New year plant hunt

This year, one of the real joys of running F&F has been #wildflowerhour, an hour of tweeting pictures of wild flowers that we’ve all seen over the past few days. One of our key partners in this has been the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland, and their Twitter feed is a meadow of native plants flowering all year round. And at the very point of the year when you’d imagine there weren’t any flowering plants, BSBI runs a plant hunt.

You can read the rules here, but in summary it’s a challenge to find as many flowering wild plants in your area as possible between 1 and 4 January. We’ll be retweeting all the photos posted under the #newyearplanthunt hashtag over the next few days, before returning for #wildflowerhour as usual on Sunday night at 8pm.

Here are our finds for this new year, in the hedgerows in south Dorset:

Hedge woundwort, Stachys sylvatica

Stitchwort, Stellaria holostea

Hogweed, Heracleum sphondylium

Wild Flower Hour takes place every Sunday at 8pm on twitter and Instagram. Just add #wildflowerhour to your tweets of photos of flowers you’ve found at any time during the week or weekend, and do join the conversation at 8pm on Sunday so that wild flower enthusiasts can find one another and learn more about our amazing native flora.