About

This blog exists to prove that, despite what I sometimes tell myself, my botanical knowledge really is no more than skin-deep. I have immersed myself in all things 'wild' since middle childhood, yet all I have to show for this is a thin veneer of knowledge regards the rich diversity of natural history that surrounds and sustains us. I fully intend to continue increasing my depth of knowledge until the day I die and this blog, though not intended to take us to that fateful day, will follow my ongoing attempts to become slightly more proficient in all things botanical.

There are three Larix taxa on Skye. I wonder if I can photograph all three at the flowering stage?

My wending path through nature began as a small child, palms pressed against a window pane whilst watching birds in the garden, of playing in the dirt with woodlice, newts and worms, and of trying to catch sticklebacks and gudgeon in the nearby canal. From my mid-teens onwards I became a fairly hardcore birder/part-time twitcher and a keen recorder of all things bird-orientated. In my early-twenties I built myself a 'moth trap' and eventually got into invertebrates in quite a big way. By my mid-twenties I had started dabbling in the world of botany, a necessary next step for any aspiring entomologist. I then became a living, breathing embodiment of pan-species listing for a few years, looking at everything from freshwater fungi to terrestrial flatworms, from sharks to pondweeds, from winter gnats to filmy ferns. After several years of pretty intense PSL-orientated recording I realised that, actually, I simply couldn't take it all in. I'd spread myself too thinly across too many taxonomic orders and my ill-equipped brain simply couldn't handle the information overload. So I backed off, concentrated on just a couple of insect groups, and tried to get to grips with those at least. 

Without a doubt I've gained knowledge, lots of knowledge in fact. It would be ludicrous to deny that I'm not now a better informed naturalist than I was five or six years back. But I'm still no expert. With an entire lifetime of being into natural history behind me, I would describe myself as no more than a childish naturalist - which is to say I look at the natural world with the eyes of a child (and not with the mind of one! Although those who know me may argue the point...) I will never come to learn many of nature's secrets and I have not an inkling of how most of the processes work. In my mind it's all a kind of beautiful magic. And I'm fine with that, though it has taken many years for me to admit it, but yes, I'm fine with that. I'm no scientist and I never will be. I'm in this for the enjoyment.

Thyme Broomrape - a bit of a rarity and yet here it is growing just a mile or so from my door

I reach fifty years of age this winter and it would be pleasing to think that, over the course of half a century, I'd become proficient in at least one aspect of natural history. However, although I've learned lots of stuff about many things, I still lack expertise in any one thing. For years I've struggled to gravitate towards, and to become competent in, just one aspect of nature. A jack of all trades and master of one being the motto I have thus far failed to live up to. I've spent time studying various invertebrate orders whilst trying to find an area in which to specialise. Diptera came close, but I now feel my heartstrings tugging me away from inverts and back towards plants once more. Could this be my time to specialise, at last? I caught the tail end of fieldwork for the BSBI's Atlas 2020 Project and two years of hardcore square-bashing has taught me a great deal about plant identification. With steady guidance from other botanists, I am now very much 'into' plants once again. This blog will follow my exploits as I attempt to find and identify plants throughout Skye, mainland Scotland and occasionally further afield. The content will talk through many identification criteria, explaining how I came to identify the plant plus images showing key features, habitats and maybe even a few of the associated galls, fungi and leafmines. 

I have never before attempted a proper deep dive into plants, so I have no real idea how things will progress. But progress they most definitely will. My own personal goal is to record 650 species of vascular plant in Scotland this year and to submit records from every single mainland vice county in Scotland. That's probably a very big ask, but it's something to motivate me into visiting various areas I might otherwise never visit or botanise and to generate a lot more records than I would ordinarily manage. 

In 2021 I submitted over 1700 plant records to my VCR, plus another 174 records for the Botanical Society of Scotland's Urban Flora of Scotland Project and then, during a daytrip to the adjacent mainland, a further 166 records which were sent off to the relevent VCR. In all, I submitted over two thousand plant records in 2021. I wonder how this year will compare.

This Philadelphus coronarius naturalised in woodland was one of my 2021 Skye records