Around the block and Loch Imrich

The recent spell of warm weather (now gone, alas) has encouraged plenty of plants to flower so there are a lot of new blooms to spot. On a recent walk "around the block" i.e. around the roads circling the Primary school, I saw a patch of blue flowers in the playing field which turned out to be Slender Speedwell (Veronica filiformis).  

There are many Speedwells (their names all start with Veronica) so what is distinctive about this one?  

• Well, for a start, it is  slender with fine thin stems so it is floppy and lies low in the grass and forms mats.  
• The flowers are borne singly on long stems (pedicels). 
•  Like all Speedwell flowers, the flower has 2 stamens (see photo) and 4 petals but for the Slender Speedwell the lower petals tend to be whiter.  
• The leaves are kidney shaped and rounded.

Other flowers spotted on this short circuit and around Loch Imrich were Wood anemones (Anemone nemorosa), Lady's Smock or Cuckoo Flower (Cardamine pratensis)  and Common Dog-violets (Viola riviniana).

Wood Anemones at Loch Imrich

Wood Anemone

Lady's Smock

Dog-violet

Botany terms:
Stamen - the male part of the flower that has the pollen
Pedicel - a stalk bearing a single flower

On the moor

  On a sunny day, we went for a walk to Luibleathann bothy across the moor between Nuide and the Milton Burn.  The main vegetation is heather (Calluna vulgaris) which is just brown at the moment, but underneath was plenty of cowberry (Vaccinium vitis-idaea) with small pink buds.  These will open out to look like small white bells which will later form red berries. The leaves are shiny and evergreeen and the edges roll in towards the underside which is dotted.  Looking at the leaves is one way to distinguish it from other berried plants that grow on the moors.

Cowberry buds

Cowberry flowers

Cowberry leaves showing rolled-in edge and dots.

We stopped by a loop in the Milton Burn and there was a stand of bare bushes with catkins. 

Milton burn with a stand of Bog Myrtle beyond the man and dog!

From their position next to the burn I thought they would be Bog Myrtle (Myrica gale) but I had never seen the catkins before.  They gave out a puff of yellow pollen when touched.

Bog Myrtle catkins

Close up of Bog Myrtle catkin showing yellow pollen grains.

 West Highland Flora  says that plants are either all male or all female but can change sex from year to year! The pollen would make the plant I touched a male one.

There was not much else flowering, but some dead flower stalks of Yarrow (Achillea millefolia), identified from the small leaves at the base.

Yarrow - old flower stalk

Yarrow leaves

Luibleathann (Gaidhlig) probably Luib= loop, bend  + leathann= broad,  and it is by a loop in the Milton burn.

The second little white flower…

…is Thale cress, Arabidopsis thaliana. It flowers in the spring and one of the places it is flowering now in Newtonmore is  at the corner of  Old Glen Road and Creag Dhu Road, in a garden, opposite Glen Grove.

 This is a (not great) photograph of  one of the plants there leaning over the metal fence:

Thale cress

It could be mistaken for bittercress as the flowers are similar but it tends to be taller and the leaves at the base are simpler.

This photo shows the leaves of both plants:

Comparison of Bittercress and Thale cress leaves

As the plant develops the basal leaves wither away.

There is a lovely illustration in Flora Londinensis by William Curtis,  "Plates and descriptions of such plants as grow wild in the environs of London : with their places of growth, and times of flowering, their several names according to Linnæus and other authors : with a particular description of each plant in Latin and English : to which are added, their several uses in medicine, agriculture, rural economy and other arts"  which was published in 1777. (You can download the whole book for free from the link.)

The plant has had several name changes, in this case from Arabis to Arabidopsis.  Arabidopsis means resembling Arabis and Arabis means Arabian, though I can find no reason why it has this name. Thaliana is because it was first discovered by Johannes Thal in the sixteenth century.

Thale cress has a quick turnaround - its complete life cycle only takes 6 weeks - which makes it well suited to scientific research.  It was the first plant to have its genome completely sequenced. There is a whole internet site devoted to its research:  The Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR) and if you fancy having a look there is free access until 31 May 2020.

Links

Flora Londinensis  https://archive.org/details/FloraLondinensi6Curt

The Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR)

Two more little white flowers...

There are two plants flowering just now that are easy to overlook.  They are both small and grow in unpromising areas of dry and bare soil.  Add to that they they are only around for a few weeks and then seem to disappear until next Spring and it is not surprising that you may never have noticed them.  They have quite a lot in common: they belong to the brassica/crucifer group (so they have 4 petals), they both have white flowers, and short life cycles so that in 6 weeks they can have grown from seed, flowered, produced seeds and died.

The first one is Common Whitlowgrass (Erophila verna). It is tiny - the ones in the picture were about 3 cm tall.  They are growing at the side of the golf course track near Newtonmore Bowling Club.

Flowering Erophila verna plants showing the small rosette of leaves at base of stem

Erophila verna flower with 4 notched petals

When the flowers die they form green seed pods which ripen and split open.  The pod has two sides separated by a silvery membrane which is left behind after the seeds have fallen.  Just like Honesty but on a much smaller scale.

Erophila verna plant with seed pods - green when full, white when empty.  

The leaves have  withered away.

Erophila verna seed pod releasing seeds and leaving a silvery disc.

The scientific name is all about Spring:

Erophila means "lover of Spring," from the Greek

Verna means "Spring", from Latin

But what is the second plant?  I'll leave that until my next post!

Spring at last?

During the last week, I walked the circuit up Glen Banchor and back by the Calder Path and - at last- found some plants flowering.  Until now, my main distraction has been spotting frogs and frog spawn in the patch of water by the old birches.
On the Calder path, there were patches of Celandines in the damp areas.  Their full name is Lesser Celandine.   They grow in damp places and can be seen along the Spey and near streams.   They are easily spread by the tuberous roots which are transported with soil and there is a good batch of them in the tub by the Newtonmore Village Hall!
The petals are shiny yellow and vary in number, but there are always 3 sepals.  The leaves are deep green and heart or kidney shaped.

Lesser celandine flowers

Lesser Celandine leaves

The scientific name has recently been changed from Ranunculus ficaria  to  Ficaria verna.  Ranunculus is the buttercup family and you can see the resemblance as they both have shiny yellow petals, but in fact they are different families (genera) hence the change of name. Verna means Spring. As for Ficaria,  I can't improve on the description given in the Oxford 400 Plants:

"The name Ficaria ('little figs') was first used for the lesser celandine by the early-sixteenth-century German botanist and theologian Otto Brunfels. Brunfels's Herbarum vivae eicones (1530-1536) has the twin distinctions of being one of the earliest botanical books to contain naturalistic illustrations and to be banned by the Vatican as heretical. Brunfels's 'little figs' are overwintering tubers at the plant's base. Under the Doctrine of Signatures these tubers were thought to resemble haemorrhoids, hence another of the plant's common names, pilewort."

The Oxford site is fascinating  - don't you want to know what use medieval beggars made of the plant?

Links
Oxford 400 Plants Ficaria verna