Yellow flowers

 The places  have visited recently seem to be full of yellow flowers.  There was a visit to a fantastic garden in Nethybridge and, more prosaically, exploring behind the Badenoch centre and looking at a cutting on the A9! But for a curious botanist/nature enthusiast there is always something to notice and learn from.

The garden in Nethybridge was open to raise money for charity, and it is always a pleasure to be able to explore someone else's garden and even better, there were cream teas...

Peacock butterfly and a very tattered Tortoiseshell - correction - it's a Comma

There were some large yellow flowers that the butterflies loved. The flower is Inula or Elecampane.  The Peacock butterflies looked fresh and iridescent whereas the poor old tortoiseshell  must have overwintered. UPDATE Thanks to Audrey for pointing out that it is not a tortoiseshell but a Comma.

Now for the less exciting visits.  I had recorded the plants behind the Badenoch Centre in the Spring, but there was a Hypericum (St John's Wort) that I could not record because I needed to see the flowers to narrow it down to the species. It is finishing flowering right now so I was just in time.

It turned out to be Tutsan (Hypericum androsaemum) which was a new find for me. The red fruits turn black (you can see some on the right hand side of the photo). Another yellow flower which is growing around the Badenoch Centre is Sticky Groundsel (Senecio viscosus).  It is a bit like Groundsel (Senecio vulgaris) but is taller, has petals and is ... sticky.

Here are the two together for comparison:

Sticky Groundsel on the left of each picture, and Groundsel on the right

The reason it is sticky is easier to see with some magnification The stem is coated with hairs which have blobs of sticky liquid on the ends.

The sticky hairs seem to have caught a few things

The last visit was to  the A9, a cutting where I have been before, but decided to revisit as parts of it have had new topsoil added, though I have no idea why.  The slopes have been covered with yellow flowers for months. The older areas look brown as the flowers are now fruiting, but the newly topsoiled areas are bright yellow.

Nearly all the plants are crucifers - the cabbage family that has 4 petalled flowers. Much of it was oil seed Rape (Brassica napus) and Treacle mustard (Erysimum cheiranthoides)

These yellow crucifers are hard to tell apart unless you have both the flowers and the seed pods.

As a bit of relief from the relentless yellow flowers, now is a good time to see Devil's-bit Scabious (Succisa pratensis).  It is mostly blue but can be found in shades of pink as well.

I have not quite finished with yellow things, but next time it will be a lichen!

Panthers in the garden?

I am seeing fungi popping up in the garden a bit earlier than I expected - maybe something to do with the wet July?

An unusual purple one popped up in my raised beds.  The beds are a new addition to the garden this year and have loads of compost (from my compost heaps) which might explain the new fungi.

 

I have recently bought a microscope and I am having a lot of fun looking at lichens and their spores (that will be another post!) so I thought I would try and see the spores from this fungus.  To get  spore print, you just put the cap, gill side down on a piece of paper and leave it for a few hours. I put a microscope slide there as well. The photo shows a different fungus but you get the idea.

Getting a spore print (from another mushroom)

The results were a bit underwhelming!  The spores are very small and round and that's about all I could make out. They really all very small - about 7 um (micrometres) long,  That's 7 millionths of a metre or 7 thousandths of a millimetre. So about 140 would fit in a millimetre if lined up end to end.

Mushroom spores

I tried to ID it and thought it might be Lepista sordida, but I got some help from an expert friend (thank you ,Liz) and it is Wood Blewit (Lepista nuda). There were some older specimens which had lost their purple colour on the cap but were still purple underneath (though not that obvious in the second photo).

A more regular visitor is this one which pops up in the lawn each year, probably growing on birch roots. 

It starts off as a round bump in the grass and then pushes up to the more usual mushroom shape with a circular pattern of beige  flecks.

The flecks are the remnants of  the bag or veil that enclosed the growing mushroom and which breaks as it grow up, leaving the flecks on the top and a collar around the stem.

There is a bulbous base to the stalk and the gills are white

I thought it was Panther Cap (Amanita pantherina).  So did I have panthers on the lawn? I'm afraid not - I was wrong again! It is The Blusher (Amanita rubescens), so called because the flesh turns redder when bruised.  I did try this test but hadn't realised that the colour change is quite gradual so I was too hasty in assuming it did not change.  It all goes to show that a little knowledge is not enough when identifying fungi.