#82 Alpine Rush by Robert Goodison
Meet Robert Goodison, naturalist, photographer, and volunteer warden!
Robert is a now retired naturalist with a wide interest in natural history, mainly botany and geology, with attempts to spread into lepidoptera, bryology, mycology and, perhaps less successfully, lichenology. Throughout life he has indulged in landscape and natural history photography beginning hill walking from a school trip although has become a fairer weather outdoorsman with age. He was employed at Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire Area Team of Natural England as a Lead Advisor primarily giving ecological support and some agri-environment scheme work in the Yorkshire Dales, and before that, in precursor bodies beginning way back as an ADAS casual in the summer of 1990 as a casual surveyor of meadows and pastures within the Pennine Dales Environmentally Sensitive Area Scheme also referenced by Deborah Millward in her introduction to blog 75. He has been the volunteer warden of one of the Yorkshire Dales Lady’s slipper orchid reintroduction sites for over a decade and hopes to continue as long as he can ‘get up that hill’. He retains membership of several organisations including the Scottish Wildlife Trust when he worked on a project at the then Scottish Agricultural College at Auchincruive, near Ayr. He still enjoys the byproduct of fungal fermentation of cereals created by small independent craft combos!
The species Robert has chosen to cover is the scarce and obscure Alpine Rush occasionally, referred to as northern green-rush or Juncus alpinoarticulatus. Why? Several reasons. Not least it links directly to one of our other chosen species, the plant Bird’s-eye primrose, which it can overlap in habitat within Northern England at least although is far rarer and localised in occurrence where their distribution overlaps but does extend to the Scottish Highlands which the primrose does not, plus has been lost from the Southern Uplands. Secondly, it is easily overlooked and not often sought out. It also ties in with a number of Robert’s other interests and uncommon species, more of which later.
Juncus alpinoarticulatus. Great Close Mire Middlehouse, 27 Sept 2007-01
Whilst there is rightly interest elsewhere in these blogs for peatland restoration and the prevention of carbon release, plus the downstream flooding of our cities and other settlements and the wider issues of farm abandonment and landscape scale rewilding, as well as dale-head tree planting with the subsequent impact on ground nesting birds, waxcaps, and other grassland fungi, Robert has always been drawn to those smaller, more compact and often diverse habitats. The alkaline flushes that often struggle to exceed a hectare in area and the springs that may not even challenge more than a square metre at a time. And, of course, the montane tall herb cliff ledges (U17b) and montane willow scrub, (W20), the latter, despite a few downy willows on the Helvellyn range, really meaning a trip to the Highlands and even then, being selective in where you look.
Alpine Rush is a circumboreal perennial plant species found throughout Northern Europe, Asia and North America. Within the UK it is nationally rare and has a mainly upland distribution from the northern half of the Pennines, Southern Uplands and Highlands mainly south of the Great Glen with some scattered records north of it, sometimes more lowland or coastal. One seemingly bizarre recent record on the NBN from the Norfolk Broads attributed to the even rarer subspecies rariflorus which BSBI only appears to show for Scotland and (even by the Stace 3rd edition Flora) is of questionable taxonomy and maybe a Scandinavian taxon.
