Hairy Bitter Cress

Hairy Bitter Cress has a sister plant called Wavy Bitter Cress (Cardamine flexuosa), which I wrote about here. The most important distinguishing features, at least that I can make out, are firstly that Wavy has six stamens and Hairy has four, and secondly that the seed pods of Wavy only grow up to the height of the flowers whereas those of Hairy grow beyond as shown in the photo below.

Hairy Bitter Cress
(Cardamine hirsuta)

The flowers are tiny and always seems to be closed when I come across the plants so determining the number of stamens is a fiddlesome job with fine tweezers under a microscope.

The fruit pedicels of Hairy grow beyond the flowers in part, I think, because they are erect, relatively speaking, whereas they are more spreading in Wavy. The stems of Hairy are straight, relatively speaking too, whereas wavy gets its name from its more wavy stems.

C. hirsuta erect seed pods
and relatively straight stem

In the Boggy Brae garden I found Wavy on April 21 and Hairy just today, May 19.

Hairy Bitter Cress is boggybrae wild plant no.54 for 2015.

Wavy Bitter Cress (Cardamine flexuosa)

Quick edit... probably my best pic of Wavy, showing the "oh so flexuoso" stems:

May Findings

The first buttercup has flowered. This is Creeping Buttercup (Ranunculus repens). Leaves pictured below.

Silvery scales of Lemon-scented Fern
(Oreopteris limbosperma)

An unfurling crozier of Lemon-scented Fern

Slender Rush (Juncus tenuis),
one small step outside the back door,
looking colourful in afternoon light

Fern and bluebell

and today's favourite daisy

I found what I think might be a Wood Pigeon's eggshell at the top of the garden.
And several bunches of small feathers. Whether the two are connected, I don't know.

The Grey Sallow I pruned vigorously in the autumn is fighting back. It might not be as easy as I thought to use this horizontal branch as a garden seat.

Tormentil, beech seedlings and spreading flowers

I found the first Tormentil flower (Potentilla erecta) this morning, looking somewhat wind and rain battered, but sturdily bright for all that.

Also some beech seedlings (Fagus sylvatica) in the earth behind the uprooted eucalyptus tree. I'm hoping one of them will survive and grow into a tree but they will have to run the gauntlet of roe deer nibbling unless I give them some protection. Deciding whether to thin them now or later is the next issue...

Between spots of rain I managed to get a pic of our late narcissus. I'm calling it My Sister's Narcissus because this year it started flowering on her birthday, 12 May. There are now five clumps of it from an initial two and they are not all near each other.

A May narcissus

Bluebells are spreading too. These, just beginning to flower, are on a northwest-facing bank and only get sunshine in the late afternoon. I found two new plants round the bank corner on the bit that faces northeast this morning. My practice of not mowing certain areas until flowers have set seed is paying dividends! I found a single bluebell quite far into the field too this morning and immediately imagined how awesome it would be if they covered a largish area. Fingers crossed the farmer doesn't mow until September like last year.


At the bottom of the same bank Devil's-bit Scabious grows near the base of a downy birch tree. They have also spread round the corner and are establishing themselves in the shade of Toad's boat across the garden in the east corner as well. Pictures anon. They don't flower until later in the year.

Finding things in the grass

I've got into the way of scrutinising the greensward of the Boggy Brae as I walk about. The other day I noticed a patch of green that differed from the rest in the field. when I went for a closer look, it turned out to be a patch of grass of a different species from that surrounding it. I'll investigate further in due course. In the meantime my self-testing guess is one of the soft grasses, Holcus species.

The other evening, in the slanting light, as I was walking up the south-east slope after abandoning the lawn-mower in a boggy bit where it had got stuck beyond my strength (Toad later rescued it and finished the mowing I had started), I noticed a different green in the grass again. closer inspection revealed it to be the leaves of Whorled Caraway (Carum verticillatum) in one of the places I had first found it growing last year.

As you can see from the photo to the left (click on it to enlarge it), Whorled Caraway leaves look quite different from grass. The first pic, above, was my attempt to show how the leaves' colour differed from that of the grasses surrounding them. It was more obvious than the photo shows.

