guide will provide a "springboard into the wider world of botanical identification".   

British and Irish Wild Flowers and Plants: A Pocket Guide retails at £12.99 and is available to purchase now from natural history booksellers such as Summerfield Books who are offering it for only £7.95 (excl. P&P). 

This softback book has 320 pages and weighs just over half a kilo, so it should slip nicely into the pocket of anyone keen to get started on identifying some of our commonest wild plants. If that's you, then why not give the book a go and leave a comment below telling us what you thought? Or, if you're already a seasoned botanist, this book might be the ideal present for you to give to any plant-loving friends keen to take the next step into plant ID! 

Pseudonyms and the BSBI Distribution Database

Bee Orchid Ophrys apifera
submitted on iNaturalist by 'hemipepsis'  

In this blogpost, BSBI Countries Manager James Harding-Morris sheds light on the issue of botanical recorders using pseudonyms Over to James:

"In the past, BSBI's County Recorders (VCRs) would largely receive records from a known network of individuals allowing a fine-tuned understanding of their botanical abilities. With the growth in recording technology (such as iRecord) this has allowed any enthusiast to generate biological records for any taxa. This increase in accessibility has allowed a broader range of people to take part in recording, but means that our approaches to working with this data need to evolve.

We are all familiar with the rule that a biological record is composed of four key parts; the Who, What, When and Where. When working with data from certain sources, however, some records are submitted under a pseudonym. This has led to some discussion around the treatment of pseudonyms on the BSBI’s Distribution Database (the DDb). To help VCRs make decisions on what data they chose to move into the DDb, we have drawn together some information into this blog post.

Sources of records with pseudonyms

Great Forget-me-not
Brunnera macrophylla
 

Pseudonymous records are most likely to be encountered when working with data submitted by the general public through iNaturalist and, to a lesser extent, iRecord. These records enter a separate holding pen on the DDb after a transfer and can be moved into the live DDb at VCR discretion. See full guidance on that process here.

To take "my" vice-county North Lincolnshire (VC54) as an example, the vast majority of records submitted via iRecord have been submitted with full, personal names. With iNaturalist, the incidence of pseudonyms is higher - perhaps 10% of records. These proportions may and probably will vary from county to county, but in my experience the records I have received from pseudonymous users are no less serious or valuable than those from people who appear to be using legal names. For example, the record I received of Brunnera macrophylla (on left) submitted on iNaturalist by 'giles63' - this is an unusual alien for VC54. 

A benefit of iNaturalist is that nearly all records will have an associated image, allowing the identification to be confirmed. Pseudonyms are also stable and unique - as in, a person will be associated with an unchanging name - and can allow development of a long-term perspective of a recorder’s ability.

Why do people use pseudonyms?

People may use pseudonyms online for a number of reasons:

Trailing Bellflower
Campanula poscharskyana
submitted on iNaturalist by 'biomel'

Internet safety: Young people, when first learning about internet safety, are told not to share personal identity data online. There are now generations of people who have grown up with this advice, making online pseudonyms second nature.

Uniqueness: Pseudonyms are unique. When registering for an online account, you can’t have the same name as someone else, which can compel people to use something other than their legal name. There is value in this, as pseudonyms tend to be stable and unique, unlike real names. Matt Harding, BSBI Scotland Officer, recently pointed out that there are a number of records on the DDb for ‘M. Harding,’ not all of which are his.

Protection of vulnerable people: Pseudonyms can protect the identities of vulnerable individuals or those responsible for them, who may not want to disclose their real names for personal or safeguarding reasons. This is something to be aware of when considering the use of pseudonyms in a public-facing forum such as iRecord or iNaturalist, where anyone with an account can see the names (or pseudonyms) of other recorders.

What are the risks of ignoring pseudonymous records?

