Mick Crawley, Discover and Read the Best of Twitter Threads by @crawley_mick

Mick Crawley

crawley_mick

Admit it. You’ve always intended to get to grips with Atriplex and Chenopodium, but somehow you just never got round to it. The time has come. The fruits are ripe

The late-season alien grasses are beginning to show themselves. The best place to look for them is in the vicinity of bird-feeders; their seeds are often imported as contaminants of

As with the oaks, the birches have two native species and a hybrid. But Betula is even trickier, because the genetics are more complicated. Linnaeus didn’t make very many

Oaks are tricky. It is much easier to conclude “That’s not Quercus robur” than it is to say exactly what it IS you are looking at. In many places, the

If, like me, you enjoy botanizing in towns, then it is likely that waste ground is one of your favourite habitats. The species diversity is off the scale compared

This is an ideal time to learn about the grass genus Poa (Poaceae). These are the species with leaf-tips shaped like the bow of a canoe (x10). The 2 common

The ‘seed bank’ is a plant community that spends most of the time hidden underground, suppressed from germinating by a carpet of perennial vegetation and dead organic matter. When the

Our next plant community is the ‘fly tip’. It’s the horticultural version of that scourge of modern life, where cowboy builders avoid paying for the proper disposal their waste

One other plant community that you are able to botanize in these times of lock-down is the supermarket car park, as you stand in line outside, dutifully distancing. I’ll talk

A very distinctive plant community you’ll see on your exercise walk is the dog-latrine. The dominant plant is the attractive grass Hordeum murinum which, in Scotland, has the brilliant

This is the very best time of year for studying the "bottom of the wall" plant community. It occupies 5-20 cm of pavement or tarmac at the bottom of the