Platanthera bifolia

Platanthera bifolia, Lesser Butterfly-orchid

There are eight locations in Oxfordshire where there are records for Platanthera bifolia drawn from post 1980 BSBI and TVERC records. Certainly in five of these sites numbers of the plant are reduced or it cannot be found at all. In 2019, only a single flowering spike was found anywhere and this was at the BBOWT Warburg Reserve, near Henley. The species is hanging on here but the plants are under scrub which is unlikely to be ideal. To improve the habitat, some modest clearance of vegetation is being undertaken by BBOWT.

Platanthera x hybrida, the hybrid between P. bifolia and P. chlorantha does sometimes appear at the Warburg but none were found in 2019.