The risk of trying to identify pseudonyms is that some people simply have names that might look like pseudonyms - Monte-Carlo, Dreamy, Alloy, Costly, Arwen and Eowyn could appear as unlikely real names but were all given to children in 2023. Conversely, the name Colin Robinson could appear a perfectly reasonable name but may actually be the pseudonym of a What We Do In the Shadows fan. Ignoring records with (perceived) pseudonyms runs the risk of accidentally excluding records from genuine recorders with unique or unusual names.

Colin Robinson (on right) alongside
 his other vampire companions 

Another risk is that valuable plant records could be missed. By simply discounting records on the basis of a pseudonym then unusual or exciting records could be eliminated before consideration.

Final points

Feedback mechanism: Working with records in the DDb holding pen does not (yet) allow feedback to the users of iRecord. However, if you or a member of your VCR team verify records within iRecord itself, there is an opportunity to exchange messages with users, which could include asking whether they’d be happy to provide a legal name - which they often are! Of course, given some of the reasons mentioned above, a few people may have a good rationale for remaining pseudonymous.

Support for record verification: If you would like to start verifying records in iRecord for your VC, or would like to find someone else to support you by verifying records, then please contact your Country Officer or email me, James Harding-Morris, who will support you in getting set up.

VCR discretion: VCRs have final say on which records enter the live DDb for their vice-county and hopefully this blogpost will support VCRs with that decision making process. That said, no records should be rejected on the basis of a pseudonym, and instead should be left in the ‘holding pen’ and not moved to the live DDb.

British & Irish Botany: issue 6.1 published

Dr Stuart Desjardins

We have just published the latest issue of British & Irish Botany, the BSBI's online, Open Access scientific journal. It's been six months since our previous issue, the final one with Ian Denholm at the helm as Editor-in-Chief. Work has been going on behind the scenes in recent months as Ian handed over to his successor, Dr Stuart Desjardins, an Early Career Fellow in Plant Biology at the University of Leicester. Stuart's research interests include plant molecular phylogenetics and taxonomy, as well as evolutionary processes such as speciation and hybridisation.

This new issue of the journal, with Stuart as Editor-in-Chief, features six papers which we are confident will be of interest to botanists across Britain and Ireland. 

First up is a paper by David Green (BSBI County Recorder for North Wiltshire from 1982 to 2003) describing the Wynd Cliff whitebeam; a new species of Aria (formerly Sorbus subg. Aria) endemic to the Wye Valley, Wales. Next is an account by Andy Amphlett, joint BSBI County Recorder for Easterness, of the tree and scrub species of the treeline ecotone in the Cairngorms National Park, Scotland. Andy discusses the 36 species which occur in the Park at >500 m altitude, compares them with the 'birch belt' species found in Norway, and considers the implications for conservation management. If you enjoyed Sarah Watts' recent paper in British & Irish Botany on 'High mountain trees: altitudinal records recently broken for 11 different tree species in Britain' and have been following David Pearman's work on altitudinal data, then this paper is for you. 

Wynd Cliff Whitebeam
Image: D. Green

Next up we have a paper by Dr Tim Rich describing two new hybrid species of scurvygrass Cochlearia; Tim has named one of them Cochlearia x stacei in honour of Prof Clive Stace, "for his authoritative work on the British and Irish floras for the last 50 years". Tim is a frequent contributor to our journal, an Honorary Member of BSBI and earlier this year he became the second recipient of the BSBI Award for Outstanding Contribution to British and Irish botany. 

The fourth contribution is from Jim Bevan, whose detailed account clarifies the occurrence of a lesser-known species of hawkweed Hieracium gothicum in Britain. As you will be able to tell from the paper, H. gothicum has clearly been a much-confused taxon, but Jim’s meticulous work has shed light on this almost forgotten species and adds to the already considerable BSBI resources on hawkweeds.

Salix lapponum at Drumochter Pass
Image: A. Amphlett

One of the roles of British & Irish Botany is to provide an outlet for British botanists to make taxonomic revisions and to update plant nomenclature, and a perfect example of this is included in the current issue: a short, but necessary, validation of three of P.D. Sell’s Hieracium binomials from Sell & Murrell’s Flora of Great Britain and Ireland, prepared by Dr Tim Rich and Jim Crossley.

