More happenings in the garden

 It seems as though Spring is trying to appear as there are bulbs starting to flower in the garden.

Crocuses, irises and snowdrops

However, not all the bulbs have succeeded in flowering this year as some have been cut off or dug up in their prime.

Remains of the crocuses

Something has dug them up.  I am a bit puzzled as to the culprit as they have not eaten the flowering shoots and I can still see most of the bulbs.  The suspects are:  a rabbit, a pheasant or a squirrel, all of which have been in the garden. I have put some of the discarded shoots in water to see if they will flower, but I am not very hopeful. Time to set up the trail camera to see if I can catch them in the act!

In my last post, I mentioned a small yellow lichen that I had found on a garden branch.  I was not sure what it was and have had (Zoom) discussions with more knowledgeable lichen people. One reason I had confused myself was that there were actually two different yellow lichens, both tiny.

The first one was  just a tiny bunch of yellow lobes with even tinier bumps on the edges. There are two examples in the photo, and the lead from a propelling pencil is an easy way to give an idea of the scale.

The pencil lead is 0.5mm wide

The brown discs with white rims at the bottom of the picture is a different lichen, probably Lecanora hybocarpa. The discs are apothecia (fruiting bodies that produce spores), whereas the yellow lichen did not have any.  A help when trying to name yellow lichens is to put a drop of potassium hydroxide (KOH) on them and see if you get a colour change.

A red reaction with KOH

This red reaction rules out a whole group of yellow lichens in the Candelaria family.  It looked as though this little one was a Xanthoria and eventually it was named as either Xanthoria candelaria or Xanthoria ucrainica.  I won't go into the details here but the two species are hard to distinguish from each other.  Even more confusingly, they have now been renamed as Polycauliona instead of Xanthoria!

The second similar lichen  was on the same branch but these ones had apothecia, and turned out to be Xanthoria (now Polycauliona) polycarpa.

The ruler is numbered in cm with mm divisions

 I rather went to town with some microscope investigations. I cut a very thin section of an apothecium to get some spores. The spores are dumbbell shaped inside and have the tongue twisting description of polarilocular. 

Microscope photos

I have more pictures but I expect that is enough detail for most of you!

A scarcity of lichens

 Whilst staying with family west of London, the house was opposite Sunbury Park, a green space with ancient trees as it once belonged to an courtier who was gifted it by Elizabeth I. To my surprise (and disappointment) the tree trunks were bare of lichen apart from a new one for me, Flavoparmelia caperata.  This is a very common lichen in the UK apart from the North of Scotland.

You can also see some tiny specks of yellow lichen, which is probably Xanthoria parietina, more of which later.  The lack of lichens is linked to the air quality  and pollution as we were in a highly populated area with plenty of traffic.  Some lichens manage to thrive in the extra nitrogen  and Xanthoria is one of them. There are more lichens in the park, as there is a booklet available:

I bought a copy at an excellent café and embroidery gallery in the Park. Two more of my pastimes catered for - eating and crafts! Most of the booklet was about fungi, though there were 10 or so lichens mentioned.  A poor count when I can find more than that in my garden. 

I also did the New Year Plant Hunt and managed to find 11 species flowering.  One was a species I had not seen before, Gallant or Shaggy Soldier. These are actually 2 different species Galinsoga parviflora (Gallant Soldier)  and Shaggy Soldier (Galinsoga quadriradiata)  and I think my specimen was Gallant Soldier as it did not have the glandular hairs of Shaggy Soldier, but  I could not be sure as it is a  plant I am not familiar with. The plant was introduced at Kew in 1796, having come from Peru. It seems that the name Gallant Soldier is a corruption of the Latin "Galinsoga".  You can find lots more about this plant in a blog post at Botany in Scotland here.

The other "foreign" plant I saw was in the park, and there were just leaves, no flowers. But very striking leaves.

With the help of a plant app, it turned out to be Italian Arum or Italian Lords and Ladies (Arum italicum).

Once I got home, I decided to tackle some of the Bird Cherry tree prunings that had been lurking on the picnic table, as I did not want to throw them away until I had looked at the lichens growing on them. So much joy in looking closely at ordinary things!

Branch from Bird Cherry, with 6 inch ruler for scale.  

You can see a few brown scars where I have already taken off some of the lichens to look at under the microscope. Most of the lichens were familiar to me. There were some Lecanoras, most of which have  a white background and "jam tart" fruits:

This one was Lecanora carpinea (now renamed Glaucomaria carpinea) which has a white frosty look (it's called pruina) and the discs turn egg yolk yellow when a drop of bleach is added (C+yellow).

Glaucomaria carpinea with a drop of bleach

Another really common one is Lecanora hybocarpa. To ID it you have to take a slice and put it under a microscope with polarising filters to see the crystals glowing.

Lecanora hybocarpa

The section shows small crystals along the top which "snow" downwards, and bigger crystals lower down in the green area.

Some  of the lichens were easier to ID just by looking, with no special tests needed. This warty one has big apothecia. It's Melanohalea exasperata.

