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!

Gadding about

 Since I last posted, I have travelled about more in the last month than I have all year. First was a trip to Inverness to transport a friend who needed an operation at Raigmore hospital. This meant an early start and all day in Inverness until she was able to be discharged. An ideal opportunity to do some botanising in Inverness, rather than rushing around the shops.

I checked the online database of the BSBI to see which areas had not been surveyed much. This database is free to access for anyone and gives a list of the species that people have recorded. As a member of the public, you can look at a 2km square and see what plants occur. As a recorder, I have been granted special access and I  looked at the 1 km squares around Inverness. (You need the Grid Reference to search). NH6744 did not have many plants recorded so I decided to go and look there.  This is the area to the NW of Raigmore.

NH6744

At first sight, I could see why there were not many records. It is a housing area and the pavement edges have all been kept very bare either by weedkiller or neat homeowners. Wildflowers need a bit of neglect to thrive! I found a parking space by some flats which were surrounded by (unweeded!) gravel. The first thing that caught me eye was an ENORMOUS red clover, much bigger than the usual plants I see being about 40 cm tall.

The large red clover

Checking that it was Red Clover, I looked at the shape of the stipules - this is the name for little leaf-like growths that appear at the base of leaf stalks. You can see them in the above photo if you follow down from the clover leaf to where the leaf stalk joins the main stem.

Stipule - purple veined with a bristle point

I was happy that it was Red Clover (there is a similar plant called Zigzag Clover) but it still didn't look like the ones I see regularly.  A bit more research in the doorstop of a book called "Stace" revealed that there is an agricultural variety that is more vigorous and had hollow stems so I cut the stalk in half.

Hollow stem

So that convinced me that I had agricultural Red Clover (Trifolium pratense var. sativa) which was a new one for me. How it got to the gravel in front of the flats was a mystery...

A more promising spot was a bridge over the Mill Burn.

A selection of ferns on the bridge over Mill Burn

There were at least 4 different ferns in  a shady spot over the burn.

Maidenhair Spleenwort (Asplenium trichomanes)

Wall Rue (Asplenium ruta-muraria)

Hart's-Tongue (Asplenium scolopendrium) and another fern that I cannot identify

Interestingly, I saw exactly the same community on my trip to West London (Hampton Hill). This was on a wall over the railway and was very different as it was hot and dry and not where I expected to find ferns. The yellow flower is Yellow Corydalis (Pseudofumaria lutea) which likes growing on walls.

Other trips involved a look at plants on the banks of the River Tummel:

Fellow botanists in a field of cowslips

When I got home from London, there was a surprise waiting for me....  find out more in another post!