A 21st Century Herbarium for Lincolnshire

The day didn't start too well - we were planning to set off at 9am to attend a training day at Whisby Nature Park near Lincoln and wanted to have a quick chat with the fitters before we left - but of course they were late arriving. So we left Lizzy in charge and left anyway. We'd only got as far as Stamford when we got caught up in a huge traffic jam - so to avoid it we decided to weave our way through the town - only so did lots of other people making that just as slow. Nevertheless once we rejoined the A1 we had a smooth journey and only arrived about 15 minutes late.

The training day was led by Dr. Mark Spencer, Curator of the British Herbarium at the Natural History Museum, as part of an initiative to create a modern herbarium for Lincolnshire. The session was well attended and Mark was a lively and enthusiastic tutor, who made a potentially dry subject relevant, interesting and fun. In the morning we learnt how to select plants for pressing and the basics of making and labeling a specimen, and in the afternoon we learnt how to deal with more tricky subjects, including huge plants such as bulrush and water plants, which are arranged by a flotation method.

The session ended about 4, and then Pete and I headed to Welbourn to record a tetrad very slowly, as it was hot and my leg was feeling tired. We eventually arrived home about 8.30pm and found the house empty, as all the boys had gone to the pub. We ate dinner at 10pm, and I then collapsed into bed.

As you can imagine, there wasn't a great deal of time for photography, but the lawn outside the Whisby Education centre is full of pennyroyal. This herb is a British native, and is now very rare (and fully protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act), being characteristic of seasonally inundated grassland around ephemeral pools and runnels that are subject to all-year-round trampling and grazing. This type of habitat was often found on lowland village greens, but few of these are now grazed, and many have been prettified to remove muddy, rutted areas. Its stronghold is now the New Forest where a pastoral economy persists. Seed of pennyroyal is available commercially and it now occasionally turns up in reseeded grassland, which may be the origin of this population.