Slum Botany

The Botanical Society of Scotland is asking botanists north of the border to have a close look at the plants to be found growing in a purely urban setting as part of their 'exciting new project' Urban Flora of Scotland. Skye has lots of tiny clusters of houses, a handful of villages and a couple of what could, at a push, be described as towns, the larger of which is Portree. With a population of around 2500, Portree qualifies as being urbanised and is hence suitable for the BSS project. I figured I'd like to get in on the action.

The Portree recording area spills into five monads. By the time I got around to expressing an interest in helping out, Stephen Bungard, the BSBI Recorder for Skye, had already allocated four of the five monads to himself and two other folks, but I was offered NG4844 which covers the north-east sector of Portree. 

Each plant species found needs to be ranked on the DAFOR scale. DAFOR stands for Dominant, Abundant, Frequent, Occasional and Rare. This seems simple enough until you realise that plants are commoner in some streets than others, throwing the DAFOR ranking off kilter somewhat. Groundsel is 'Frequent' in some streets, 'Rare' in others and entirely absent where the residents of a few cul-de-sacs have gone a bit gung-ho with the weedkiller, to give just one example of one plant in one monad. Not sure I fancy Stephen's task of collating the data and trying to make sense of it all across several monads and habitats. Or maybe we just send in our data as individuals, I'm not actually sure. 

This is the large-scale OS Map I use to navigate Portree's five monads

My survey monad is NG4844 at the top right corner of the image above. Staffin Road (the red one snaking northwards) is quite a busy road with a footpath on one side and nothing to the other. The area to the west of it is a council estate, though it's a very quiet, rather pleasant part of Portree and nothing at all like some of the South London estates I'm so very familiar with. The houses to the east of the Staffin Road are where the rich folk live and has woodland surrounding it on two sides. 

This is the area I covered on my first visit

Despite my first survey visit lasting a couple of hours or so, I only managed to cover an area of less than six acres in extent. Wow, at this rate it will easily take me another couple of years to get this monad whupped! 

Which roughly corresponds to the hatched area marked '1' on this map

Thankfully I upped my game and today's visit, my third in total, saw me complete my survey of the urbanised areas of NG4844. Fifteen minutes into my first visit, I found a small Laburnum tree in a fragment of woodland at the end of a cul-de-sac. Stephen had provided me with the existing taxon list for the monad, a quick glance confirmed a complete lack of any Laburnum on it. I took a bit home with me, twigs, leaves and a couple of seedpods. To my genuine surprise, it keyed straight through to Laburnum anagyroides, which is the true Laburnum and a lifer for me! Previously I've only seen Hybrid Laburnum, so that just leaves Scottish Laburnum to find for the set. 

Plant-hunting in urban areas is definitely not everyone's cup of tea, though personally I love it. For anybody that has spent time botanising with me, you'll know how much I enjoy finding or tracking down an alien species. And although it's true that many aliens occur out in the wilds, urban areas do clearly offer a greater opportunity for garden escapees to gain a foothold and become naturalised. I thoroughly enjoy the thrill of finding plastic dross species growing in a kerbside, or on a tip, or beneath a garden wall. Kev Rylands introduced me to the phrase 'slum botany', a phrase which Mark Telfer quickly adopted whilst we were twitching plastic shit-plants on Scillies a few years back. I really don't see it as a derogatory term, it is what it is and I for one love it. Ruderals and aliens are an exciting and dynamic part of the floral landscape and can offer all kinds of unexpected surprises and puzzles.

I use a quick shortcut when it comes to recording unusual plants; I hold my GPS unit next to the plant in question and take a photo of them. That way if Stephen decides he needs to verify an especially unlikely sighting, I just ping him the pic which will put him within a metre or so of the plant in question. Which is what I did when I found a bush of Darwin's Barberry.

On my second survey visit I found another Berberis, this one a large bush covered in bees. I didn't recognise it so took a barrage of pics. 

I still haven't figured out which barberry this is. I need to grab a bit and key it through

The field in the background of the image above is about 150 metres wide and there's a path that cuts across it, a shortcut between two different roads. I was a bit wary regards how far from tarmac I should stray in order to remain 'urban' but I'm glad I wandered a short way into this field as it provided me with new monad records for Redshank (the plant, not the bird), Oxeye Daisy, Wall Speedwell, Yellow Rattle and a big patch of Timothy Grass, which is not a particularly common grass up here.

