Old Chestnuts in Chichester

Arriving in Chichester to see Murder on the Orient Express at the Festival Theatre, I had two hours free before the show. Shops, cafes and galleries close promptly at 5pm so, feeling a bit Poirrot-ish with notebook and magnifier, used the time for a bit of bryologising.

I wandered up to the top of Oaklands Park into tetrad SU80T which had just 23 previous records, mostly woodland bryophytes found by Rod Stern in Summersdale Copse. A gravel path leading out of Oaklands Park was soggy with Didymodon luridus, D. insulanus and Amblystegium serpens.

A footpath led into another large green space, Havenstoke Park, with an ancient earthwork running down the centre. Mosses were sparse with a few leaves of Syntrichia papillosa on Horse Chestnut and Ceratodon purpureus nestled at the base of another. A veteran Ash was covered in Rhynchostegium confertum at its base. Students, families and groups of friends, dressed up for the evening in satin gowns and cashmere shawls, (so unlike Brighton on a Friday night), wandered across the grass towards town. At the top of the park I collected a scrape of earth with one, neat rosette that looked like Hennediella. Sam Bosanquet recorded Hennediella macrophylla in Oaklands Park in 2014 and the trio of Rose, Matcham and Stern found it in Priory Park in 2008. These records are both from SU80S just to the south.

Pavements, walls and roof tops as I walked on through Summersdale were dry and bare and I had to search for scraps of Tortula muralis and Grimmia pulvinata on wall tops, Bryum argenteum and Pseudocrossidium hornschuchianum on verge edges and Lunularia cruciata on a brick driveway. They are all new for the tetrad.

Turning into Highland Road, Goldcrests screeched into the bushes, making me look up from a shaded bit of tarmac covered in Didymodon rigidulus and Hypnum cupressiforme. Syntrichia montana on sunnier tarmac and Rhytidiadelphus squarrosus in turf added to the list of common species that hadn’t been recorded from here before.

A few streets further north Hedwigia stellata was found by Rod Stern on damp tarmac in 2001, the only record in West Sussex of this moss which is extremely rare in the south-east. I searched the mossy area on Highland Road thoroughly but didn’t have time to get to the right spot to see if it was still there.

H. macrophylla from Brighton

Entering the records I found that it had reached 39 taxa but still had a sample to check which contained one rosette of Hennediella macrophylla so, with the addition of one scarce moss, (but without the re-discovery of a rare one), the tetrad can turn green!