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!)