2023 County Report for Co. Armagh
John Faulkner
The main achievement of the year was to complete the post-2000 coverage of tetrads in the vice-county. There is now a record of at least 100 taxa – typically many more – for all tetrads with more than 25% of their land area in Co. Armagh. 2023 was the penultimate year of recording for the planned Flora of Co. Armagh, so what remains is primarily a matter of tidying up and revisiting the sites of important species that appear to have ‘gone missing’. This will be more interesting to other botanists than the tetrad-bashing of the last few years, so I hope to involve others in this final year of recording. In summary, 2023:
· Like 2022, 2023 yielded a few interesting records in an ocean of run-of-the-mill ones.
· The majority of tetrads recorded were dominated by intensively managed grassland, with their botanical interest more or less confined to hedges, road verges, and clusters of trees.
· Records of interest are listed below (unless named otherwise, the recorder was the VCR)..
· The total number of 2023 plant records entered onto the DDb is 7944.
· There was one formal BSBI field meeting in the county during the year, with the purpose of looking at the urban flora of Newry. It had been planned to visit 3-4 spots within the city, but so interesting were the finds (and so cold the wind!) that we had to call it a day after only 2 of these. Among the plants seen were Potamogeton trichoides (Hair-like Pondweed) at one of its two known Irish sites, and an Orobanche sp. (Broomrape) which might be O. hederae but will need to be confirmed in 2024. While it had been billed as a training meeting, those who turned up were all well down the road of being competent botanists.
· In October, I gave a talk to the County Armagh Wildlife Society on Pteridophytes.