2021 County Report for Cumberland

Phill Brown, Mike Porter & Jeremy Roberts

ANNUAL REPORT 2021 CUMBERLAND AND WESTMORLAND

Our year began with another successful New Year Plant Hunt with 43 people taking part and 109 species being recorded, exactly the same numbers as in 2020 but not the same people or species!

In March we held our first get-together of the season in the form of a zoom meeting, looking over the previous year and making plans for 2021. After years of hard monad-bashing and then a year of isolation, we felt we all deserved time together in some of our best Cumbrian sites (often visited but not always carefully recorded).  Consequently we had a season of well-attended field meetings in botanically rich spots with some particularly attractive species recorded:

Scout Scar – limestone grassland and crags (Helianthemum oelandicum, Carex ericetorum and C. ornithopoda)

Hodbarrow – former industrial site with a wide range of species (Leontodon saxatilis, Filago germanica)

Hutton Roof – limestone pavement (Epipactis atrorubens and hybrids)

Tarn Moor – species-rich damp grassland (Carex capillaris, C. diandra, Botrychium lunaria)

Waitby- Greenriggs – limestone grassland (Epipactis palustris, Brachypodium pinnatum s.s.)

Butterburn Flow – upland mire (Carex pauciflora, Drosera anglica)

Mawbray and Silloth – coastal dunes (Elytrigia species and hybrid)

During the season we held a national field meeting to look at sedges at Tarn Moss and Eycott Hill, made some progress on the updating of the RPR for Cumbria, encouraged interest in the plants of Cumbria through our Facebook site, Cumbria Botany, which now has more than 660 members, produced three Newsletters and processed many records, some of them significant, via iRecord. As a result of field meetings and individual efforts, to date 10654 new records have been entered in the DDb, 5742 from Cumberland and 4912 from Westmorland.