Timothy Grass in a nutrient-enriched meadow (full of dogshit, basically)

I'd be fibbing if I said I didn't attract a little bit of attention with my urban botanising. Slowly walking up one side of a cul-de-sac and then down the other side, ducking into a disused tennis courts and staring over fences and onto folks' lawns does atract a small degree of attention. The good thing is that this is Skye and you're unlikely to be stabbed to death just for loitering near somebody's car, or have the police called out because there are children playing in the same street that you are slowly walking down. 

Nobody I talked to had ever heard of The Botanical Society for Scotland, or the Urban Flora of Scotland Project, but they all hoped I found something interesting, and that the weather would stay dry for me, and at no point was there more than the merest moment of awkwardness to be had. 

Astrantia major - this clump is the first record for Skye in 52 years

Greater Sea-spurrey, Marsh Cudweed and Bulbous Rush in typical roadside gravel habitat

Changing Forget-me-not seems to be quite happy to grow in arid kerbsides

There are a large number of folk out there who obviously feel that it is perfectly acceptable to dump their garden refuse over the back wall, or across the road, or hide it away beneath the nearest trees. But it's not acceptable. I'd slap the whole damn lot of them with a very substantial fine followed by yet more very substantial fines until they stop. There are plenty of these type of folks that live here on Skye and, coming from a guy who was born way south of the border, I'm ashamed to say that it's abundantly clear to see that the majority of these offenders are English incomers rather than Skye folks. Whether they're dumping grass clippings or Japanese Knotweed seedlings, they just don't realise they're breaking the law, or the consequences of their actions on the local environment. I found one large b+b with extensive and immaculate gardens. It looked lovely. Then I noticed the 'tunnel' between trees on the other side of the road. A quick skirmish beneath the trees and I found a very substantial patch of Fuchsia, Londonpride and Pick-a-back Plant, plus numerous bushes of Spiraea and Cotoneaster. Each and every one of those plants are highly invasive aliens. The b+b owner, or his gardener, has clearly been dumping their unwanted vegetation into the landscape at large without a care in the world. And that really pisses me off. Mind you, new plant records were made. 

 

Limonia nubeculosa balanced upon an illegally dumped Pick-a-back Plant

Rock Stonecrop growing on top of a wall

Monkeyflower Erythranthe (Mimulus) guttatus in a ditch at the bottom of a garden

Hairy Bindweed naturalised along several hundred feet of roadside verge

But obviously, you can't just point a pan-species lister at a bunch of plants and not expect them to find other things too. Today I found something I'd genuinely forgotten existed, something I never expected to find locally. Here it is, I do hope you're sitting down folks...

This is the only Honeybee I've ever seen on the northern part of Skye!

It's a bit messed-up, I know, but when I first spotted this bee my immediate thought was "what the heck is wrong with that Eristalis?" Honeybee simply was not on my radar. Whatsoever. I assume this has come from somebody's hive. I've only ever seen four or five Honeybees on Skye, and they were all down on Sleat where a beekeeper lets them forage as "feral bees".  

Other non-plant interest on plants included the following

This is Snowberry exhibiting a heavy infestation of the powdery mildew Erysiphe symphoricarpae

The powdery mildew Golovinomyces sordidus on Sea Plantain

This is the mine of Mompha raschkiella, a small moth that as a larva feeds on Rosebay Willowherb 

This is the mine of the fly Phytomyza minuscula on Columbine

Wow - that was a surprise! 

I decided that, just for the sake of completion, I ought to peer around the back of a boring-looking privet hedge. And I'm glad I did, just look at that nectar-rich oasis of Dotted Loosestrife, Purple Loosestrife and Meadowsweet! It was positively buzzing with insect life, a pity I didn't have my net to hand. 

Another unassuming corner held what I think will probably turn out to be Medium-flowered Winter-cress. The pics are a bit shite, not sure what I did with the settings but clearly they were wrong! 

I've still to finalise a few IDs, but NG4844 has so far provided me with around 150 species of plant with more to firm up. I still need to 'fine-tune' the DAFOR scale for most of them, but I've thorougly enjoyed my three visits into the monad. I've discovered a patch of Portree that I simply didn't know existed including a huge swathe of open land that I intend to send the Skye Nature Group into at some point later this year. Might even find another Honeybee!