While British & Irish Botany's main aim is to provide a forum for publishing papers and articles relating to the vascular plants and charophytes of Britain and Ireland, including descriptions of new taxa, we also cover historic botany. So we are delighted to publish a paper by Frank Horsman about the Westminster Physic Garden - which attracted many 17th century botanists such as John Ray, aka the 'father of English natural history', John Tradescant who introduced magnolias and asters to English gardens, and John Evelyn, whose Sylva is widely acknowledged as one of the most influential books on forestry ever published, as well as eminent visitors such as diarist Samuel Pepys - but about whose precise location there has long speculation. Frank's deep dive into historic literature sources has yielded a likely site for the Garden, and follows on from his previous paper for us on the C17th botanists Edward Morgan and Edward Lhwyd.

Many thanks to Stuart and congratulations on his first issue as Editor-in-Chief! We already have seven papers in the pipeline for issue 6.2, coming to you in the autumn, and we are always keen to hear from any botanists interested in submitting a manuscript. Here are the subject areas we cover and here are the submission guidelines, or you can email Stuart if you'd rather have an informal chat before submitting. But for now, grab a cuppa, make sure you're sitting comfortably, and then you can start enjoying this latest issue of British & Irish Botany.

Interview with BSBI President Micheline Sheehy Skeffington: Part One

BSBI President Micheline Sheehy Skeffington

BSBI has welcomed female members since its inception in 1836, although this hasn’t always been reflected in the choice of President – there have only been three women Presidents so far: Mary Briggs, from 1998 to 2000; Lynne Farrell, from 2019 to 2022 – here is the interview with Lynne, whose monthly blogposts helped botanists stay in touch while we couldn’t meet in person because of the lockdowns; and then in November 2022, Lynne handed over to Micheline Sheehy Skeffington.

Micheline is both the third female BSBI President and the second from the Republic of Ireland (David Webb was the first, from 1989 to 1991). At the 2023 British & Irish Botanical Conference, Micheline delivered the keynote presentation on ‘Ireland’s Lusitanian Flora – mining, smuggling, pilgrimages and the Ericaceae’. If you were unable to attend the Conference, you can watch this video of Micheline’s presentation.

Micheline's presentation at the
2023 British & Irish Botanical Conference
Image: J. Common 

I caught up with Micheline to find out more about her back story and to hear what she’s been up to in her first year at the helm of the leading botanical society in Britain and Ireland. Here is the first instalment of my interview with our President.

LM: So Micheline, before you tell us about your Presidency, could we go right back to the beginning and ask how you first got interested in botany – has it been a lifelong passion? How did you get started?

MSS: Well I grew up in a converted gardener’s cottage and garden behind a big house and grounds. So as kids, myself and my brothers were always sent outdoors, where we climbed trees and explored hidden corners. I always retained that enjoyment of being outdoors. We were also members of the Dublin Naturalists’ Field Club and would go on outings exploring the habitats, flora and fauna of County Dublin.

LM: That sounds like the ideal childhood for a future BSBI President! How about indoors, at school and later at university?

Micheline in a tree after canoeing on Lough Derg
Image: N. Scott

MSS: Yes, I enjoyed science in school and studied Natural Science in Trinity College Dublin (TCD), where I was lucky to be able to study Geography/ Geology, as well as Botany and Zoology. In the final years, Botany seemed to offer the more interesting courses, so I chose that as my main subject. My fourth-year project was on the contribution of the lichen Peltigera polydactyla to sand dune nitrogen budgets on N Bull Island, Dublin Bay.

In my final year, I became interested in studying in France, since my mother was French. I won a bursary and spent a year in Montpellier studying plant ecology and living for a while in the Camargue, working on lagoonal flora alongside the flamingos. With friends, I explored the countryside around Montpellier and learned the local flora -and birdlife. At some point, I realised I wanted to do more for conservation and that I probably needed a PhD for that. So, I returned to TCD to take up my last years as a TCD Scholar and continued my interest in coastal systems with the study of nitrogen budgets in salt marsh plants, publishing several papers and enjoying giving talks at conferences.

