A slime mould and a flower

Today we had the first snow of autumn which turned the lawn white and produced a thin crust of ice on the standing water.  So it was a surprise to find a whole heap of flowers blooming.  Literally, a whole heap, as my walk took me past a heap of topsoil in the working area/dump at the back of the local golf course. I don't know where the soil had come from but it was covered with Bugloss (Anchusa arvensis or now Lycopsis arvensis.) The older name is the one you'll need for most field guides if you want to look it up.

A heap of Bugloss

It is a very bristly plant, and if it reminds you a bit of Borage that's because they are both in the Borage family, Boraginaceae,  along with Comfrey and Forget-me-nots.  They all have 5 petals, usually joined into a tube and encased in a calyx of 5 sepals. When it comes to the seeds though, each flower produces 4 seeds or nutlets. The description in my Wild Flower Key book says " bristles with bulbous bases" and flower "throat closed by 5 hairy scales." This is difficult to see with a hand lens but you can see these features with a x20 microscope.

Blue arrow showing bristle with bulbous base, and centre of Bugloss flower with hairy scales.

Whilst doing some tidying up in the garden, I came across a slime mould growing on a lilac sucker. I've written about slime moulds in a previous post as they don't fit into the neat categories we like to use such as animal, plant or fungus. I found a really good series of articles at  https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/lifesci/outreach/slimemold/    including how to grow one and keep it as a pet (!) I decided to cut the piece of lilac and take photos every day. Here is the life cycle of a slime mould (from the site above):

 Here is the one I found on  4 November 2024.

You can see the original slime phase (plasmodia) at the bottom of the stick. I was hoping to see some dramatic changes and it did change to start with, from an yellow fingery mass to a white one.

The same slime mould a day later

However, since then it hasn't changed (now 17 November), though I was hoping it would go black and develop some spores. But I did manage to find another clump in the same area of the garden that had already started making spores.

I shook it over a glass slide and the spores looked like black dust.  Under the microscope they looked like spheres ornamented with lots of tiny spikes. 

Spherical slime mould spores

They measured about 10-11 microns across.  A micron is a millionth of a metre or a thousandth of a millimetre so 100 of the spores would fit into a millimetre. Tiny! This spells the end of the slime mould but the spores will disperse and germinate if they land somewhere damp and will hatch into a kind of one celled creature called an amoeba (do you remember them from O level biology?). When it finds a suitable mate they will merge together and start another slime mould. I thought they were quite rare as I don't see them very often, but apparently the spores are everywhere and if you get some rotten wood and  keep it damp in a container, you will probably start a slime mould growing.  Go to the Warwick site for more details!

 

Fame? and Dundreggan

Unusually, I have featured in 2 publications this month.  The BSBI News and a BLS publicity flier.  These are hardly likely to be read by the vast majority of people (just like this blog!) The BSBI mention was for a plant I found on the waste ground between Church Terrace and Clune Terrace.

You might well ask, why bother to record a plant that has probably originated in someone's garden and then grown when they dumped some garden waste.  I suppose the answer is that if it became established or even invasive, it is good to know where it started off.

My other appearance is rather anonymous and I didn't spot it until my husband pointed it out. I'm the one in the turquoise anorak in the bottom left photo.

The pictures have come from a lichen course I went on in Fife last year.  It was called a LEAF course though I can't remember what the acronym stood for - basically it was for people who had done a LABS course to enable them to meet up and improve their skills.  Now I will have to explain what a LABS course is!  Lichens for Absolute Beginners.  This was an online course that got me started on learning about lichens in 2022.  It was really helpful for me so I volunteered to run the course myself for newbies and I am about to start with my third LABS group.  If you want to learn about lichens, you know whom to ask!

