The hedge in the top west corner

The spiraea hedge in the top west corner of the garden is not going to be an elongated rectangle. It's going to be less than a metre deep from front to back in the west corner (on the right of the photo), about three metres deep from front to back at the end nearest to us in the photo, and somewhere in between those measurments along its roughly ten metre length, with a couple of large 'scoops' taken out of it along the way. I still have some roots lower down the slope to dig out. A robin came and watched as I was doing that this morning. Toad thinks that robins think we humans are just like wild pigs the way we turn over soil and ground debris releasing lovely edible grubs for them to eat. Nice to feel useful that way. I also still have to tidy up the hedge with the hedge cutter, then I need to tackle another grey sallow that needs pruning.

During my diggings up of spiraea roots, I found quite a few bluebell bulbs, which I replanted. They have not flowered in previous years in this part of the garden but perhaps giving them a bit of 'breathing space' might encourage them. I hope so.

Just to the left of the hedge pic is today's

favourite bryophytically enhanced fence post.

And further along from that was a rotting log of grey sallow on which is growing today's fungus. I think it might be a tooth fungus but don't quote me on that.

Scrambling among the grey sallows' several trunks is lots of honeysuckle. I noticed it had new green shoots already, even before this all year's leaves have fallen off. The large beech tree up the hill in the wood is bare but the hazels still have some leaves. What can the Woodland Trust have meant about hazel having had an exceptionally early leaf drop this year? That certainly hasn't been the case here, nor in the other parts of Argyll I've been in lately. Last Friday I drove to Inveraray and there were hazels with leaves all the way there and back along Loch Long and Loch Fyne, lots of them.

Honeysuckle–old leaves and young shoots

Little She-Bear and I went a-wandering near Aberfoyle

The first stop was a coffeeshop stop. I'm testing as many Empire Biscuits as I can get at. I'm getting so skilled that I can test them even by eye nowadays and the ones in the coffeeshop we stopped at had  icing that was too hard, I could tell just by looking, so I had a vanilla slice instead. She-Bear had carrot cake. We sampled each other's choices as well, natch. Both efforts got quite high marks out of ten but weren't as good as we could make at home or the ones we had eaten as kids made by local bakers. Ah well... but you have to try. Nothing ventured, etc.

The next stop was at a gate just before the bridge over the Endrick Water on the road between Drymen and Aberfoyle.

Because it was an interesting gate.

Gate post

A true friend is someone who will stop, turn her car and go back to dump you at a gate, get the car out of the way so you can photograph said gate, then go and find somewhere to park off the road, and wait while you wander over a bridge peering at mosses and lichens on the bridge stonework. The next time we are on that road I may need to be the driver so that we can stop, get out and go to explore the bridge underpinnings as well.

Another gate or two thrust themselves upon my notice before we went for a walk along the river.

mossy gate 2

It was not a bright day but we enjoyed the autumnal colours of the larches and cloud covered hills and of the grasses on the floodplains of the River Forth.

Part of our walk was along an old railway track. We didn't realise this at first so certain objects were slightly puzzling

until we saw this and the blue information notice at the end,            
and then it all made sense.

There were some lovely things along the track–

–fungi on trees over the river and on carved owls, beautiful red berries we didn't recognise, pools containing and reflecting natural beauty,

and bryophytically enhanced gates! 

    Definitely a successful wander, we thought!

Pale Liverwort sporophytes and other things on a windy day

The sky was fierce this morning and so was the wind. The firebrand sky paled into a variety of pale greys quite quickly but the wind has been thrashing everything all day. Its buffeting, and probably a hangover from yesterday's spiraea root pulling made my chest hurt, so I decided that, apart from a couple of short expeditions to collect moss samples, I'd stay indoors today. Most of it has been spent peering into the microscope determining a moss species and being fascinated by the sporophytes of Pale Liverwort, which I found among the Mammillate Plait Moss on the trunk of a holly tree. I'd actually gone to the holly tree to check out some small fungi.

