Burnt out rowan

After torrential rain and ferocious winds yesterday the stillness of this silver morning enticed me out for a welly wander. This photo is from the top of the garden looking east.
Below is a photo of the birch, cypress and rowan clump in the middle of which is my fire basket. The wee shed in the front was once a goose house and then henhouse; now it acts as small woodshed.  The top corner is behind all that.

Oops!

It seems a spark must have got into the hollow trunk of the old rowan and, without noticeable smoke and through the drenching rain, it has burnt out the rotting wood. It must have been incredibly dry in there! The remaining part of that tree, seen above the goose house, still looks fine. It will be interesting to see what happens next spring.

So my unsmothering of the rowans under the cypress will continue over the winter. Not that the boggy brae is short of rowans; I've lost count of the number of rowan seedlings all over the place. Left to go wild the garden would soon turn into a forest of birch, rowan, holly, sallow, oak, wild cherry and beech. I find that a reassuring thought even if there were rhododendrons in the mix. I read somewhere that before the last ice age there were native rhododendrons in Britain anyway. Nothing stays the same for long.

More drains and a new liverwort

This drain runs roughly north to south along the retaining wall back terrace and turns at a right angle round the corner below.

I've removed most of the ferns so I can clear the drain

Making the water that seeps almost continuously down the hill run round the terrace edge rather than straight across it and into the wash-house means we have a dry(ish) threshold. It also turns out that maintaining drains is fun because you find stuff. I found more Trailing St.John's-wort (Hypericum humifusum) and more Toad Rushes (Juncus bufonius). See left; a Toad Rush is 'bridging' the ditch at the right-hand side of the pic. Most importantly though, I found a new species of liverwort, one of the Riccia genus. I'm sending a sample off to be identified and recorded properly.

It's quite tricky, I found, to photograph a small liverwort in situ when its 'situ' is a more or less vertical piece of ditch bank on the ditch side farther from a retaining wall. The exercise requires an old camping mat to prevent one from getting soaked lying on wet ground for a start. I suppose I could have just got soaked, being so close to home but I probably would have given up sooner in that case.

I found an old stone painting of Toadlet's and used it to mark opposite the spot of my discovery. As it happens I found more of the same Riccia as I cleared out the ditch further.

Some animal wildlife kept me company: this tiny moth decided to flutter about in the wheelbarrow into which I was chucking ditch dirt.

A caterpillar on the wall was charging around (in caterpillar terms) for quite a while among the hornwort,

Caterpillar and hornwort

and a rather weary looking Angle-shades moth  decided to walk up my arm at one point. I repositioned him on a lungwort leaf where he stayed for the remainder of my ditch digging time.

Sand and grass

This old whisky bottle filled with layers of sand –they were level but got a bit squidged when a plumber took it under the bathroom – used to be the base of a lamp. It hasn't been the base of a lamp for a number of years now and has just been kicking around gathering dust. I needed some sand to help me identify a grass yesterday, so I poured a bit of the sand into an egg cup...

grass and sand

...so that I could take this close-up photo in my attempt to identify the grass.

I think this tufty grass is what Francis Rose and
C E Hubbard call Fine-leaved Sheep's Fescue (Festuca tenuifolia) and what Keble Martin calls Awnless Sheep's Fescue. My final confirmation, at least until someone more gramineously knowledgeable than I am corrects it, came when I saw how similar were my photo and the illustration in Hubbard's book. The book's drawings are acknowledged as being mostly by Joan Sampson.

My photo, taken under midge attack.

Joan Sampson's drawing

This species is #boggybrae #wildplant 125 for 2015.

Mystery Moss

This moss is growing on the top of an old fence post at the top of the garden. Because of where it is growing its identity is baffling me. British Bryological Society (BBS) keys take me repeatedly to  the Campylopus mosses, and in particular to Campylopus flexuosus/Rusty Swan-neck Moss and to Campylopus subulatus/Awl-leaved Swan-neck Moss. In favour of the former are what BBS describes as "clusters of short-leaved deciduous branchlets ... found at the tip of the shoots".

That's what I think these are:

I took some microscope pics with two different cameras.

In favour of the latter (C.subulatus) are what BBS describes as "deciduous shoot tips" which BBS 'presumes' are the plant's means of spread since capsules are very rare but the broken shoot tips are 'frequent'. See below.

I also took some pics of these much magnified. Quite a few had what looked like roots or rhizoids, like the one in the pic here:

The leaves of C.flexuosus and C.subulatus can be 2.5mm long, which many of my sample were. C.flex leaves apparently vary between 2mm and 7mm and those of C.sub between 2mm and 4mm.

I think the leaves are awl-shaped ---> C.sub

C.flex shoots can grow up to 8cm tall but are, BBS says, "normally much less". C.sub stems can grow to 3cm but are "usually less than this". My sample, scraped off the top of the fence post, is not more than 1cm tall (or 'deep', as I think of it):

Just to help matters along, C.flex is said to typically favour habitats such as open peat, rotting stumps and logs, peaty ledges on wet rocks, wet acidic crags ... and occasionally trees.

C.sub likes open gravelly or sandy places ... river gravels, loch margins and fine gravel in scree.

Fence posts are not mentioned.

At this point in the proceedings, I went and put on my muck boots and a waterproof jacket and went outside for more samples. Here is a sample illustrative of swan-neckiness–the capsules have curvy setae. I'm pretty sure it is Campylopus flexuosus. It grows on a rotting spruce log. I couldn't see any broken shoot tips.

Below is a pic with the mystery moss alongside C.flex from the spruce log. Both C.flex samples have nice clusters of the short-leaved branchlets mentioned above.

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So! As of today and until evidence to the contrary shows up, either from further observations or from more knowledgable people than I am, I'm going with C.subulatus for Fence Post Moss even though there is no mention of it growing on wood, either natural or treated, at all.


Here is a Wiki pic of C.sub:

And, lastly, here is a picture of a Downy Birch seed. It's the light-coloured thing at the bottom of one of the samples above pictured with the millimetre rule. I think bluetits and coaltits eat a lot of these.

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.

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.

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Waved Silk Moss/Plagiothecium undulatum