Blind spots

Field gentian Gentianella campestris, Humphrey Head, Cumbria.

We all have our blind spots, and this plant has been firmly in mine for all the years since I was a teenager when my interest in flowering plants first blossomed. Had I walked past this plant yesterday, I would have assumed it was the commoner close relative, Autumn Gentian or Felwort Gentianella amarella.

A colleague had sent us an email asking for volunteers to revisit old recorded locations of the field gentian on the limestones around Morecambe Bay. So Simon suggested that after work we should pay a visit to one of the old localities for it on Humphrey Head, the nose of limestone that projects into the Bay beyond Grange-over-Sands. We checked out the distinguishing characters, the most obvious of which is that two of the 4 green sepals enclosing the petals are much larger than the other two, visibly overlapping them.

Armed with this information, we walked the length of the headland and saw nothing of the gentian. We debated whether to give up and climb down the cliff and enjoy a walk along its base, but decided to zig-zag back along the cliff top in case we had missed it. As Simon was climbing through the low wire fence, he spotted this plant. And there were the tell-tale 2 large sepals overlapping the other two smaller ones. And then as I was taking this photograph, he found more, about 200 more.

The field gentian is not a national rarity, but like so many other native plants it is in steep decline, so it was gratifying to find it today, albeit that it was confined pretty much to one small area. There are records for Arnside Knott which I shall be following up now.

STOP PRESS - we have just spoken to the bigger fella and he has done really well in his GCSEs with 4 A*s in his sciences and a sweep of A's and B's across the rest of his subjects.