The County recorder for plants in Herefordshire, Peter Garner, is well qualified to give a talk on ’Unusual Herefordshire Plants’.

Perhaps because the county is so thinly populated, particularly with botanists, the locations of rarities are probably under-reported. There are, however, some extremely dedicated people who go above and beyond the call of duty. One of our rarest plants, the ghost orchid, is very small and was declared extinct in Britain in 1986. Working on a handful of old records, Mark Jannink identified 10 possible sites in the Marches and visited them every weekend throughout the summer of 2009. On 20th September he found one flower on a stem 5cm tall. Without chlorophyll, it is a parasite on the roots of other plants and, like fungi, does not need to appear at all for years.

Peter recalled the day when his little granddaughter became distressed on the Malverns: she looked down a rabbit hole and saw shining light. She had discovered goblin gold – a type of moss which grows in dark places and reflects the weakest light in such a way that it looks luminous.

In Tennessee Russian knapweed is a plague plant covering an area the size of the Isle of Wight. There is only one tiny patch in Britain – at Hereford railway station where it was first recorded in 1947, possibly from a seed brought back from Europe by a troop train. It needs very cold winters and dry summers which is why it has not spread further.