Purple Milk-vetch

A wonderful day out with three fellow botanists exploring Bonemills Hollow SSSI, a site that I used to be responsible for when I worked for the Nature Conservancy Council, and which I last visited in 2004 when I undertook a botanical survey of the SSSI for Natural England.
The site's a limestone valley and has species-rich dry grassland on the slopes, and a tufa-depositing stream with associated areas of willow carr and fen meadow. 

It was in much better condition then when I last visited and we found a whole host of interesting species in the limestone grassland - Purple Milk-vetch, Horseshoe Vetch, Man Orchid, Autumn Gentian, Dropwort - the list goes on. A series of mounds of imported material had their own special flora with many plants of Hoary Cinquefoil, as well as Early Forget-me-not and Knotted Clover.

The willow carr contained much Tussock Sedge, while areas of more open fen-meadow supported both Southern Marsh-orchid and its hybrid with Common Spotted-orchid, as well as probably the largest extent of Bottle Sedge in Northamptonshire.

But the highlight of the visit was finding a few plants of an unusual looking St. John's-wort (see extra), which none of us could immediately identify. We keyed it out to Pale St. John's-wort, which seemed surprising, but once we were able to check the old records we found that it had last been recorded from the site in 1984 -and that this is probably the only extant site for the species in the vice-county. A discovery well worth celebrating with Alyson Freeman's excellent rhubarb and ginger cake!