Common Spotted-orchid

An exceedingly hot and sunny few hours spent botanising round the village of Sutton proved quite exhausting. We started on the riverside meadows and then proceeded to Sutton Heath and Bog, a spring-fed wetland and calcareous grassland SSSI with many rare and local species. The Common Spotted-orchids were making a fine show, and there were plenty of other interesting species to photograph. One of my favourites was the Black Bog-rush (see extra), a species associated with base-rich flushes, which has declined enormously in lowland Britain and is very rare in Cambridgeshire, only being found in a small number of SSSIs..