Winter garden

Pic taken 4 August 2014

I'm working my way through the green pile at the back. The logs have been split and stored in a woodshed. I'm shredding the green stuff and piling the long branches up against the stone wall you might be able to make out beyond the piles.

So... I did today's stint of that, wearing a dust mask over my mouth and nose because if I breathe in too much of the sappy wood fumes I get a headache.

Then I went for a garden wander to see where things were at.

 The first few daffodil and snowdrop shoots are poking through

but it is really the mosses and liverworts that brighten up a winter garden, like this Variable-leaved Crestwort (Lophocolea heterophylla) on an old spruce stump

and this Neat Feather Moss (Pseudoscleropodium purum) which covers large areas of our north-east and north-west facing banks. Below is a small area under a downy birch tree.

Most of the ferns have 'gone over' for the winter, though new little ones are appearing everywhere. I like the way our large Hard Fern shows the deciduous fertile fronds in brown and the evergreen sterile ones at the same time.

Then I started looking at mosses on the dry stone wall at the top of the bank. In the middle is Rusty Swan-neck Moss (Campylopus flexuosus). More about its rustiness in another post. Behind it and in front of it is Cypress-leaved Plait-moss (Hypnum cupressiforme), and either side of the Rusty Swan-neck moss are shoots of the succulent Reflexed Stonecrop.