ADVENTIVES AND ALIENS: dventives&liensNews25
ADVENTIVES AND ALIENS Adventives and Aliens News 25 Compiled by Matthew Berry
at lF ,2 ascel L es l an M sis, no 8–10ascel L es l Terace, r ast E boenru N2B 14BJ m.berry15100@btinternet.com
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efore passing onto the latest compilation, I would like to share a few observations from Eastbourne in 2021 if I may, in case they might be of more general interest as a possible indication of future trends or to give food for botanical thought. In September I was surprised to find nonflowering plants of Pennisetum petiolare and Arthraxon hispidus (Small Carpet-grass) in Addingham Road in the Seaside area of Eastbourne (both conf. E.J. Clement). The first was sprouting in a tuft from a broken kerbstone, the second formed a very small prostrate mat on a dropped kerb of the pavement directly in front of the entrance to a property. There were also a few non-flowering plants of Guizotia scabra subsp. schimperi at the base of a wall and the foot of a lamppost. Both of the grass species have appeared in recent compilations for this section but these reports and others have tended to involve plants that were obviously very closely associated with bird tables and/or feeders, often actually in gardens. This was not the case in Addingham Road, although no doubt that bird seed was their source. For the second time in the space of a few years, I found a self-sown plant of Lathyrus odoratus (Sweet Pea) in 2021, growing in the gutter of Channel View Road also in the Seaside area and not far from a garden where flowering Sweet Peas often take pride of place in high summer. If it is to become a more familiar sight as a ‘street weed’, it might be worth noting that at an early stage characters such as the winged stem and wavy leaflet margins are not necessarily that obvious. The leaflets, stems and stipules will probably be hairy, however, and as indicated in Poland & Clement (2020), these hairs have swollen bases. It also seems that a proportion of hairs fail to develop and when the light catches 44
BSBI NEWS 149 | January 2022
them under a lens, these swellings can then resemble tiny sessile glands. In the introduction to Adventives & Aliens News 22, I wrote a little about Iberis amara (Wild Candytuft) as a constituent of wild flower seed mixes. Not long afterwards I sent flowering material I had collected from a wild flower seed mix to Eric Clement. He could not confirm that it was identical to the I. amara found as a native in this country, leaving open the possibility of a non-native infraspecific taxon such as Iberis amara var. coronaria (D. Don) Voss, or even a hybrid with a non-native species such as Iberis gibraltarica L. This year I was able to send him fruiting material from the same source and he thought it a very good match for our native I. amara. Even so, the situation might not be as straightforward as I implied, and the white-flowered, annual Iberis found in these mixes might not always be exactly the same as the plants that make up our native populations.
V.c. 6 (N. Somerset)
Stachys annua (Annual Yellow-woundwort). Radstock Railway Sidings (ST69085470), 12/7/2020, H.J. Crouch, J.M. Crouch & P. Watson: one plant on waste ground on former disused railway sidings, now the edge of a housing estate. The second v.c. 6 record and the first since 1908 at Portishead Station yard. An erect Eurasian annual (Lamiaceae) with cream corollas and a rare casual in Britain, brought in for example with grain and oil-seed. ‘Formerly established in abundance on the downs in W. Kent’, Clement & Foster (1994). Stace (2019): 657. Tanacetum macrophyllum (Rayed Tansy). Frome (ST777478), 28/6/2021, H.J. Crouch & V. Graham: in waste ground below boundary wall of churchyard, St. John’s Church. It is not thought to have been
