Sharpen Your Botanical Skills: BSBI's New Webinar Series on Difficult Plants

Water Mint Mentha aquatica
Image: S. Thomas

An exciting new series of webinars is planned for 2025. They have been organised by Sam Thomas, BSBI England Officer, so over to Sam to tell us more:

"For botanists and plant enthusiasts across Britain and Ireland, the challenge of identifying certain plant groups can be both daunting and rewarding. We’re excited to announce a new series of webinars designed to demystify some of our more tricky plant groups. Join us for the opportunity to learn from national experts in three online Zoom sessions.

These webinars are perfect for anyone looking to refine their botanical skills, from more experienced botanists and BSBI County Recorders to those just beginning their plant identification journey. They are free to attend but if you’d like to make a donation towards the BSBI’s work then the option to do so is available on the booking pages. 

Hungarian Mullein
Verbascum speciosum
Image: S. Thomas

Here's a summary of what's in store:

Mulleins (Verbascum) of Britain and Ireland with Mike Crewe

Tue 22 Apr 2025 7:30 PM - 8:30 PM via Zoom - Booking Link

Identification of Verbascum species in the UK isn't always easy, especially with non-native species and hybridisation. We will start with an overview of the distribution and identification of the genus before looking more closely at the native and more frequent alien species that have been recorded in Britain and Ireland. This session will be delivered by Mike Crewe who is the BSBI’s national expert referee for Verbascum as well as an experienced nature tour leader, botanist and birder. 

Mints (Mentha) of Britain and Ireland with Ambroise Baker

Wed 7 May 2025 7:30 PM - 8:30 PM via Zoom - Booking Link 

Mints are a challenging but rewarding group which are often neglected by recorders. In this webinar Ambroise will help attendees improve their Mentha recording by providing an overview of the Mentha diversity encountered by field botanists in Britain and Ireland, discussing the recording challenges and reviewing some of the more ambiguous key characters. Ambroise is a keen field botanist and a plant ecologist by training whose interests include urban floras, grasses, bryophytes, and aquatic plants. He's also going to be leading a weekend-long workshop about mints in September, so if this webinar whets your appetite, you'll be able to follow up with some more in-depth study.

Oxtongue Broomrape Orobanche picridis
Image: S. Thomas

Broomrapes (Orobanche & Phelipanche) of Britain and Ireland with Chris Thorogood

Tue 10 Jun 2025 7:30 PM - 8:30 PM via Zoom - Booking Link

Broomrapes are among the most enigmatically beautiful plants. They are parasitic, therefore lack leaves and chlorophyll, and they have aroused curiosity for centuries. In recent years, broomrapes have sparked interest among plant enthusiasts in a similar way to orchids. In this talk Chris Thorogood (Oxford Botanic Garden and Arboretum), international broomrape specialist and co-author of Broomrapes of Britain & Ireland, No.22 in the series of BSBI Handbooks, will introduce some broomrapes from around the world, then focus on the species found in Britain and Ireland and how to identify them.

Huge thanks are due to all three experts for agreeing to present so please do make the most of their time and come along. Even if you can’t make it on the day we’ll be recording the webinars for the BSBI YouTube channel so you can catch up or rewatch in the future".

Help your local herbarium!

Volunteers mounting specimens at Univ Leicester
Image: L. Marsh

Regular readers of this blog will know that we have a passion for herbaria. If you don't know much about these collections of dried, pressed plants or why they are so useful, check out our Herbaria page where you'll find resources, videos and contact details to help you find - and maybe visit? - your local herbarium. They are incredibly important for all plant-lovers, whether you're carrying out research, interested in the history of plant collecting, or you're trying to improve your botanical skills and really want to get to grips with what a particular species looks like across the year and in all kinds of conditions. 

Ranee putting away specimens
 in the NHM Herbarium
Image courtesy of S. Knapp 

So when Sandy Knapp, Chair of BSBI's Board of Trustees and botanist at the Natural History Museum, London, got in touch with important information about how we can help our herbaria, we were keen to help spread the word!

Over to Sandy to tell us more:

"As botanists we all love to see plants in the field, there is nothing like it. But herbaria are essential resources for verification of occurrences, especially when taxonomic opinions change. David Pearman showed how important herbaria are for finding first records of alien species in our area and emphasised the key role small, local herbaria play in understanding our flora.

Herbaria of the world are recorded in the online resource Index Herbariorum maintained by the New York Botanical Garden. Here you can look up herbaria by country or acronym (all registered herbaria have a standard acronym – for example mine at the Natural History Museum is BM (from when we were the British Museum!) and Trinity College herbarium is TCD and so on). There has been increasing interest in digitising and providing online images of herbarium specimens – for example, Kew has embarked on a programme to digitally image the entire herbarium.

Digitising herbarium specimens
Image courtesy of S. Knapp

But it is not only the big collections that are important for understanding our British and Irish flora! Right now, in the UK we have a great opportunity, especially for small institutions. Sadly, Ireland is not a part of this local initiative, but future initiatives await (and there is a Europe-wide DiSSCo consortium from which the UK node sprang).

