I turned the whole of last week over to a personal project that – like a treadmill – wouldn’t let me off; at least that’s my excuse for not posting for a while. I’ve been meaning to gather together all my untidy botanical records into a single spreadsheet for ages; but knowing it would be a bit of a struggle I put it off until it converged with another thread: self doubt in its most insidious form. I’ve got notebooks and photos (many not properly ID’d) going back over years and I am for the most part organised, but only for short periods like trips away in the campervan. Any qualifications I possess are completely unrelated to natural history and so if it’s not theology or ceramics I feel like a minnow in the shark infested ponds of botanical expertise. I know my place but I’d like to swap it for a better one because I really enjoy finding and identifying plants and – dare I say – I’m pretty good at it. However, not possessing a piece of paper with an “ology” on the top, makes me a bit of an insecure wallflower. My inner policeman urges me not to make a fool of myself (psychological code for venturing an opinion).
So I thought I’d make a list. I thought I might find a hundred plants that I know at best and that would be a confidence booster and so I set up a spreadsheet, opened up the notebooks and Google Photos and started to enter plants matched with photos wherever I have them and double check every entry against the field guides, excluding anything I might have got wrong. I soon reached 100, then 200 and then – running out of steam – got to the high 200’s with only a handful needed to cross the magic 300 boundary.
Meanwhile, back on the allotment it’s always busy and so watering, planting out for the winter and weeding also demands time. That’s OK for me because I can weed and look out for likely additions to my list at the same time and so I was taking a break and gossiping with our next door neighbour when I caught sight of a carrot family (Apiaceae) plant that I initially thought could be a Pig Nut and took a quick photo to check. I often use an AI app to quickly assess what I’ve found. They’re pretty useful for identifying the family, but less so at species level. Anyway it came back as a plant I’d never seen – Bullwort. So having told our neighbour that it could be unusual I went back ten minutes later to take more detailed photos and it had disappeared, presumably into his compost heap. It was such an interesting clash of cultures; for me a plant of interest and for him a pernicious weed that needed to be removed ASAP. In the event my first photo was good enough to confirm Bullwort and it didn’t take long to realize that it was at the edge of a scattering of wildflowers grown from a packet of supermarket seeds. So dilemma number two came up – should I record it as described by the field guides – an occasional stray from birdseed and seed mixes – when I remembered my copy of the 1907 Bristol Flora written by James White who haunted railway sidings and docksides in search of accidental introductions that fell off the back of a wagon or out of a torn sack. If he found them he recorded them – and so shall I!
And so I crept and then tottered across the magic 300 with the assistance of a walk down the Canal which rarely fails to yield something interesting and also a photo of an utterly common weed such as often passes under the radar because it’s so common and I feel just a bit vindicated as well as tormented by the thought of the next target. All this is a bit too trainspotting for me, and yet the temptation is enormous.
Realistically the majority of field botanists are complete (but extremely competent) amateurs, and the professionals – with very few exceptions – are helpful, kind and considerate. There are also BSBI tests we could take to award a level of competency but the thought terrifies me, and so I’ll bumble on at my own speed and keep up the day job – writing and gardening and tonight, cooking a courgette risotto for Madame.
