Andrew Perry

Society News – notes from the Editor

The big change for botanical recording this year has been the change of our vice-county recorders for Shropshire, with Mags Cousins and John Martin now jointly covering the role. We wholeheartedly thank Sarah Whild and Alex Lockton for their excellent work in this capacity, including checking our records, maintaining the data and providing training. You can read more about botanical recording in Shropshire, past and present, in this copy of the newsletter.

Winter meeting

We have John Warren booked for our winter meeting which is to be held on 21st January at FSC Preston Montford. John has just written a new flora of difficult to identify plant groups called “Frustrating Flowers and Puzzling Plants”. John will be taking a look at some of these plant groups in his talk and discussing different approaches for identifying them. His flora will hopefully be available to buy early next year.

Spring meeting

Mark Duffell has also agreed to do a talk at our spring meeting on 22nd April at FSC Preston Montford. The talk is titled “Does Shropshire have a problem with Invasive Non-native Species? A review of botanical data for the county”.

Database

We’re very proud to have our new online database up and running this year. It is an excellent resource for searching plant records in Shropshire; you can search for records at a given site name or grid square, or look at the records for a given species. The data search is quick and easy to use, and you can see the records displayed on a map. We encourage you to give it a try if you have not already done so! The website address is: https:// flora.shropshirebotany.org.uk/

Andrew Perry