To Sedlescombe churchyard

To Sedlescombe churchyard, the first time I have been up there for ages. It is still very cold. They say it will be a bad year for frogs as they have started breeding and their spawn will be frozen and killed. I felt almost as bored with this weather as the horse in the picture.

In the bed of the little Churchland Stream I noticed lots of great scented liverwort Conocephalum conicum growing on sandstone rocks and fallen bits of the old brick bridge. This plant has a wonderful smell of cedar and I think has been recently split into two species, but I haven’t quite caught up with that.

In the churchyard there was nothing much to look at except the lichens and I took photos and made a resolution to work harder on them this year. If I concentrate on just the churchyard and invoke the help of Simon Davey and other lichenologists, I should gradually get there.

One I could identify was Caloplaca flavescens with its beautiful golden suns usually growing on the east facing sides of the limestone gravestones.

The only other thing of note, apart from some mosses to look at later, was the colony of stinking iris Iris foetidissima, this year with plenty of berries. They used to be swamped with stinging nettles, but since these have been removed the plants have become an attractive feature.