St. Aidan’s Nature Park (RSPB)

Saturday 29^th June 2019

Leader: Jesse Tregale

This was a joint meeting with the Wild Flower Society with 23 members meeting in the car parking area at the end of Fleet Street on a pleasant sunny day. The site is very extensive and consists of pools, ditches and grassland with good paths and was formed after the flooding of open cast mining from the River Aire.

The plant hunting started very early, with Japanese Honeysuckle scrambling over the fence by the RSPB board, a few metres from our parked cars. Also here was the Greek Dock, an alien from the Mediterranean which has been known in England for many years but only recently reaching this far north. St. Aidan’s is almost certainly its most northern outpost. Beside it was its hybrid with Broad-leaved Dock, Rumex x louseyi. The distinguishing features were pointed out to the members.

We then proceeded along the road onto the path leading to the reserve, passing many more Greek Docks. The pools themselves had lots of interesting plants including three other rare docks: Golden Dock, Marsh Dock and Water Dock. Also here was the spectacular Great Soft Rush, Juncus pallida, a wool alien from Australia and New Zealand. It possibly arrived with some substantial mining equipment from America (but how did it get to America?) or from impurities (shoddy) in fleece from Australia. This was the plant many of the WFS members had come to see, St. Aidan’s being possible its only British site.

After lunching by one of the pools we headed off to find Common Spotted Orchids, Southern Marsh Orchids and their hybrid. Also on the edge of the pools was an interesting looking Water Crowfoot. I gathered a small portion and identified it later as the Common Water Crowfoot. This usually has floating leaves but as it was growing on mud not water, it only had capillary leaves.

Just before leaving the pools I managed to photograph another alien, my first Painted Lady of the year. By mid afternoon it was very hot and we returned to our cars along the footpath by the edge of the reserve finding Lesser Century and Bee Orchids.

Text and Photographs by Jesse