2022 County Report for Lanarkshire

Michael Philip & Peter Wiggins

2022 has been a year of modest progress in Lanarkshire. We have added over 6,500 records to the database, from 117 monads. In 29 of these, over 100 records were made.

One notable focus has been urban recording - not only the valuable ongoing solo work by our urban specialist, Malcolm Macneill, but several group outings to contribute to the Botanical Society of Scotland’s Urban Flora Project: Glasgow, Motherwell, Lanark, Strathaven, Tannochside (Uddingston) and Shotts have been visited this year.

We were approached early in the year by the Scottish Wildlife Trust Reserve at the Falls of Clyde to seek our input into a fresh botanical survey of the site.  Numerous visits were made during the year by various combinations of people, resulting in over 1,000 records across 10 Compartments, including over 270 species. In 2023 there will be further work on this, hunting for some of the rarer plants previously known on the site.

We were delighted to host the BSBI Grasses Workshop at Chatelherault Country Park in June.  This is a great venue for this topic and we will do it again before long.

Among the more interesting finds were Typha laxmannii (Slender Reedmace), which is now appearing as a planting in urban SUDS and may escape, Carex × involuta (the hybrid between Bottle Sedge and Bladder Sedge) in Dunsyre in September, and Cardamine corymbosa (New Zealand Bitter-cress) - a tiny weed of pavement cracks which may have been under our urban noses for some time!