Ononis reclinata Small Restharrow

A small, sticky, greyish-green annual, much smaller than Common Rest Harrow (Ononis repens) and with smaller pink flowers. When mature, the seed pods hang down like minature tree ornaments. It is a very rare, calcicole in Britain, confined to coastal limestone cliffs in south Wales and Devon and lime-rich,coastal dune turf in the Channel Islands but with one remarkable, disjunct occurrence in the Mull of Galloway in Scotland, where it grows on steep, south-facing, graywacke sandstone cliffs at its northern limit. In Glamorgan it is only found on the south Gower cliffs where it grows in thin rendzina soils on carbobiferous limestone. It was first discovered by D. Sharp in 1828, growing on rocks in Port Eynon. Finding plants requires diligent searching but the Gower population appears to relatively stable, but numbers of plants and flowering times vary from year to year.

Native