Dundreggan Rewilding Centre was the venue for a field meeting for the BLS last week.  This is when lichen enthusiasts get together and visit various sites to record what we find and to learn more, especially as there are usually some professional lichenologists attending who are generous with their expertise. Dundreggan is in Inverness-shire, on the road alongside the North side of Loch Ness.  I really enjoyed the week, though the only wildlife I came back with was  a bad cold and several ticks... all dealt with now.   One of the sites we visited was a graveyard near Glen Urquhart with the appropriate name of Kilmore Cemetery!

You would not believe how long keen lichen hunters can spend looking at one tree! Up high, down low and round the back...

Lichen hunters barking up the (right) tree

We were very fortunate with the weather which was clear and bright and we avoided Storm Ashley which was the next weekend. The good thing about having an interest in any aspect of nature is that it gets you outside into areas you might not normally visit.  As well as looking at trees and rocks, there was a lovely water fall on one of the Dundreggan walks, and the centre has an attractive avenue of limes that were just dripping with lichens.

The avenue of lime trees and a lichen called Pectenia plumbea

A waterfall on the Allt a'Choire Bhuidhe

But you don't have to travel far to see lichens if you live in Newtonmore - there are plenty to see here.

Back to Spey Dam - with friends

My lonely lichen life (!) was enlivened by meeting up with 2 keen lichenologists that I had only previously met on Zoom.  As they were up on holiday locally we arranged a lichening trip together and went to Spey Dam and Laggan Churchyard.  We were blessed with the most glorious of days. Sunny, clear and no wind which made for fantastic reflections in Loch Spey.

Loch Spey

My husband also came along and took the not so flattering pictures of  us looking closely at lichens!

This has led to some discussion as to the collective name for a group of lichenologists - a "peer", a "bottoms-up, a "myopia""... maybe you have some (polite) suggestions that you can leave in the comments!

On the way back, we called in at Laggan Churchyard.

The church is for sale for only £35,000.  A bargain - though you would need funds to do it up and install water.  The graveyard is not included in the sale and I think it belongs to, or is managed by, Highland Council.  I love the graveyard as it is full of a great variety of lichens, mainly on the headstones.  Because the headstones are made of different stones, mainly granite or sandstone, each kind of rock hosts its own community of lichens. The church would make a great Lichen Education Centre!

One new (to me) lichen I found in the church yard was an Umbilicaria,.  These are leaf like lichens which attach to the rock at one point (like an umbilicus). Some of them have black fruiting bodies (apothecia) which look like coiled licorice (the scientific term for this is gyrose).

In close up it reminds me of a biscuit with raisins it it.  It's called Umbilicaria torrefacta.

From further away it looks like something that has been deep fried and left in too long and burnt.

On the way home, I called in at Biallidbeg cemetery and was impressed by the very simple but ingenious gate closer.

Look at the big stone hanging on the left.  It is attached to the centre  of the top rail of the gate.  

When you open the gate it raises the stone so when you let go, the stone  falls and closes the gate. Just genius!

Back Home

 After returning from Berlin, I was blessed with both glorious weather and the return of my luggage which had been lost for a week! The sunshine meant I saw more butterflies, some were old favourites like the Peacock and Red Admiral, but also a new one for me, the Speckled Wood which was resting on the ground by the Bowling Green.  I am afraid the photos are nothing special.  I tend to take photos to remind me of what I saw and when, so I can record them, and the phone is always handy and records the date as well.

Red Admiral on a fuchsia in my garden, Peacock on Devils-bit-scabious at Spey Dam, and Speckled Wood on the dirt at Newtonmore

On a walk along the Coffin Road (at the South end of Newtonmore), the young swallows were lining up on the fence wires.

Whilst my husband was at the dentist, I took a stroll to the old Primary School site which is now abandoned and overgrown and recorded a few plants. Some I think were remnants of "garden" planting at the school.  There were Everlasting Sweetpeas, and the Scotch Burnet Rose which used to have the lovely name of Rosa pimpinellifolia but is now called Rosa spinosissima.  It has ball shaped flowers and then black hips.  It is too late for the flowers but there were plenty of hips which are rather attractive with their ebony globes and red ends which are remnants of the original rose.

