Species Spotlight Challenge - Day 1 - Field Forget-me-not

Hi all. I'm back with a new idea for the blog. Instead of going out occasionally for a long outing and writing about all that I found (or more often than I would like to admit, putting off writing about it until I decided not to bother), I am going to try and publish one short blog-post every day for a month (at first), focussing on one species that I have found growing, or flying, or crawling, or maybe even swimming, on that day.

To kick it off, the species in the spotlight for today, the 6th of August 2020, is ... drumroll please...

Dah Dahhhhh    -----Field Forget-me-not   also known as Myosotis arvensis

You may know the forget-me-not as a pretty little garden plant with little blue five-petaled flowers, which rapidly takes over your flowerbed if left unchecked. The plant you have seen is most likely to be the  Wood Forget-me-not (Myosotis sylvatica), which is found in woods and gardens over nearly all of Britain. However, there are actually 9 different species of Forget-me-not found in Great Britain, with a further one in the Channel Islands, but the one we are looking at today, perhaps surprisingly given that you have probably never noticed it, it is actually commonest member of the genus, in the UK.

Field Forget-me-not (Myosotis arvensis) is a smaller, more delicate plant than the garden species, although it can grow up to 40 cm in height. It is often a 'weed' of arable field edges but can be found in almost any dry, sparsely vegetated habitat, including roadsides, sand dunes or, as in this case, the edge of a lawn just where it meets the asphalt of a car park in urban Middlesbrough.

The first photo, taken on my phone while I was out (which is why it is a bit blurry) shows it growing with dandelions,  clover,  grasses and other typical lawn plants and you can get an impression of a thin, straggly looking plant with small pale blue flowers. 

The second photo, which I took on my camera when I got home (I picked only a small bit, leaving the plant to keep growing), shows much more detail. The flowers are usually no more than 3mm across and, as you can see if you look closely, the petals are actually joined (fused is the technical word) together, and form a tube containing the reproductive parts of the plant, although that is hidden on this photo by the green sepals (the green appendages on the flower below the petals). If you have ever had a bunch of Forget-me-nots in a little vase or jam jar in your house (perhaps brought to you by a small person on Mother's day or your birthday) you may have seen these 'petal tubes' lying on your table or windowsill after they have fallen. These fused corolla tubes are a feature found in all members of the Borage family, the Boraginaceae, to which forget-me-nots belong.

On the second photo you can also see little hooked hairs on the sepals, and short straight hairs lying flat against the stem. The shapes of the hairs on the sepals and stems, and the degree to which they are sticking out or lying flat, as well as the size and colour of the flowers, and the shape of the individual sepals, are important for telling most of the British Myosotis species apart, and there is no other British forget-me-not with exactly the same combination of these characters that you can see here - Early Forget-me-not (Myosotis ramosissima) is similar but is a tiny plant with usually much smaller flowers.

The name 'forget-me-not' apparently comes from a time when it was seen as a symbol of love and young ladies (and perhaps men) would wear it to ensure that they weren't forgotten by their true-love. The scientific name is much more prosaic, with the first part (the genus name) 'myosotis' meaning 'mouse-ear' in Greek (referring to the shape of the leaves I think), and the second part (the species name), meaning 'of fields or cultivated ground' in Latin, so it literally translates as 'Field Mouse-ear'. Confusingly this is actually the English name of a different, much scarcer, species in a different family. If I'm ever lucky enough to see that (I haven't yet), I may feature it in a future blog-post.