Meandering in the meadow

This weekend has proved to be very sociable, with a lot of time spent in hay meadows. Today we travelled to Castle Bytham for a splendid home-cooked lunch with an old friend who was celebrating his seventieth birthday. It was a small gathering, but all but one of of us had worked with the Nature Conservancy Council (now Natural England), so there was lots of shared experience and discussion about wildlife.

After lunch we visited a nearby Wildlife Trust reserve, Tortoiseshell Wood and Porter's Lodge Meadow. I'd never been to the site before but was blown away by the quality of the grassland, which must be some of the richest I've seen in south Lincolnshire, with species such as Betony, Tormentil, Quaking Grass, Pepper-saxifrage, Great Burnet, Adder's-tongue and Common Spotted-orchid in abundance. Although it had been well recorded, we still managed to add a number of new species, including Heath--grass, which hasn't been seen in the vice county for over twenty-five years!