Sometimes it’s not so much individual species, but combinations of things that make places feel special or distinctive. Of course that’s what special about everywhere. Everywhere is its own combination of the biogeography of everything. North-meets-south, east-meets-west etc.
I started using the DDb to look at some of these combos. This stemmed partly from wanting to find out places where both Elatine hexandra and Elatine hydropiper occur together, following a discussion about Hanmer Mere near Wrexham (v.c. 51).
There’s a nice dingle wood near me in Montgomeryshire (v.c. 47). It has some nice things in it, but when you put a few of them together it starts to sing. Hordelymus europaeus is clearly rare in Wales anyway, but if you query what monads it occurs alongside Circaea x intermedia (which was a bit of a random choice to be honest), you find it’s a unique combo in Wales, with only a few other monads in Britain and Ireland. If you add Carex strigosa to the query you find it’s this trio of plants growing within a few metres of one another is unique to this monad. There must be loads of examples like this.
It’s interesting to explore this with fairly common things, and more of a challenge to find the distinctive combos. The combo of bitter-vetch and betony lining the lovely lane verges feels quite characteristic of the rolling-hills of Montgomeryshire. This seems to be supported by the DDb. Alebit, its probably more of a whole of Powys-thing in a Wales context. I thought I’d better check this at tetrad level too, and in a Britain and Ireland context mid-Wales is one of the bitter-vetch/betony combo hotspots with the Weald, New Forest, SW England, the Peak District and the NE of England.
If you want to explore this and find some unique plant combos in your local patch, then here’s a link to the Elatine example query that you can change. You can change/add more species, change the ‘group by’ > ‘localites’ to ‘hectad’ or whatever you desire! Just make sure if you add more species, to change the ‘frequency’ number too. If you like eyeballing it spatially like me, then monads can be a bit tricky to spot on the map in black, so you can change to red and can be easier to spot on aerials.
https://database.bsbi.org/search.php#retrievesaved=0.nthhh&query=d94d9144de99e042e038cf4ff5645d1d
