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Sunday, April 02, 2006

Plants in the sea

In my quest to cover as many of the botanical families that grow in the UK / Ireland as I can* I could not pass up an invitation to accompany David Fenwick to see some Eelgrass he found in March.

This grows truly in the sea (very unusually for a vascular plant which is what I am mainly about) and you need a very low tide to see it sensibly and hopefully photograph it, assuming you are not equipped with an underwater camera.

The tide was predicted to be at its lowest for the year when we went to Looe but I soon found that shops had been flooded in the morning - suggesting a tide that had been "pushed up" by the wind. We found the Eelgrass but it never fully uncovered thanks to the brisk southwesterly wind behind the tide but nonetheless I tried out my new "glass-bottomed bucket" for such circumstances - with moderate success and a lot of ideas for improvements in technique next time...

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* Possibly silly this - as I suspect the powers that be are about to recast the families in a big way - see my note at Info: Liliaceae.

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