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Botanists Baffled By Fred's Plant ; New Species Found at Lakeland

Posted on: Saturday, 6 November 2004, 12:00 CST

SCIENTISTS lead expeditions into the deepest jungles of South America and to the remotest ends of the earth in search of new species of plant.But Fred Carroll, from Enniskillen, has found one growing in his back garden. There are probably just two specimens in the world, and they have botanists scratching their heads in bewilderment.With its mat of yellow-green leaves, pretty white flowers and an ability to grow in the harshest of environments, Fred is tickled to think his new plant might become a feature of gardens around the world, just like that other native of Fermanagh, the Florencecourt yew."It's a smasher of a little plant. It would look wonderful in rockeries," he enthuses.The good news for those gardeners not blessed with green fingers is that the plant is exceptionally easy to propagate from cuttings."You just stick them in the ground and they grow," says Fred who discovered the new plant on a remote lakeshore in Fermanagh

. "It was so conspicuous. There was almost nothing else growing on that rock strewn shore. Even though they were so small they were sticking out like sore thumbs."Fred reckons his new plant is aclose relative of the sea campion which is why he has provisionally named it the "Fermanagh campion."Fred contacted Paul Hackney, a botanist at the Ulster Museum, and subsequently led a team of 25 members of the Botanical Society of the British Isles to the remote lakeshore where the plants are growing.As he recalls: "They were a bit baffled by it and thought it might have been a multiple mutant of ragged robin."However, on a visit to the Donegal coast, Fred came upon some sea campion and went back to his original theory that his plant was not an abnormal ragged robin but a hybrid of twospecies: ragged robin and sea campion.He thinks the plants may have cross-bred somewhere on the west coast of Ireland and their tiny seeds, each no bigger than a grain of pepper, carried on the wind to Fermanagh.A laboratory or university could identify the plant from its DNA but in the meantime Fred has set up his own experiment to test his theory.Having gathered seed pods from the plants and mixed his own compost to mimic the acid peat soil conditions where the plants are growing, he is propagating them in his home."If it is a hybrid, you should be getting some of the seeds reverting to the parental types and they will betray themselves then," he said.

Source: Belfast Telegraph

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