Anyway, since I want these to flower later, I set about fencing them off marking them so that Toad doesn't mow the caraway patches by accident. Out came the canes and string – see pic below. The mower was round the corner of the bank in the left of the photo, and that is the loch you can see through the trees.

I call it the SE slope because it is on the SE side of the garden but the incline is actually north-easterly.

It's just as well we got that boggy bit mowed when we did because the heavens opened later that night and it has rained fairly steadily since.

Bears in the wash-house

Yesterday and today I've been cleaning the wash-house. This involves moving the fridge and freezer, which are on a kind of raised platform. That involves jiggling them forward onto a breeze block and a lump of eucalyptus wood that are about the right height so that I can get behind them and clean what was underneath which is usually a lot of dust and cobwebs and leaves and small twigs. The platform, and another even higher one on the other side where the washing-machine sits, is necessary because the floor slopes down from the edges of the wash-house to a drain in the middle. This does mean that if the washing-machine leaks and when I want to defrost the freezer, I don't have to worry about catching water. It can trickle away across the concrete floor and not be a problem. Unfortunately, the lack of a damp course in the walls of this ancient wet room means that mould grows so the cleaning involves mould killer, bleach and a scrubbing brush, especially as I don't do it very often – probably averaging about once every three years at the moment, about as often as I really thoroughly clean out the garden shed. When trying to imagine the Boggy Brae wash-house, don't think sparkling modern utility room, think very old, usually messy, stone shed.

Anyway, to get to the point. I found some bears. This one, made of some stony, plastery conglomerate, I found on the beach some years ago. He has been sitting in a cobwebby corner of the wash-house. He got a brush up yesterday. Today I found his friend so now they are together.

Beach bear and plastic bear

At the time I photographed them they were making sure I'd hung up all the gardening gloves and hats and ear warmers. Now they have a been allotted the corner of one of the steps that lead up into the kitchen from the old wash'us.

Wavy Bitter Cress

Here is my picture proving to myself, with the help of a blob of Blutak to keep it in position, that it is Wavy Bitter Cress (Cardamine flexuosa) that's growing on the terrace and not (yet, at any rate) Hairy Bitter Cress (Cardamine hirsuta). WavyBC has six stamens, Hairy only four.

Wavy Bitter Cress with six visible stamens

According to W Keble Martin, WavyBC can grown to about 45cm in height and HairyBC is smaller. My plant measured 13cm, which is actually shorter than the lower size Keble Martin quotes for HairyBC. BoggyBrae breaking the rules as usual?

Now follow two bad photographs illustrating that the stem of my Wavy Bitter Cress has about the same waviness as Roger Phillips' photograph of Hairy Bitter Cress.

Wavy stem of BoggyBrae Wavy Bitter Cress

Photo of Roger Phillips' photo of Hairy Bitter Cress
showing its similarly wavy stem

WavyBC is hairy too, by the way. This is where I need a dead straight face emoticon.

Bonfires, Swallows, and Cuckoo calls

The last two mornings I have been tackling this green pile of branches from an old cypress tree that we had cut down last summer. This picture was taken in early August. Since then the pile has settled a bit and I had shredded some of the green and piled the logs to carry on seasoning at the edge of the garden. They can be chopped and used in the stove in due course.

Wood pile on part of the climbing frame
that got bent by another falling tree.
It has come in handy for stacking wood on.

There's still quite a bit of the green pile to go but I can now see the Rattletrap over the top of it, which I couldn't a couple of days ago.

I decided to burn the green stuff (it burns very well) so the task involved grabbing branches by the horns, so to speak, and dragging them up the garden to near the bonfire site.

Dragged by the horns

I won't be able to stack much more on the climbing frame so I've started a 'wigwam' pile against the Grey Sallow I pruned last autumn.

During a break for a breakfast slab of home-made bread with butter, quince jam, and Cambozola cheese and a mug of tea, which I consumed sitting in the sun at the top of the companionway steps, I used a posh plastic bag that came home full of Fortnum & Mason biscuits when Toad returned from a London trip recently, to cover the nearside wing mirror of the Rattletrap. Bluetits were getting very angry with competitors that they saw in the mirror and were making a right mess of the car door!

Oh yes, swallows and cuckoo calls.... well, I had my first sighting of swallows flying over while I was eating my piece, and throughout the bonfiring exercise I could hear cuckoo calls from up the hill.