The silvery thread in the pic on the right made me look more closely where I saw more of those.

And while I was looking closely through the microscope lens, one of the sporophyte capsules released its spores onto the petri dish. Click pics to enlarge if you like. It was fascinating.

Before these exciting events I had been up the garden for a fresh sample of the moss growing low on the old spiraea stems, and I determined that it is Waved Silk Moss (Plagiothecium undulatum).

The undulated leaves, which stay wavy when dry, are evident here.

<<<

Waved Silk Moss/Plagiothecium undulatum

A walking fire

This morning my spiraea bashing got as far as the bed in the hedge. It has been useful for hitting spiraea roots against, those ones I've managed to dig, pull and saw enough to get out of the ground. This is yesterday's pile of roots, which more than doubled today. They can't go in the dead hedge because they might just start growing again.

What's in the wheelbarrow (and a couple of other barrowsful) is what has gone into the dead hedge. The mosses can grow to their hearts' content. I will lightly step over the deep philosophical question of whether a moss has a heart and continue the story.

The piles of still green branches began to grow alarmingly but then my small fire decided to take off and really get burning thanks to some gusts of wind from the right direction at the right time, so I managed to get both green stalks and roots burned today. The fire walked. You can see in the picture to the left that it finished in a different place from where it began. I did try to discourage its walking but after a while I just let it. There was space for it and the ground is soggy underneath so it didn't really matter. The thing is, it kept going and dealt with all those troublesome shoots and roots.

 While I was feeding the fire I found the edge of another bed frame, a random slab of concrete

                    and the base of a stand for a bird feeding station. >>

If I can't think of a way to incorporate rusty beds into dead hedges, I might pay a visit to the municipal dump when I've nothing better to do, or when I'm going round the loch for some other reason.


So, here is my partly cleared space up in the top west corner of the Boggy Brae garden. The spiraea and the grey sallow covered it all and would have continued to encroach if left. The tree trunk at the right hand side of the pic is a goat willow.

Still a bit to go southwards but I'm quite pleased with my progress so far and especially pleased about the successful walking fire today. The space between the pruned grey sallow and the spiraea hedge was filling up with prunings and uprootings. I brought in a sample from this (below) to look at more closely but right now my shoulders are aching so I'm going to have a nap.

Update 13 Nov
The large moss in the pic above is Waved Silk Moss (Plagiothecium undulatum) and here are a couple of closer pics of it:

A tiny moss

10 Nov
This tiny moss, growing as a 1-2mm deep mat on a still upright old rotting fence post, is evading identification. A shoot next to the edge of a millimetre rule shows how small it is. This, along with the fact that my moss is definitely not a pincushion, makes me doubt that it could be Common Pincushion moss (Dicranoweisia cirrata), which is where the ID elimination keys keep leading me.

I suppose what I need to do is find an identifiable sample of D.cirrata and compare but other descriptions in my moss book (ISBN 978-0-9561310-1-0) also do not fit this moss. Things like "capsules are common"... er, no, though I think I found one >>
Elliptical gemmae to be found on the backs of leaves are mentioned as occurring 'often'. I didn't find any of those either.

The moss appears to have a protonemal mat between the shoots as shown in the photos and the wood of the fence post.

<< There are some protonemata in this pic. I need a more powerful microscope!


11 Nov
Today I found a Common Pincushion and, as might be expected, it really does look like a pincushion. See pic below.

With the help of some members of a botanical and bryological Facebook group I've come to the conclusion that Tiny Moss up top is Cape Thread Moss (Orthodontium lineare). The elimination keys also took me there a few times but the pictures of the moss, with masses of capsules, put me off because I struggled to find even one capsule on the Boggy Brae sample.  I need to look at Cape Thread Moss again in the spring.

This moss identifying lark sure is a steep learning curve.