While out on a Grassland Survey last week I found a plant which I have not recorded in Calderdale before.
I know it has been recorded by Bruce Brown nr Withens Reservoir but despite looking for it there I couldn’t find it.
I wonder though if it is really rare or just very difficult to spot.
Here is a picture of a bare patch in an otherwise grassy meadow.
Click to enlarge, I doubt you will be able to see much there.
A closer look just in case there is something interesting there.
Look like a little Rush
On closer inspection it is Bristle Club Rush (Isolepis setacea)
Such a tiny little plant, it must be so easy to miss.
It likes damp open places. If you see it, let me know.
Thanks Steve, it needs a good eye to find that but I will keep a look-out for it. There is another species that is more rare, Isolepsis cernua that is of interest as it sold in most garden centres, going under the name of “fibre optic plant”. Although I always have a healthy scepticism of botanical names on labels in garden centres.
There are some things you only seem to find when you sit down for lunch, this is one of those.
Isolepsis cernua appears to be a coastal plant but if it can survive in gardens then I guess it could find a home somewhere out and about.
There are two possible Withens Reservoirs; Withens Clough Res off the Cragg Vale Road, and Green Withens Res, on Rishworth Moor.. Congratulations on finding the new sedge.
Someone has confusingly referred to our Society as the “Halifax Naturalists Society” on the first page of this website, a name change that has been bandied about but this is a mistake as we are still called the Halifax Scientific Society unless we have a General Meeting to decide on a change.
Such a change would have to be made democratically, with a majority of the membership voting for it..
There was a Halifax Naturalists Society. It met at the Coss Keys Inn, (which one I don’t know – there are two..) This had no connection with the Halifax Scientific Society as far as I know and the members mostly seem to have argued about the identity of the preserved birds they had shot, so that name, I would have thought, is a non-starter.
Sorry, it was a newly discovered rush , not a sedge.