Stalking the wild clubmoss

摘要

In August 2007 I was feeling just a little smug, having recently completed my first major website milestone: at least one image of every full species native in the British Isles. It would take a few more weeks to get it all on the website, but even soit felt good. I returned home from the BPS field trip to North Wales (followed by several days' fern hunting in Northern England), to find the latest edition of Watsonia waiting for me. It included an article by Fred Rumsey on Lycopodium lagopus in Scotland - a new species for Britain. What? You cannot be serious. He had identified the clubmoss from two herbarium specimens, both from sites in Scotland, one collected in the late nineteenth century, the other in the 1970s. Lycopodium lagopus, originallyconsidered a variety and later a subspecies of L clavatum, has more recently been separated by some authors as a full species. It is primarily an arctic plant, but with outposts in the Alps and Dalmatia in Europe, and spreading as far south as Michigan in the USA.