Linum usitatissimum L., Flax

Introduction, neophyte, previously deliberately planted, now very rare and casual.

21 August 1989; Northridge, R.H.; Farnaght, SE of Tamlaght.

July to October.

One of the three recent sporadic records in Fermanagh of this tall and conspicuous blue-flowered annual was a plant found growing in a reseeded field. The owner, Mr Carrothers, informed RHN that his father had grown flax for fibre in the field during the World War I over 60 years previously. However, the current author (RSF) presumes that the plant RHN found was a recently introduced grass-clover seed contaminant. Experimental work and vast local experience of the plant throughout NI, which was a major flax fibre growing region in the 19th and early 20th centuries, indicates that L. usitatissimum (a species that probably arose in cultivation from the Mediterranean-Atlantic species, L. bienne (Pale Flax)) is only transient in the soil seed bank surviving for less than one year (Toole & Brown 1946; Thompson et al. 1997). RHN and the current author (RSF) very much doubt that any recent occurrences of the plant in Ireland are relicts of this earlier period of widespread cultivation, despite speculation to the contrary reported in Cat Alien Pl Ir.

Details of the other two Fermanagh records are as follows: plentiful in disturbed ground in several fields of a farm E of Melly's Rocks, 14 July 2001, RHN; and one plant at the end of the jetty, Knockninny Quay, Corraslee Point, Upper Lough Erne, 5 October 2002, RHN.

The New Atlas map plots 24 post-1986 hectads in Ireland with records of L. usitatissimum scattered fairly randomly across the island. The Cat Alien Pl Ir lists ten Irish VCs with recent records, not including Fermanagh. It appears that white-flowered forms frequently occur in bird-seed mixtures and several other Linum species may also have been introduced in this way (Clement & Foster 1994).

At an agricultural research station near Belfast in the 1980s, there was a failed attempt to develop a chemical means of 'scutching' flax plants to extract the fibre. The project may have grown some varieties for a time, although the small surviving local Irish linen industry imports all of its flax from Egypt. The rare and sporadic occurrences of L. usitatissimum in disturbed ground in Fermanagh and elsewhere around Ireland are most probably derived either as seed contaminants of commercial grass and clover mixtures, or are dispersed from wild bird seed-mixtures on bird-tables, carried on the wind or the wing.

Short, branched cultivated varieties grown for linseed oil were reintroduced to Britain, mainly in the south of England, during the early 1990s (Clement & Foster 1994), but neither RHN nor RSF on their travels have yet seen these grown anywhere in Ireland. The resultant explosion of recent records of the plant throughout S England is very apparent in the New Atlas hectad map but, as G.T.D. Wilmore comments, these escapes from cultivation usually represent only transient casuals (G.T.D. Wilmore, in: Preston et al. 2002).