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!