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Originally Posted by KeenTeen17  good job, Dave, these cotoneasters are a bit awkward. How would I ID one in the garden?  |
Since I do a lot of urban plant-hunting, naturalised cotoneasters crop up pretty frequently so I've had to get acquainted with them - and, once you're used to them, they're honestly not as hard as you might think
The first step is to get to know the commonest species - the ones you'll find naturalised most frequently are Wall Cotoneaster,
C. horizontalis & Himalayan Cotoneaster,
C. simonsii. Once you can ID those with barely a second glance, start looking out for the slightly less-frequent species, but those that are still common enough to occur in most towns & cities etc. In my experience, these are Stern's Cotoneaster (
C. sternanus), Franchet's Cotoneaster (
C. franchetti) and, pretty easy to recognise when you've seen it once, Bullate Cotoneaster (
C. rehderi).
All these species, I've found time and time again around my Bristol local patch. Probably nine in ten naturalised cotoneasters will be
C. horizontalis or
C. simonsii, and nine in ten of the rest will turn out to be covered by one of the names I've listed above.
Once you're used to those, you'll automatically recognise anything else as "looking a bit different." There aren't really any easy short-cuts to naming the rarer ones, other than working your way through a list of recorded species (the one on the BSBI website will do), plugging the scientific name into Google Image and seeing whether the pictures match your find
So far, in and around Bristol, I've recorded 15 species of Cotoneaster (including the common ones I've already listed) and they're actually a lot easier to ID than many native families like mayweeds, spurges etc. Good luck
If you're talking about garden species, though, one pitfall to bear in mind - if it's a planted specimen, it could well be some kind of terribly confusing hybrid that even an expert would probably give up on
Thankfully they tend to be sterile, hence not worth bothering about away from the confines of gardens