Bubbles and fly agaric

I so enjoyed photographing stream bubbles that I went back to do some more. I went to a different part of the burn, a little downstream, to the place where it does a sharp turn downhill, to where we raced the plastic ducks in August, the place where some of the old bridge made of what look like wooden railway sleepers collapsed into the ravine taking a heifer with it and causing the farmer – when Toad and her pal finally told me about the dead cow and I had phoned the farmer – to have to come with a digger to hoik it out. The first digger was too heavy to get up the boggy field, so they had to get a smaller one. Then in a surreal moment, I looked out of the window and saw small digger transferring the dead heifer to big digger just outside our front gate!

But back to bubbles and, guess what!, more fungi. The place I went is the only place I've seen fly agaric around here and each autumn after the first time, I've been back to find it again. This is the only time I've seen it again. Perhaps I have not been at quite the right time or perhaps conditions have not been quite right for it to grow.

fly agaric fungus

I might go back with my macro lens later today.

But back to bubbles...

I experimented with shutter speeds. Here are some of the results.

Such shots show some of the limitations of photography or, more likely, the limitations of my photography skills, since neither of these types of image record quite what I was seeing. Fun though.

A couple more:

The following photo show how low the burn is at the moment. You can see how it washes round both sides of the rock in the middle where the little tree is growing when it is in full spate. On those occasions it has been known to burst out of the culvert at the bottom of the hill and flood the road and even, on one occasion a few years before we came to live here, one of the old cottages built right beside it before the culvert was built. The power of nature never ceases to amaze (and hopefully never will).

Lastly, a couple (couple of couples!) of leafy 'arty farties', more fungi (!), and part of my path back down our garden. I don't have to go between the tree trunks, but I do because I like the changes of the light that way affords. I think of it as the adult version of a child's wending its meandering way through a row of street bollards – impossible to go the 'ordinary' way ;-)

The trunks are of rowan (L), holly (middle), and bird cherry (R). You can see that flowering currant grows among them too.

The woodland floor and the stream

A bigoted person (not Toad or Toadlet) troubled me this morning so after some chores I went for a scrabble around on the woodland floor up the hill in search of composure and calmness. There is wreckage and tangled growth of fallen trees up there but the undergrowth quietly gets on with generating new life. Fungi, mosses and lichens eat up decay and trees and flowers settle themselves for winter so that they can grow anew come spring. Looking and marvelling at details I forgot my annoyance.

Photos should be clickable to enlarge

Light through azalea leaves on the way up the garden

A new fungus at the base of the cypress
at the top of the garden

in situ

close up

And a patch of sunlight on fallen
birch and cypress leaves

Then I climbed over our fence, across to the forest fence, over that, and into the wood. Colourful and varied fungi and lichens were everywhere.

Here's one with a sterile frond of hard fern
and some wood sorrel leaves

There was a dead tree trunk covered in these
– many broken like this

Some of the same but less broken

Note the dried bluebell stalks here too

A lovely example of a Cladonia lichen
(I think! not sure what kind)

Colourful fungus on a dead spruce trunk

I tried to move the grass off it and then realised
the grass was embedded in the fungus

A young version of the same?

Another wee fungal garden on a fallen tree

Closer in

This picture made me smile

I moved on to look at other things and nearly trod on this

Probably trod on some of these; they littered the forest floor

The forest floor is fascinating. In a small space, say half a square metre, many small things appear. Here are a small spruce tree (top left), an oak (bottom left) and a holly (bottom right) surrounding a young hard fern (Blechnum spicant). Almost half way down the left edge is a liverwort.

Spruce needles give some scale

 The liverwort closer in

And closer 1

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I found a nice simple example of the upright fertile fronds of Hard Fern

Hard Fern fertile fronds. These die in winter

And the evergreen sterile fronds of Hard Fern
on the ground

Baby bilberry plants among the moss

By now I was back to the stream and thoroughly enjoyed myself watching bubbles and looking at leaf dams upstream of the tiny waterfalls.

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Over the forest fence again, down the field to check out the hips and haws

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And so back up our drive, where there are still a few blue flowers of alkanet, a quick scramble between rhododendrons and mad fuchsias down by the pond to look at yet more fungi and an upsidedown fuchsia flower sitting on duckweed.

A scrumply fungus

And a floating flower

And so home to a good lunch. Nothing like rooting around in the wood for forgetting about the stupidness of bigotry, and getting an appetite for bacon. And my hat wasn't nearly as well-decorated with bits of twig and leaf as I expected.