ESSEX   BOTANY   AND   MYCOLOGY  GROUPS 

Native. This strange un-fernlike plant could be mistaken for young Juncus plants. Its yellow-green 1mm diameter and up to 10cm high cylindrical stems are however curled at the tip and dark slightly hairy pill-like sporocarps occur at the base. The cylindrical leaves arise at close intervals from linear creaping rhizomes.  Only one Essex record. Lord's Pond, Hoghill, Hainault Forest . c. 1800. Edward Forster. On the Chapman & Andre Map (1777) a large pond is shown as 'Hoghill Pond' up against the road from the Maypole to Collier Row. The hollow where this pond was is still there but is now wooded over, and the present day Lake was created just upstream by the construction of a dam in the early 1900s.. Pillwort was known in at least four sites in Middlesex in the 1700s, and still occurs at three sites in Surrey, and at two sites in Norfolk and one in Suffolk, so it seems very likely that this was a native site, although the pond may originally have been ponded back artificially by the construction of the road. Its surviving locations in the eastern counties are currently threatened by Crassula helmsii.