Intrepid botanists!

Today was the first day of a weekend field meeting I'd organised for the BSBI in the Lincoln area. I had hoped that it might be a perfect spring day, but it turned out to be a fairly typical British spring day instead, with a biting northerly wind and occasional heavy showers. However, this didn't put off a team of over twenty warmly clad and intrepid botanists who scoured the village of Branston in the morning, and then Potterhanworth and Nocton Woods in the afternoon. Fortunately the heaviest shower took place while we were driving between venues.

This is most of the contingent who went to Nocton Wood, which normally has no public access. It had a rather strange mix of plantation and semi-natural woodland, with a huge variety of trees including many exotic conifers (which taxed our id skills) and two species of Southern beech. The huge oak that they're standing under is known as The Nine Brethren and has a basal diameter of over 10m. It is rumoured to be an ancient boundary marker separating the Lord of the Manor's land and that belonging to the old Augustinian Priory founded by Robert D'Arcy, the ruins of which are situated on Abbey Hill overlooking Nocton Fen and Wasp's Nest. 
The tree was named 'The Nine Brethren' because of its unusual shape - the bole has divided into nine separate trunks allowing people to stand within its centre.