Scotch Burnet Rose

The pavement was covered in a succulent, Sedum acre, Biting stonecrop, which would have had yellow flowers but now just has the white starry sepals.

It had also decided to form a miniature garden in a bit of litter about the size of a pencil sharpener.

Taking advantage of the glorious weather, I drove up to Spey Dam and looked at some lichens on the rocks. The views were glorious.  And the lichens were interesting - but I have still to identify many of them, so that will have to wait for another time.

I was not the only visitor - plenty of walkers, and a previous explorer seemed to have left their trainers behind...

Off to foreign parts!

 I have just come back from a week in Berlin, visiting family.  It was my first visit  and the temperature was in the thirties so a bit of a change from the chilly Scottish weather we left behind.  I was surprised at the number of trees in Berlin, lining the streets and in parks.  Just behind my son's flat were huge beech trees where we saw woodpeckers and red squirrels.  When walking across one park, I found a nut on the ground which looked different from anything I had seen before.

Turkish Hazel

It turned out to be a hazel nut from a Turkish Hazel, Corylus colurna.  The long extensions to the cup were covered in sticky (glandular) hairs.  You can see them best in the picture bottom left as white hairs with black blobs on top.  The Hazel trees that grow locally in Newtonmore are Corylus avellana but there are not that many of them.  The one I found at the North end of Newtonmore had a lichen that I had not found before, called Arthonia radiata. It is the speckled looking one at the top of the photo.

Hazel twig with lichens (5mm squares in background)

The closeup shows the black apothecia (fruiting bodies) which look like squashed flies!  The spores that are inside the black parts are in a small sack called an ascus.  Each spore has 3 walls  across it and looks like a little worm.  Different lichens have different looking spores so it helps to see them to give the lichen the correct species name.

Spores

Back in Berlin, I saw very few lichens, probably because of pollution.  I did however get a guided tour of the lichen Herbarium in the Botanic Gardens from Harrie Sipman, the curator. The Herbarium stores thousands (240,000) of samples of lichens from across the world. There were 3 large rooms in the basement kitted out with rolling banks of shelves.  Upon the shelves were brown boxes, labelled with a lichen name and arranged in alphabetical order.

Harrie and the collection

Inside each box are samples  of lichen, with information on where and when it was collected and by whom.

The picture shows the samples of a lichen called Anisomeridium albisedum. You can see that the handwritten name on the brown packet starts with Ditremis not Anisomeridium.  This is one of the hazards of lichen names - they keep changing them when something like DNA analysis shows that it should be renamed.  It must be a bit of a nightmare to have to relocate the box if the new name starts with a different letter!

The rooms are kept at a constant temperature and there are sprinklers in the ceiling which pump out nitrogen rather than water in case of fire.  In fact, flooding the room with nitrogen is a way to kill any bugs that may have got in there.  New specimens are put in a freezer for a week before they are allowed in, in order to kill any wildlife in the samples.

 I also have a small shoebox of lichens I have collected so I can try to identify them. I was rather amused to see that they had a whole shelf  labelled as below:

In other words, ones they couldn't identify!

As it was pouring with rain, we didn't walk round the rest of the  gardens but visited the glasshouses.  I enjoyed a series of aquaria which showed underwater plants.  The one with corals (and fish)  was stunning.

Home and Away (Part2)

 I had helped to organise a field trip for Inverness Botany Group, which was a walk up "The Big Glen" in Golspie to look at ferns with an expert (Dr Heather McHaffie). The weather forecast was pretty grim so we were all dressed up in waterproofs, but apart from the odd shower, it was much better than expected.

Heather explaining about ferns to some well wrapped up botanists!

One of the ferns we were looking at grows on walls and trees and rocks, and is a Polypody.  It is quite common - here's one I found  locally near Pattack Falls.

Those round brown spots on the underside are called sori and hold little packets of spores. The colour and shape are key features when you are trying to identify ferns, as different species have different shaped sori. I found out that there are three different polypodies, which look much the same, but have different spores (this is starting to sound like lichens!). I took a little bit home and put it under the microscope.