Flush habitat, Shot Street Gate, June 2011-01
Robert recounts his first experience hunting for this plant with Bradford Botany Group and his subsequent finds in the region: ‘I first started hunting for it (unsuccessfully) with Bradford Botany Group colleagues looking for an old grid reference on a day out near Malham Tarn some decades back, probably before 2000. That interest was reawakened after 2007 when Jesse Tregale and Micheal Wilcox reported finding it, alongside the rare and near-sterile hybrid now Juncus x alpiniflorus with the more widespread Sharp-flowered Rush Juncus acutiflorus on the Middle House Farm portion of Great Close Mire west of Malham Tarn. I subsequently relocated it there on the afternoon of the 28th September 2007, where it is not far from Yorkshire’s only relict population of alpine Bartsia, Bartsia alpina under bright blue skies. I then went on to re-find it about an hour later by that original reference. It corresponds to a series of small alkaline flushes in what I call Street Gate Allotment farmed by none other than Neil Heseltine of Hill Top Farm and who also sits on the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority. These flushes were shortly to gain more conservation importance (2015) as the core location within a meta-population of the rare Round-mouthed Whorl-snail or Vertigo genesii first found nearby by Adrian Norris (2005) and is also important for the rare Dwarf Milkwort or Polygala amarella. Looking further afield I encountered it not far south from the Moughton Whetstone Spring in Crummackdale in tiny risings as the water table reaches the surface on the flanks of Ingleborough’s Moughton plateau on 15th August 2010, though could hardly claim to be a discoverer. Certainly, in our neck of the woods it appears to be a relatively base-loving plant ditto the one location I have definitely seen it in the Highlands beside the Dalradian Precambrian ‘limestones’ or calc-schists and flushes of Lochan an Daim beside the Shiehallion road to Kinloch Rannoch.’
It is a hard plant to spot early in the season, relying on the rather sparsely and openly branched inflorescence to be bearing ripening heads within the less acute inner tepals and markedly rounded glossy brown-black capsules to differentiate it from its common relative that lives up to its ‘sharp-flowered’ name and more trigonous character. As rushes go it is not especially large, often being shorter than the ‘up to 40cm’, as quoted in the text books. It is also not one of the most attractive, romantic or ‘fluffy’ species and thus easily overlooked or ignored by botanist, although there is no doubting it is genuinely very local and uncommon in spite of all that, and because of its more demanding requirements. It loves the open habitat of the flush edges and a few hummocks, plus the seeping western bank of the main flush basin near Street Gate that under the National Vegetation Classification are attributable to M10b Dioecious sedge and Common butterwort mire Quaking grass and Birds-eye primrose sub-community. This transitions with very open or brown-moss dominated M37/38 marl and tufa spring, whose composition is much more poorly defined and even less understood.
Juncus alpinoarticulatus, whole plants. Street Gate mid-basin flush 14th Aug 2024-03.
This is a fascinating place where in work times Robert loved testing out the strengths and weaknesses of a national Designated Sites monitoring system supposedly for upland habitat but much drawn from the NVC tables, where there was no hard division between ‘Upland’ and ‘Lowland’ around some nominal division around the 250-350 metre mark and degree of enclosure; a place doing its best to defy being pigeon-holed. This is also a place where the beautiful and uncommon calcicole red and metallic-shiny moss Red Leskea or Orthothecium rufescens can be found, whilst on a summer’s day listening to the backdrop of the sound of curlews and skylarks. Enough to make up for the times when the air is almost as wet as the ground itself…
Recording and monitoring
Records of Alpine Rush can be sent to your relevant VC recorder.
Further information and acknowledgements
NEYEDC would like to thank Robert for his time and expertise in helping to create this blog. There were a number of different species options considered when writing this blog, some of which Robert was beaten to in the series, or which push the limits of taxonomy. A wider issue as an undercurrent to any of these choices – which Robert wishes to explore – is whether taxonomic skills have declined over the last generation or so. This is especially visible within the work environment, which now requires far more multi-tasking, with field skills potentially only be required on a few days each year and management cultures which may wish for simpler assessments ‘that almost anyone can do’. This is alongside the backdrop of the increase in availability of remote sensing via satellite or drone, or the field staff may want identification no more demanding than looking through guidebooks without needing keys or sharing photos/using apps and phones, which can work, but not always.
The way we survey is also changing, with forms and methodologies that were clearly designed for the analogue era that do not easily digitise – which now needs to be done to store, share, and analyse data - as they often ask compound questions for which there is no simple binary answer. And is an ipad or other logger robust enough to be bounced off a limestone pavement or retrievable from a grike? All these aspects are important to consider when we talk about the importance of botanical skills and recording.