Sedum album L., White Stonecrop

Account Summary

Growth form and preferred habitats

This creeping, evergreen, mat-forming perennial is a quite common garden escape, very widely scattered throughout B & I. It is mainly established on the mortar or the stone of walls, but is also present in other open, dry, lime-rich habitats, including on rocks, gravel and stretches of concrete, especially when the latter is cracked. S. album has great vegetative and flowering vigour and it roots very readily, enabling it to rapidly colonise open ground. In NI, it has spread very considerably during the last 70 years and occasionally it becomes locally abundant (NI Vascular Plant Database 2005).

Fermanagh occurrence

In Fermanagh, S. album has been recorded from a total of 25 tetrads (4.7%), 22 of them with post-1975 records. White Stonecrop is now thinly and widely scattered throughout the VC in a range of dry artificial or disturbed wayside habitats, but locally this patch-forming succulent occurs in its greatest profusion on the cracked, concrete flying-boat slipways of the Second World War period on the shores of Lower Lough Erne. It has spread from these to adjacent runways and to other slipways and stony ground, where people have most access to the shores of Lough Erne.

A small minority of stations in Fermanagh are quite remote from houses, eg on tracks at Brougher Mountain and in several old quarries, which suggests that S. album is becoming thoroughly naturalised and that it has considerable powers of dispersal. The tiny, very light, seed produced in abundance from a many-flowered, flat-topped, branched cyme inflorescence is undoubtedly readily transported by wind, evidence of which is clear from the presence of the plant high on walls and on cliffs (Ridley 1930, p. 29).

Irish occurrence

In Ireland, this introduction is a certain neophyte, being first noted by Moore & More (1866) from the wild where it was growing on cliffs in Cork and on rocks at Fermoy. Reynolds (2002) has catalogued its spread in Ireland. It was reported from a total of 17 Irish VCs in ITB (Praeger 1901), and later from a further ten VCs by the early 1930s in his book The Botanist in Ireland (Praeger 1934). The 1987 Irish flora Census Catalogue listed the presence of S. album in every VC except Monaghan and Fermanagh (H32, H33) (Scannell & Synnott 1987). With the publication of The Flora of Co Fermanagh, Monaghan stands alone.

British occurrence

In England and Wales, S. album is a common and widespread archaeophyte, present almost throughout, while in Scotland it is very much more scattered, records having a definite eastern preponderance. However, it thins northwards noticeably beyond the Glasgow-Edinburgh conurbations, while reaching Orkney (Preston et al. 2002).

Threats

None, since it almost always occurs in artificial, man-made habitats.

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