I am nearly five months into my training now and that time has flown by! We trainees spend most of our time out on the Trust’s reserves, improving and maintaining the infrastructure and helping to run some of the more complex volunteer tasks, which is all fantastic experience for understanding how a Wildlife Trust functions on a day-to-day basis. We all have additional training goals and one of my personal objectives is to improve my knowledge of Worcestershire’s flora. To achieve this, I have taken advantage of numerous opportunities offered to me.

Back in June, I completed an online course with the Field Studies Council called “Botanical Anatomy”. The aim of the course was to examine the parts of a plant in order to better understand the descriptions in the field guides. It was a deep dive into plant identification and covered features such as the types of leaves, parts of flowers and fruits and seeds. There was also an exercise to dissect and label the parts of a flower of our choice. I thought a creeping buttercup would be very straightforward but, as you see below, it proved to be quite a fiddly task!

A month later, the trainees spent time with Jasmine, from the Trust's wildlife and farming team, helping to pilot a survey method for monitoring the condition of grassland. This requires some ability to identify flowers and, you guessed it, grasses - the latter being something everyone finds difficult. We spent the first session with some of the volunteers studying one of the flower-rich meadows at Lower Smite Farm. Laying down a 1m by 1m square (known as a quadrat) in the meadow, we looked closely at the species present. Criteria including sward height, presence of “thatch” (decaying vegetation from previous years) and the percentage of bare ground were also recorded. We then looked for the presence of positive indicator species (e.g. black knapweed) and negative indicator species (e.g. docks).  A score was calculated for each square and averaged over all the squares in the meadow to give a measure of its condition. This survey will be repeated every two or three years to determine whether the management of the site is maintaining or improving the quality of the grassland or whether changes need to be made.

In August, my training took me further afield- I spent a weekend with the Field Studies Council at Slapton Ley in south Devon on a course about using the vegetative key to British flora. Previously I have relied on flowers to identify species but problems soon arise when plants don't flower! The vegetative key (by John Poland) enables a botanist to identify plants using only the vegetative parts, such as the stems and the leaves. I was under no illusions as to how difficult this would be! To describe vegetative features requires a very comprehensive set of terminology and as a beginner to this method, I found the course quite tough. 

On the first day, we concentrated on the flowering plants and I could see that, with practice, I could make some headway. On the second day, we moved on to grasses, rushes and conifers and this takes things to a whole new level. I'll need to do a lot of work to become proficient with these groups but this is hardly surprising as I find them quite difficult using a normal field guide!