Dryopteris pseudodisjuncta in England ANTHONY PIGOTT
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bout two years ago, while attending to a potted section of my large Dryopteris living collection, I noticed a plant which struck me as looking like Dryopteris pseudodisjuncta. I knew I had one living plant of pseudodisjuncta, from Norway, but I soon realised that this was not it. It was on my database just as ‘D. affinis complex’ from the South Lakes in 1995, but on checking my original field notes, I found that I’d noted that it was not obvious what morphotype it was but that its pinnule shape was rather like pseudodisjuncta. I’d taken a frond for an herbarium specimen and taken a small piece to propagate. The fact that my son and daughter were born in 1995 and 1996 respectively may explain why I’d not paid more attention to it nearer the time! The propagated plant had probably languished in its early years and remained small and unnoticed. Having had a good look at the now quite strongly growing plant, I was quite convinced it
One of two plants of Dryopteris pseudodisjuncta found at the original location in the Lake District (Cumberland, v.c. 70), photographed July 2020. Alison Evans
was pseudodisjuncta but I thought that I should apply the usual ‘due diligence’, so I found the original herbarium specimen to check it was the same and went through the published descriptions for the taxon and looked at any verified images I could find. All worked out well. The DNA ploidy level has since been confirmed to be triploid, as it has for the Norwegian plant. This meant that this find is the only known record for England and the earliest known date for the British Isles. I informed the local county recorders of the record and we agreed not to publish the exact location due to the rarity and lack of any knowledge of population size. My original notes had only mentioned one plant. A recent search at the original site found two specimens. BSBI NEWS 148 | September 2021
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