Math and Elsea Wood

A good start to the day - monitoring Lincolnshire's only known population of Deptford Pink. Numbers had crashed last year, so we were feeling fairly pessimistic, but were delighted to find 30 young plants, together with another fourteen potential seedlings.

After that duty was done I visited an under-recorded tetrad, but the strong blustery wind made it feel quite tiring and unpleasant, and it was  a struggle to find interesting species in a fairly intensively arable part of the county. Nevertheless, i did find a couple of patches of crosswort and several ditch-sides and hedgerows with a profusion of cowslips and lesser celandines.

On my way back I dropped into Math and Elsea Wood, an SSSI that I'd never quite got around to visiting. It was truly beautiful, with sheets of wood anemones and plenty of bluebells to come. I wasn't really trying to record it systematically, but still managed to find herb-paris, twayblade, thin-spiked wood-sedge, purple small-reed and moschatel, all of which are ancient woodland indicators and are quite rare in South Lincolnshire..