Herefordshire Rare Plants Register

The Herefordshire Rare Plants Register is a joint project between Herefordshire Botanical Society, the BSBI and Herefordshire Biological Records Centre (HBRC). HBRC is supporting this project by maintaining a Rare Plants database and supporting local recorders by collating county records from all sources for the Register and providing meeting space and administrative / data support.

Many UK counties, with the support and encouragement of the BSBI, have already published or are working on registers of plants which are rare, scarce and or threatened in their counties.

We have begun such a project in Herefordshire and some useful recording and verification of previous records have already been achieved. With so small a population in our county it is important to enlist the support of all interested people who know of the existence of scarce plants or who may wish to seek them.

A sub-committee of HBS has drawn up a list of some 200 species of vascular plants and from this a preliminary list of 68 for priority attention. The principal, but not only, criterion for selection has been that there are no more than ten known sites in the county. It is intended that the register should include all post 2000 records of the chosen species.

Details of the Rare Plants project with a complete list of included species have been circulated to Society members in our Newsletter. Copies of the database of records of those species held by HBRC have been circulated to subcommittee members. Anyone wishing to contribute records or enquire about known records for particular species or local areas of the county should contact a subcommittee member: