Lost and Found

Two pieces of good news over the long, rainy Bank Holiday weekend. One was that the lovely and vanishingly rare Fen Violet has been found again at Wicken Fen after a decade-long absence which had seemed final - rediscovered in the course of a routine plant audit, not of a specific search. The other cheering news was the discovery in the Congolese jungle of a peat bog the size of England that had somehow escaped the attention of the scientists until now. It's good to know - and salutary to remember - that there are still vast areas of the planet that even now are essentially uncharted territory (not to mention virtually the entire floor of the deep oceans, of which we know less than we do of the Moon). And, of course, the more you look, the more you see - and the more you see there is to see. There is always more...