DiSSCo UK (Distributed System of Scientific Collections UK) is a national programme to digitally record  the UK’s natural history collections – herbaria included. DiSSCo UK seeks to become a one-stop, dynamic, openly available and easy-to-use e-science infrastructure, integrating digital access to UK natural science collections. Through a hub and spoke model of digitisation at national, regional and local levels DiSSCo will:

• Empower the UK network of collections through digitisation
• Enhance UK biodiversity and heritage information infrastructure
• Improve data quality
• Deliver relevant data

Folders full of herbarium specimens
Image courtesy of S. Knapp

The 10-year programme has been allocated funding from the UK government, and herbaria are among the first collections to be digitised – so the fun and benefit from having access to digital records of herbarium specimens will soon begin!

An Expression of Interest (EOI) for DiSSCo UK has been launched for organisations interested in participating in future DiSSCo UK digitisation funding calls and wider activities over the 10-year programme. We’d encourage all organisations with an interest in DiSSCo UK to participate, and the EOI will aid in connecting organisations with potential hubs to collaborate on funding calls

Prof Clive Stace in the Univ Leicester Herbarium
Image: L. Marsh

The EOI is a light touch process that should not require special preparation or research – completion time will depend on which questions are relevant to the submitting organisation but is estimated at 20-40 minutes. Submissions are via Citizen Space, an online survey platform. The survey can be found here. The closing date for submissions is Friday 21st March.

If you have any questions, please direct them to dissco-uk@nhm.ac.uk. If you encounter any difficulty using Citizen Space, please direct your query to infrastructure@ahrc.ukri.org. Our BSBI President, Paul Ashton, has registered his local herbarium’s interest – I encourage all BSBI members to contact their local collections and urge them to do the same!"

Many thanks to Sandy for sharing this important news. We'll be following developments as they unfold, so watch this space, and Sandy will be keeping BSBI members in the loop with a longer piece about DiSSCo and its role in helping herbaria in the autumn issue of BSBI News, our membership magazine. Let's get involved and show some love to our wonderful herbaria!

British & Irish Botany: issue 7.1 published

Open limestone pavement  at Ingleborough,
Yorkshire, showing the clint and grike structure
 Image: C.Stevens

We've just published the latest issue of British & Irish Botany, the Botanical Society's online Open Access scientific journal. This issue contains six papers which we think will be of interest to botanists across Britain and Ireland.

First up is a paper by Carly Stevens called 'More evidence gaps than grikes: how limestone pavements have fallen through the cracks of British conservation' in which the author considers the various factors which may have contributed to the poor condition of British limestone pavements. This paper will be essential reading for anyone involved in the conservation of this internationally important habitat, which can support such a rich array of wild flowers.

Charlotte Grace O’Brien in 1894.
Image: Anthony O'Brien

From Ireland, Sylvia Reynolds (until recently, BSBI County Recorder for Co. Limerick) offers a fascinating account of the botanical interests and the many and various achievements of her great-grandaunt Charlotte Grace O'Brien. It's always a delight to read about eminent C19th female botanists, who managed to achieve great things - often in the face of adversity - and Sylvia's engaging writing style makes this a particularly enjoyable read.

Our third paper sees Tim Rich and Libby Houston, two of the authors of the BSBI Handbook on Whitebeams, Rowans and Service Trees of Britain and Ireland, make a number of new combinations in Sorbus, in preparation for the highly anticipated second edition. The first edition is currently out of print, although it is available as an eBook (as are all our BSBI Handbooks and a selection of other titles too).

Next up, a paper by the aptly named Caroline Plant et al. considers new records of New Zealand Pigmyweed Crassula helmsii in two Irish lakes; these records indicate a continued spread from east to west on the island of Ireland, since the first records of this invasive non-native plant in 1984.

Oxalis corniculata depicted by L’Obel (1576)
Image courtesy of the Linnean Society

From Chris Preston and David Pearman - two very well-known names in botanical circles, and frequent contributors to British & Irish Botany - we have an account of the first British record of Procumbent Yellow-Sorrel Oxalis corniculata in the late C15th. This plant has gone on to attain worldwide distribution, and Preston & Pearman tell the story of the British botanists who first described it in Britain and observed the explosive method of seed dispersal which helped it proliferate.

Finally, we have an account from Tim Rich of a new Lake District endemic, Lesser-leaved hawkweed Hieracium subangustatum, which was formerly treated as the Norwegian H. angustatum. This latest paper by Tim, author of many such contributions to this journal and several BSBI Handbooks, adds to the already considerable BSBI resources on hawkweeds. 

We hope you enjoy reading this latest issue of British & Irish Botany and as always, if you have an idea for a submission, do feel free to get in touch with us to talk through your idea. If it's about the vascular plants of Britain and Ireland, we'll be keen to hear from you.