Close up of sori on polypody

The orange blobs are made up of lots of little spheres, which - if you look closely - have a wormlike strip along one side, and are full of tiny bean shaped spores

Here's one of the spores, much enlarged:

So what is the purpose of the wormlike strip?  When conditions are right, it pings open the sphere into 2 halves and the spores are flung out. AS you will see my video skills are minimal but if you have the patience,watch the 27 second video and keep your eyes on the bottom right to see a "ball" opening and then flinging the spores out .  It reminded me of a trebouchet (one of those siege engines that lob boulders at castles!)

On the way home we  passed a sandbank with basking harbour seals.

At Embo, there are some striking sandstone rocks and a long sandy beach. 

Embo beach

I have been reading a book titled Sea Bean by Sally Huband who took up beachcombing when she moved to Shetland, so I kept my eyes open for any finds.  The beach was very clean with no piles of plastic, though I did find a little monster...

The path to the beach was covered with a sprawling bindweed.  To identify it, I had to look closely at the green and brown portion (sepals and bracts) cupping the flower.  The two outer bracts didn't overlap. This arrangement identified it as Hedge Bindweed (Calystegia sepium).  The other similar bindweed is Large Bindweed (Calystegia silvatica)

Large Bindweed on left, Hedge Bindweed (at Embo) on the right

Large Bindweed can get very large - here's some climbing up the  trees near Clune Terrace Play Park in Newtonmore.

In Newtonmore, you can also find Bindweed  growing in the Jack Richmond Memorial Park and by Loch Imrich.

What, a whole post and no lichens? Maybe in the next post!

Home and Away (Part 1)

 I have been trying to catch the rabbit that is eating my plants but it ignored the lettuce in my live trap. However, I was delighted to catch (and release) a hedgehog, which is very welcome

Some of the the foxgloves in the garden deviated from the usual form.  Foxgloves are indeterminate flowerers - which means that they keep on flowering, producing more and more flowers on the top of the spike.  However, sometimes things go wrong and they just produce one enormous flower  on top and then stop.

Left to right: normal foxglove, strange form, and both together.

The bees seem perfectly happy with either form of the flower.

 A few weekends ago, I helped at a workshop organised by the BSBI on identifying composite flowers - these are ones in the daisy family but it covers a huge range from thistles, to daisies, to dandelions.  The trickiest ones to put a name to are the yellow ones which might look a bit like dandelions but aren't. There are plenty around at the moment.  The verges of the A9 are full of yellow flowers (which you pass too quickly to get a good look at) but just now most of them are  Autumn Hawkbit (Scorzoneroides autumnalis).  Here's one I found growing along the Main Street in Newtonmore.

Autumn Hawkbit

It's a bit like a smaller more elegant  dandelion, but the main characteristic to look out for is that the green part under the flower tapers gradually into the stem.

Last weekend I was involved in the Garden Club Show, held in Newtonmore Village Hall, and by the fire exit outside there were a lot of weeds - including some of those pesky yellow flowers. Feeling confident after the workshop, I identified some of them.

Here is a fairly delicate one that is easy to ID because it only has 5 petals and has lots of branches so it looks quite airy and delicate. It's called Wall Lettuce (not edible as far as I know) (Mycelis muralis) and was not common round here several years ago, but now it is all through the village.

Wall Lettuce

Another delicate one, just a few inches tall, was Smooth Hawk's-beard (Crepis capillaris). This time, the green part under the flower is more flask shaped rather than tapered.

Smooth Hawk's-beard

All these yellow flowers produce seeds with little hairy parachutes which are blown around in the wind, which explains how successful they are at spreading themselves around.

If you would like a free guide to plants found growing in pavements, the Natural History Museum has one you can download from here.  There is also a free ID guide for plants that grow on walls.

 I have just come back from a trip to Golspie to look at ferns so there will be more about what I saw in my next post (and of course, lichens, but I still need to work on them!)