2024 County Report for Lanarkshire

Peter Wiggins & Michael Philip

This year we joined with Dunbartonshire and Renfrewshire to form the  ‘West Central Scotland Botany Network’ and now have a shared Outings Programme and a new shared Newsletter called ‘Trifoliate’. See https://bsbi.org/west-central-scotland-botany-network.

Of our 15 field meetings, five were specifically for everyone to learn and improve their botanical skills. We made over 15,000 plant records across 444 monads, including 84 previously unrecorded.

We tackled some critical species groups, Taraxacum, Hieracium and Rubus. With the help of referees and other experts we recorded 22 species including some new to the VC. Encouraged, we are going for many more this year.

We developed contacts in a number of windfarms and visited over 25 windfarm monads. Next year we plan to do more, giving us access to many of the 27% of Lanarkshire monads still with no records.

We have been working with South Lanarkshire Countryside Rangers visiting many local nature reserves and training volunteers. Our collaboration with BSS Urban Flora project continued with an outing in Lesmahagow. Malcolm Macneill continued to scour the streets of many towns for interesting plants: the highlight was Bidens frondosa (Beggarticks) at Pinkston Basin on the Forth & Clyde Canal - a first record for Scotland.

We also had two “border skirmishes”. Near Tarbrax we met with Sue Jury and worked along the VC border with Midlothian. We also went to the deep south of the VC and, climbing Gana Hill from our side, met Chris and Alison Miles from the Dumfriesshire side and managed to refind many plants of interest in this shared botanical hotspot (see photo).