Geum rivale Water Avens

An attractive perennial with flowers which often droop and have orange-pink or yellowish petals and conspicuous, purple sepals. It is a plant of damp habitats besides streams, rivers and canals and also in mesotrophic grasslands such as hay meadows, alluvial floodplane meadows, grassy verges, hedgebanks and wet rock faces. It is widely distributed in Britain, particularly in the west and north, but it has been lost from many of its former sites as a resullt of land drainage and agricultural improvenments. Although widespread in Wales it is largely a plant of upland areas and it is rather scarce in West Glamorgan with records only from the upper Vale of Neath where it occurs in riparian habitats along the River Neath. It hybridises with Wood Avens (Geum urbanum) to form a fertile hybrid (Geum x intermedium). Hybrids are common where both parents occur in the vicinity of each other but are rarely recorded in West Glamorgan.

Native