A rather wet lichen

There was one tiny yellow lichen that I had not noticed before.  Here it is next to Xanthoria parietina. 

The bigger yellow lichen at the top is the  X. parietina but I was interested in the  small one on the bottom twig which is only a few millimetres across. I have spent several days investigating it and I think I know what it is now, but I will check in with some of my lichen friends on Zoom to confirm it.  I'll share the details in another post!

All in black...

 It has been a long time since my last post - partly because I have been busy and also because there are not many wildflowers out at this time of the year, so I have been looking at lichens instead. Although this blog has the title of Newtonmore Wildflowers, my interests have expanded since then but maybe not everyone who reads this is as fascinated by lichens as I have become.  And I did not want to bore you too much with my lichen explorations... but in the absence of any other news, here goes!

I was helping some friends move house from a rather isolated cottage on the back road to Laggan, and took the opportunity to get a few twigs to look at (for lichens) and managed to find and identify two that were new to me. They were both quite small  crustose lichens, which just means that they grow as a thin crust on the bark.  The first one was a white crust with black fruiting bodies (apothecia) on it:

It's quite hard to identify these kind of lichens as there are loads with white crusts and black fruiting bodies. One way is to take a slice of the black discs and look at it under a microscope.  This is easier to say than to do as they are tiny - just a millimetre across! Here's what I saw:

The top layer is the visible top of the apothecium which looked black in the first photo.  The white area underneath has the fancy name of the hymenium, and is where the lichen develops spores, ready to shoot them out to spread itself.  The spores are very obvious here as  the dark lines are groups of spores. With more magnification, you can see the structure of each spore.

They look like beans but have a line across the middle  This helped me decide on the ID - Amandinea punctata.

The second lichen on the twig looked very different.  It was still only a tiny crustose patch but it looked a dirty brown-green.

Those round structures are fruiting bodies (apothecia) as well but this time they are like jam tarts with a different colour rim around the dark centre. Out came the razor blade again, and I took a slice through one of them.

The brown bit along the bottom is the bark, and the slice (or section) shows that this lichen also has dark spores with a line across the middle though the shape and size were a bit different. The red bar on the photo is 10 microns long which is one hundredth of a millimetre.  So that's why you need a microscope!

This lichen turned out to be Rinodina sophodes.

Another trophy from the removals was a piece of black plastic from the hen's enclosure roof, which was covered with lichens, so I couldn't resist taking a piece. You may think it's a bit odd to be enthused about a piece of plastic but it is covered with lichens for the curious mind to investigate!

I'll do another post to tell you what I have found on it so far, but the first thing I did was to shine a UV torch on it, and I'll leave you with the colourful result.

The frog spawn arrives - and an interesting twig

Frog spawn has appeared today in my pond – quite hard to see in the photo because of the reflections of trees and sky, but  you can make out the tops of two clumps with plenty more under the surface.

Frog spawn in my pond

I walked round Loch Imrich today as well, and a small amount has appeared there too.

Frog spawn in Loch Imrich

While walking round the loch I picked up one of the many fallen twigs on the ground as it looked to have a good selection of lichens on it.  It was a section of a larch branch  about 25cm (10 inches) long and 15mm (1/2 inch) diameter and I counted 8 different lichens on it, all of which are fairly common locally. There was one species it did not have so I picked up the much thinner twig, at the top of the photo which has an example of it.

How do we know it is a larch twig? Well, apart from the fact that it was underneath some of the larch trees that surround the loch, it has the characteristic nobbles along it.  The roughness of the larch twigs encourages a good growth of lichens, presumably because the spores or fragments of lichen are easily caught and trapped in the bark.  Larch has an acid bark (like pines and birches) and lichens can be quite fussy about where they grow – some prefer acid bark and some prefer less acid bark like that on oaks and hawthorn. I have put some numbers on the photo and I’ll give a list of the different names of the lichens.

1.   1 An Usnea (Beard lichen) probably Usnea subfloridana which is the most common locally.

2.    2   Hypogymnia physodes which has inflated lobe tips so it feels quite bouncy when you press it.

3.    3 Platismatia glauca – quite big grey-blue “leaves” which stick up and are brown underneath.

4.     4 A bit more of 1 (Usnea) and 2(H.physodes)

5.     5 Tuckermanopsis chlorophylla – again more leaflike but smaller than 3 and a browny green colour.

6.      6 A Parmelia  - probably P. sulcata but a bit too young to be sure.

7.      7 Bryoria fuscescens – a horsehair lichen

8.       8Evernia prunastri – this one has been used for a perfume fixative.

9.      9 On the thin twig is a look alike for Evernia prunastri but is a darker colour and covered in tiny fingerlike projections(isidia) and is Pseudevernia furfuracea.

Lichens x art

 Apart from my interest in lichens and botany, I am also a keen crafter, using textiles. While I have been "confined to barracks" because of my ankle injury, I have been occupying  myself with craft projects and sorting out my lichen collection - both photographs and samples (which are now all neatly stored in a shoebox in folded paper packets).

