The results of the 2026 New Year Plant Hunt, organised by the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland (BSBI) are now available. This is an annual event: each year, across a set of days around New Year, intrepid botanists of all ages and abilities set out to record which wild plants they can find in bloom. The 2026 Hunt ran from Thursday 1 January to Sunday 4 January 2026.
By recording the wild plants in flower in your local patch in the depths of winter, individuals or groups help the BSBI gather valuable data ‘about how our wild or naturalised plants are responding to a changing climate, and how this might impact the other species that rely upon them.’ Full details of this annual event can be found on the BSBI website https://bsbi.org/
The results for 2026 can also be found there: https://bsbi.org/take-part/activities/new-year-plant-hunt/results. Number 1 was Bellis perennis “Daisy” (which was the main one I found in Buckingham), with Dandelion and Groundsel making up the top three. In total 663 different plant species were recorded in bloom, the third highest total in the 15-year history of the Hunt.
Dr Kevin Walker, BSBI Head of Science, is reported as saying: “New Year Plant Hunt results show how our weather is changing, impacting flowering times and other wildlife that depend on our wild plants. Climate change is the chief suspect, as our recent collaboration with scientists at the Met Office confirms, but to be certain we’ll need more data. That’s why we are unrolling a new flowering plant phenology project, starting this spring. Our volunteers will be asked to record the abundance of the wild plants they find in bloom along a fixed route walked at regular – ideally weekly – intervals. This will help us learn more about how flowering times vary from place to place and year to year. The aim is to gain a better understanding of the full impact of changing weather patterns on our wild plants and all the other wildlife that depend on them.”
The next New Year Plant Hunt will take place from Thursday 31 December 2026 to Sunday 3 January 2027. Perhaps this is something a group of MKNHS members would be interested in doing together?
Sue Hetherington
January 2026