LM: Ok so that’s you back in Ireland, studying and you mentioned the legendary Dublin Naturalists’ Field Club earlier – so did you get involved with them again?

Screenshot of a
Dublin Naturalists' Field Club
walkabout, inner north Dublin, 1981:
as reported in the Irish Times 

MSS: Yes, when I returned from Montpellier in autumn 1977, I met up with some Field Club members who encouraged me to join their committee, which I did. Not long after, while planning future field excursions, we realised that the on-going petrol crisis could seriously affect our ability to travel outside the city. Maura Scannell, Head of the National Herbarium at Glasnevin, suggested we work on the flora of inner Dublin. This caught our imagination and a small group came together, dividing the inner city, conveniently bounded by its two canals, into 14 districts overseen by a range of botanists, notably Jonathan Shackleton, a classmate of mine in TCD and later one-time County Recorder for Cavan; Peter Wyse Jackson, now President of the Missouri Botanical Garden; John Parnell, TCD lecturer in plant taxonomy; and contributions from Maura Scannell, Paddy Reilly, Declan Doogue, John Akeroyd and many more. It was great fun and eventually Peter and I put all the data together and the Flora of Inner Dublin was published in 1984. I’ve never lost my interest in ruderals and wasteland since those heady days when the latter were a blight on Dublin’s streetscape for all but us keen botanists.

Micheline plant recording in
Connemara National Park,
September 2016

LM: Ah that explains why you are always so great at flying the flag for urban botany and the so-called weeds that turn up on our city streets! So, you were out with the Field Club members, publishing the Flora, still working towards your PhD… were you also job-hunting?

MSS: As postgrads, we regularly scoured the pages of the New Scientist for jobs and, having travelled throughout Europe on interrail, I was keen to explore even wider, applying for jobs inter alia in Wales, Mauritania and Zambia, as well as in Ireland. Incredibly, in 1980, I landed a lectureship in plant ecology in the Botany Department of then-named University College Galway (UCG). Luckily, academia was less pressurised then and I spent two summers analysing my data and writing up my PhD, awarded in early 1983. The next week I was taking my colleague Michael O’Connell’s palaeoecology and bryology courses as well as mine, while he took a year’s sabbatical! On his return, I promptly handed him my lecture notes and took up my side of the exchange, choosing to go to Indonesia for a year. I was very lucky to be able to do this, as neither of us had to raise funds for our respective sabbaticals.

Having attended famous French tropical botanist Francis Hallé’s lectures in Montpellier, I was bitten by the bug to see tropical rainforest first-hand. Based in the SE Asian Regional Centre for Tropical Biology in Bogor, Java, I chose to work on the programme to find sustainable ways of using the rattan Calamus manan, prized for its high-quality cane for furniture. This took me with the team to Kalimantan in Borneo and to Sumatra, learning even then of the tragic destruction of the rainforest by timber loggers. Tropical rainforest is an incredibly rich, fascinating and valuable habitat. The clearing out of the rattan vine by local villagers was but a small part of that destruction. On returning to Ireland in 1985, I vowed to raise awareness as best I could about our role in the west in using unsustainable tropical timbers. Sadly now, the ubiquitous palm oil is playing equal havoc, with seas of oil palms replacing the diverse canopies of the rainforest. 

LM: It certainly is. For any readers who aren’t up to speed with how palm oil is contributing to deforestation, this page on the World Wildlife Fund website will be very useful. 

Micheline, you’ve had such a fascinating life in botany and conservation, and travelled so widely! Here we are still in 1985, you’re back in Ireland, a passionate conservationist and there’s a huge but ultimately successful struggle ahead of you – one so important that you recently published a book all about it! Let’s pause here and pick up on the next instalment in a few days – watch this space, readers!