  I have been having fun with an internet site called Deepdreamgenerator  which  transforms your photographs by crossing them with the style of another picture.

Caloplaca ferruginea

I took one of my lichen pictures and used the styles they have online and generated these results:

I really liked the transformations and I think they could be inspirational when wanting to make art from lichens. I also tried using one of my own craft works as the "style". This is a rug I made for my grandson (using a technique called rug hooking).

.

This produced an interesting texture, a sort of rug hooked lichen: 

Here is one using a different lichen: 

a Parmelia 

I can feel some inspiration coming on for my next rug....

Oaks and Acorns

 For the first time, I have noticed plenty of acorns on the oaks trees that I have seen alongside the Calder on the Wildcat Trail, and on a walk on Kinrara Estate (near Aviemore).  Thirty years ago, my daughter wanted an oak tree for her birthday and we looked in vain for some local acorns in the woods at Kincraig but failed to find any that year. We bought a sapling and it is still growing in the garden - and it is her birthday today...

Oaks at Kinrara

There are two kinds of common oaks (there are actually lots of kinds of oak but let's keep it simple!) called the English Oak (Quercus robur) and the Sessile Oak (Quercus petraea).  The latter is more common in the North.  The word "sessile" means seated and when used about a plant it means that there is no stalk or a very short one.  Confusingly, the sessile part of the name  in Sessile Oak does not refer to the leaves, but to the acorns - it has acorns that sit on the twig, but leaves that have a stalk. Whereas the English Oak has acorns with a stalk and the leaves are sessile! I must admit that I find it hard to judge between them from that characteristic. Perhaps an easier way is to look at the shape of the leaves. The Sessile Oak has wavy lobes whereas the English Oak leaves are a bit irregular. I think most of what I see is the Sessile Oak but apparently there is quite a bit of variation with the leaves like one sort and the acorns like the other! So maybe is it not surprising that I get confused. However, they are lovely trees to look at, whatever their name.

The bark on the thick trunks was quite furrowed and when I went for a closer look, there were greener patches with tiny black dots.

The furrowed bark (with a hand for scale!)

The little black dots turned out to have tiny stalks, like little nails.

This is not a fungus but a pinhead lichen called Calicium viride  which is common on oaks.  It was the first time I have found it. 

 I also found a dead leaf with a white "pearl" on it. This is probably a gall caused by an insect such as an oak gall wasp and the larva develops inside and makes the tree grow these strange structures.

I assumed it was long dead and cut it open - but there was a larva inside (oops).

There is another gall called the Oak Apple Gall which is a bigger brown sphere, and was used in the past to make black ink that was used on medieval manuscripts.  There is a great video by the British Library showing how it is made here.

Lichens by water

If you are not interested in lichens, then this is not the post for you!  During the spell of hot weather when family were visiting, we went  to the Falls of Truim for some swimming, paddling, and lichen hunting.  I remember swimming there in the 1970s,  but it was not exactly as I remembered it (maybe some changes over 50 years...). The descent to the river was much steeper than expected (one approach even had a rope to hang on to!) and the dry, dusty surface was slippy.  Once down there though, the rocks were pleasantly warm to sit on, the water deliciously cooling, and there were several lichens to intrigue me.

The rocks that would normally be under water were scoured clean of any growth

Just above the sloping  rocks was a vertical step and several lichens grew there. 

A variety of different lichens on the vertical "step"

Most white crusts are too difficult for me to put a name to, unless they have some distinguishing features. One looks a possibility as it is covered in round fruiting bodies.

There was also a blackish one above it and an orange one below it.

There are several lichens that grow by streams and are often submerged when the water level rises so I am wondering if these might be some of them.

The most interesting lichen was on a vertical face higher up the slopes and was abundant.

 It looked like a complicated bundle of little leaves, quite contorted and a grey colour when dry.  I tried spraying it with water and it turned a muddy green - which turned out to be a useful characteristic.

Lichen when wet

A closer photo showed each lobe to be covered with tiny black pimples.

The black "pimples"

Some of the pimples have a small hole in the centre:

I think this is Dermatocarpon intestiniforme.  The muddy green colour when wet distinguishes it from a very similar lichen called Dermatocarpon luridum which goes bright green when wet.  The pimples are the fruits, called perithecia, mainly underneath but with the top surface emerging from the lobes to release the spores.

In August, I went down to the Durham Dales to meet up with my daughter and family.  Not much botany got done as I had an almost 3 year old to enjoy, but we went on plenty of walks.  On one walk near a village called Wolsingham, we enjoyed going over a stream via stepping stones. Some of the rocks in the stream had vivid green patches which we noticed and thought it might be a liverwort.  I didn't take a photo unfortunately... When I got home, I saw a very similar photo in a lichen book - it is probably Dermatocarpon lucidum which is the greener form of the Dermatocarpon by the Truim.  You can just about make it out on the photos. It is amazing how much detail is captured on a phone.

And the moral of the story is ALWAYS take a photo of anything interesting!