Llanelli Naturalists Newsletter - March 2003 - No 69
Richard Pryce

An important new discovery was made on 1st October 2002 by Michelle Rees, Ian Morgan and Richard Pryce when touring Pembrey Forest with a view to assessing the extent of natural scrub colonisation in clear-felled coups.  A single, well-established clump of Scirpoides holoschoenus (Round-headed Club-rush) was found on the edge of a well-used ride junction at SN376033 in dune-sand disturbed by road-grading, probably within the last five years. This species is only known to be native in Britain at Braunton Burrows across the water in North Devon, although it has also been recorded as a casual or established alien in wetlands associated with docks in the Neath area and in South-east Wales.  This location within Pembrey Forest has been visited on numerous occasions over the years but the Scirpoides clump had not been noticed before. The plant is growing in a native situation and has evidently become established since the site was disturbed.  Could this relatively recent disturbance to the substrate have exposed a seed which had then germinated into the plant discovered in October?

Following the destruction of the Silene gallica (Small-flowered Catchfly) site on the north wall of the Western Dock at Burry Port Harbour last April, Kath and I discovered a single plant of Silene gallica var. quinquevulnera, on 17th August, about 250m to the south-west, in sandy ground adjacent to the pickle factory where the Council had recently constructed a cycle-way link to the dunes.  Viv and Tony Lewis discovered a second plant at the same site a couple of weeks later.  Var. quinquevulnera, with its purple and white petals, is a very much more attractive plant than straight S. gallica and it has been grown in gardens in the past. The origin of these Burry Port plants is unknown but they were growing with a suite of other ephemerals including Mercurialis annua (Annual Mercury), Solanum nigrum (Black Nightshade), Datura stramonium (Thorn-apple), Papaver dubium ssp. lecoqii (Yellow-juiced Poppy), Papaver somniferum (Opium Poppy) and Helianthus anuus (Giant Sunflower), all of which were obviously present for many years in the seed bank before the soil was disturbed.

In October, having noticed that the Lower Lliedi Reservoir (SN 518037) was very low with expanses of exposed and mud-cracked sediment, Ian Morgan decided to search for uncommon mosses and liverworts which are known to require this ephemeral habitat. He collected a Riccia, which he suspected to be a good find, and which was determined by Sam Bosanquet as R. huebenaria,(a RDB species, and also an unknown moss: both were super-abundant over large areas. The moss was subsequently determined by Sam as Physcomitrium sphaericum, a `Near Threatened` species, new to Wales and the first record south of Derbyshire since 1950.