TWO DAYS SBAL RECORDING IN IRELAND

Chris Preston (Biological Records Centre, Monks Wood)
December 2002

I was invited to attend a meeting in Dublin on Saturday 7 December 2002, and was immediately tempted to combine it with some recording in arable fields. When I found that Ryanair were offering an outward air fare of £9.99 on Wednesday 4th, the temptation became irresistible.

My first and greatest piece of good fortune was when Donal Synnott put me in touch with Howard Fox, who offered to spend the Thursday and Friday recording with me. Howard is not only the cryptogamic botanist at the National Botanic Garden, Glasnevin, but his father is an arable farmer in Co. Kildare, so one could not imagine a better ‘local guide’. As agriculture in so predominantly pastoral in Ireland, it was a help to be pointed towards the right areas to search.

Things are never quite the same in Ireland as in Britain, and the first lesson was nomenclatural. Howard explained that:

“The word 'tillage' is employed in hiberno-english instead of the word 'arable' of english. There is a farmer's magazine known as 'The Tillage Farmer' widely distributed in Ireland. There is also an active society 'The Irish Tillage and Land Use Society' that many 'arable' stubble field landowners are members of. If you can use the word 'tillage' on any promotion of your scheme in Ireland - it would greatly facilitate its acceptance.”

On Thursday morning, taking the train eastwards, we had 70 minutes to wait for a connection at Kildare (H19). From the railway bridge we saw tillage towards the west, and after 20 minutes rapid walking we reached it, allowing some rather frantic recording before a forced march back to the station. The field was barley stubble on clay, pH 6.8. It proved to be a ‘good ordinary’ acid field, with 17 mosses, the only surprise being the presence of at least three clumps of Pohlia wahlenbergii.

We went on to record two fields farmed by Harold’s father, Jim Fox, near Athy, Co. Kildare, at the heart of the Irish tillage country. Jim grows spring barley in most of his fields rather than winter wheat. The quality of the crop is high enough to attract the premium paid for malting barley, and there is no need to invest in the larger equipment needed both to complete the sowing of winter wheat before the land becomes too wet in autumn, and to harvest the heavy wheat crops.

The first field, spring barley stubble, had been sprayed with ‘Roundup’ in the autumn so it lacked ‘volunteers’ and vascular plant weeds but had a good bryophyte cover. The soil was a quite base-rich loam (pH 7.6) and the most abundant of the 18 mosses were Barbula convoluta and Dicranella varia. I was surprised to see Microbryum rectum [Pottia recta] here, as in Cambs this is restricted to chalk but in Cornwall (and apparently Ireland) it seems to have a broader edaphic tolerance. The second field, winter wheat stubble, had not been ‘Roundup-ed’ and consequently had a high cover of vascular plants (75%) dominated by abundant flowering Poa annua; Eurhynchium hians was abundant. The soil was a more acidic loam, mean pH 6.2 although the 3 soil samples I collected ranged from 5.6 to 7.1. This may be because there was a ‘marl hole’ now ploughed and incorporated into the field and only visible as a fairly gently sloping depression. These features (again the terminology differs, we would call them ‘marl pits’ in Britain) date from an unknown period between the 1200 and 1800, possibly the 16th-18th centuries. Species which were not neighbouring field included Ditrichun cylindricum, Ephemerum serratum var. minutissimum and the first liverworts and hornworts of the trip, Fossombronia pusilla (occasional), Riccia glauca (abundant) and Phaeoceros laevis (occasional, in the pH 5.6 area). It was interesting to see how great the difference was between the two nearby fields. In the first, but not the second, I could easily have imagined I was at home in Cambridgeshire.

Howard demonstrated the attractive ascomycete Melastiza chateri in the second field, an ‘orange peel’ fungus with fine black pencilling round the edges (see www.mushrooms-pilze.de/OVasco13.html for a photograph).

On Friday morning we woke to find that there had been a heavy frost. An incursion into Co. Laois (H14) provided another barley stubble field on a rather stony loam, pH 7.5, at Garrans Cross Roads. By breathing heavily on our collections to melt the frost and taking plenty of material home we were able to record 16 species, including Microbryum rectum again as well as the more calcifuge Ditrichum cylindricum. Melastiza chateri was again present.

We then travelled westwards by car back towards Dublin while the frost melted. A large field west of Newhall Cross Roads, again in Co. Kildare, was memorable for the abundance of Ephemerum serratum var. minutissimum. It was the only field where we found Riccia sorocarpa as well as R. glauca, but the total number of species (15) was less than in the other fields we examined and most were rather mundane.

At this point Harold left me to catch a train back to Dublin, as he had to prepare for a weekend’s mycology in the Burren. We’d noticed tillage by the station at Hazelhatch, Co, Dublin, H21, so I stopped there for a final field. This was wheat stubble, again dominated by Poa annua. The pH of the loamy soil was again variable, from 6.8 to 7.9 – there was a ruined building in the centre of the field so this may have contributed some basic material. This proved to be the richest field of all, with 23 species including Fossombronia pusilla, Phaeoceros laevis and a frustratingly fruitless Weissia. It was not until I got home that I noticed the most interesting plant in the collection, six stems of Didymodon tomaculosus, its third Irish site.

In summary, we found a total of 35 bryophyte taxa with an average of 18 per field. My impression was that they were richer than the fields I’m used to in Cambs., and there was (in this small sample) a notable absence of poor fields with few mosses. The variation was interesting – perhaps a reflection of the dominance of glacial debris rather than underlying rock as soil parent material?

Six fields is only a small contribution to the SBAL scheme, but Irish botanists plan to continue the survey and there’s clearly plenty of scope for visiting Brits to help. I had hoped to make at least one new v.c. record on my trip but in the event the 6 fields produced 24 new or first post-1950 records, including 8 from the field at Hazelhatch. We therefore made far more records in two days than I have in nearly 30 years bryologising in East Anglia!

My thanks to Mark Hill for the pH readings, Tim Blackstock, Tom Blockeel and Gordon Rothero for confirming the new v.c. records, the Fox family for their hospitality and particularly Howard for his eagle-eyed help with recording, his companionship, and for providing an enlightening Irish and mycological perspective.