Last word on the BSBI Summer Meeting

Now that people have dispersed home after the BSBI Summer Meeting - and before we go any further, I just have to share this view, taken by Lydia at 5.35 am on Monday, the final morning, looking out from FSC Blencathra where the meeting was based...

Viola canina at Ullswater - Aira Point
Image: Fred Rumsey

So now that people are home again, they're uploading their images from the meeting and the thank you emails and congratulatory messages must be flooding in to Jon Shanklin's Inbox. 

But where is our man of the moment, who organised a meeting which attracted participants from Perthshire to the south coast of England? 

What do you do to recover from the intensity of organising a five-day national botanical recording meeting?

Yup, you guessed it - you go off botanising and recording somewhere else! 

Look out, botanists below!
Image: Fred Rumsey

So here's a brief report from Jon about his post-Summer Meeting recovery day, accompanied by some final images. 

Jon says: "Well I did have a nice relaxing day at the seaside!  For most of the day the sun blazed down, but a cooling sea breeze made it brilliant weather for botanising. 

I'd originally planned a two tetrad route, but the first was so nice that I spent most of the day there. The scenery was rather different to Blencathra and so were the plants. 

A very pink Oxalis acetosella at Bassenthwaite
Image: Lydia Koelmans

"The area I chose was one of the few Flintshire ones on the Dee estuary that was short of records - not any more. A large part of the tetrad includes the site of the former Point of Ayr colliery, which has been bulldozed flat. 

It therefore has a range of habitats and I found quite a few plants that I'd never seen before, such as Trifolium ornithopodioides, Ruppia maritima and Anchusa azurea".

A possible venue for a future BSBI field meeting? 

And well done Jon for filling in another recording card on the way home - we need all those records for Atlas 2020! 

I wonder what Jon will do when he does finally make it back to Cambridge - a little recording perhaps?

Many thanks to Jon for all his hard work organising and to Fred and Lydia for the images on this page, all taken during the Summer Meeting.  

I'll leave you with a final image from Fred (on right) of the botanists wending their way home after one of many successful fieldtrips on the BSBI Summer Meeting - until next year!