VIPER’S-GRASS IN BRITAIN

Viper’s-grass Scorzonera humilis is restricted to four sites in Britain, in two Dorset and two in South Wales, and is classified as Vulnerable in the Vascular Plant Red List for Great Britain (Cheffings & Farrell 2005). Historically, another three populations were known from England, one in Warwickshire, and two in Dorset. In Warwickshire, five plants were found in ‘a damp, old meadow on a sandy clay soil ’ in the 1950s (Hawkes & Phipps 1954). The meadow was an unimproved, but not particularly species-rich, grassland, a habitat that ‘is not apparently specialised and must be mirrored in thousands of places in the British Isles. ’ This small population persisted for less than fifteen years after its discovery and it was extinct by 1965 (Perring & Farrell 1983). The two extinct Dorset sites were on a roadside 1 km to the east of Wareham Meadows, and in a wet, grassy field over 11 km away (Hall 1928). The roadside site contained ‘a single fine plant ’ according to John Raven in 1972 (record card in Biological Records Centre, Monks Wood), but this plant has since died. Viper’s-grass is still present at Corfe Common in Dorset, where there were four flowers in 2006 (B. Edwards pers. comm.) Two Welsh sites were discovered in 1996 and 1997 (Preston et al. 2002), and at least one of them contains many thousands of plants in ‘several hectares of marshy pasture ’ (Woodma