Well, Readers, the results of the BSBI Annual New Year Plant Hunt are in. You might remember that this year I took part for the first time, and managed to spot a princely 9 species in flower – some Botanical Recording groups managed to find 100 but then they had both strength of numbers and expertise on their side.

This was officially the largest plant hunt ever, with over 3,000 participants, with over 20,000 plants recorded on 2,200 lists. The streets and parks and countryside must have been awash with eager plant hunters. 629 different plant species were found in bloom, which is 30% higher than in 2023, and the third highest number ever recorded (the two previous bumper years were 2022 and 2021).

But what of the plants? The bulk (53%) were plants that were late-flowering – in other words, the mild winter had enabled them to keep flowering, although obviously there were regional differences, with some plant hunts having to be abandoned because everything was under snow. The autumn stragglers include yarrow, common ragwort and white dead-nettle, and they’ve been seen regularly in previous years.

Only 27% were springtime specialists, such as primrose and lesser celandine, but it was noted that there was a lot more of the latter about than last year (over 300 records compared to just over 50 in the 2023 hunt). This is not surprising – in his very interesting talk for the LNHS on how plants are flowering earlier than they used to, Alastair Fitter noted that lesser celandine appeared to be coming into bloom an astonishing 47 days earlier in 2016 than it did in 1951, and it’s possible that that trend has continued.

20% of records were of plants that seem to be in flower for most of the year, or which you might reasonably expect to appear in late December/early January – the three most commonly seen flowers were daisy, dandelion and groundsel, all of which pop up at any time of year.

New entries to the top twenty list were common ragwort and smooth hawksbeard, which are both plants of urban/semi-urban areas, and the aforementioned lesser celandine, a woodland plant. They displaced smooth sow-thistle, ivy and hogweed from the list. I find this a little surprising, but still, I only have my little ‘patch’ to go by.

Finally, the Plant Hunt data gives a breakdown between native and non-native plants. 35% of the species seen were non-natives – in other words, plants which had ‘escaped’, usually from gardens, and had become happily established ‘in the wild’. The full BSBI results document indicates that, because the majority of the hunts have taken place in urban or suburban areas, the ‘heat island’ effect allows many plants to continue to flower that would otherwise fall silent at this supposedly chilly time of year. Cities, because of their history of trade and diversity of inhabitants, also usually have the highest number of non-native species – a walk along the Regent’s canal often yields the most astonishing range of plants, for example.

One notable comment from the report is that our standard floras, which indicate when a plant is likely to be in flower, are hopelessly out of date – most of the respected ones state that only about 2% of plants will be in bloom at the period of the Plant Hunt, and this is clearly a major underestimate. It will be interesting to see what happens when these books are updated.

It seems as if lots of people have become interested in plants this year, and have taken themselves outside to see what’s happening botanically. Let’s hope that the BSBI finds a way to retain the interest of some of these people in the year to come – we need all the keen observers that we can get.

And in the meantime, if you’re in the UK, don’t forget the RSPB’s Great Garden Birdwatch which takes place from 26th to 28th January (i.e. this weekend!!!) For me it’s always an excellent opportunity to spend an hour wondering where all your usual birds have gone, but maybe you’ll have better luck 🙂