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.