A'lichening at Glenmore and Cairngorm

I wrote a long post which somehow got deleted so this one will be a bit briefer!

I spent several days at Glenmore Lodge on a lichen course which I had helped to organise. The weather forecast was dire but we escaped with just one downpour which was fortunately just as we got back to our cars.

The format of each day was to go for a walk in the morning to different habitats and then spend the afternoon with our microscopes, as many lichens can't be identified without finding spores.

Most things about lichens are small so you have to get up close and personal to see them well.

Maybe something interesting on this dead log?

Or this sycamore?

Or these big rocks?

Lichens are quite fussy about where they grow - some like rocks, others like trees, others like dead logs. 

Even a dead stump can attract a host of lichenologists!

My garden is full of flowers and  wildlife at the moment. There was a small (5cm) Common Newt under a log.

It was near the pond - which might explain why my tadpoles disappeared as newts eat tadpoles.

A Bee Beetle was on a Scabious flower.

And a pair of blackbirds have been following me around as I garden, collecting food.  Here is the female in the compost heap.

My bamboo plant has flowered this year for the first time. This might be bad news as they can die after that.  They are a grass, and I have some news about grasses in my next post.

Wet, Wet, Wet

 I have just come back from a week on the West Coast at Lochaline, with friends from the Inverness Botany Group.  We stayed in the very grand Ardtornish House, in the South Wing, where the hall was  the size of some people's flats!

The first day was relatively dry but the rest of the week was very wet - but we went out every day botanising, with time for other interests such as lichens (for me) and moths.  The moth trap caught some bigger moths, which look very hairy in closeup.

Moths: a Drinker and a Buff Ermine

I was very taken with the variety of seaweeds along the coast, especially this yellow collection, with different shapes. Seaweeds are algae - similar to the algae in lichens, but bigger.

Of course there were plenty of plants as well, especially those that like boggy conditions, like the yellow Bog Asphodel and Butterwort clinging to the rock where the rain drained.

It was so wet that newts had taken up residence in one of the puddles on the track up the Black Glen.

Two newcomers to the garden

 An unfamiliar plant popped up in the garden, near the compost bins.

Yellow flowered mystery plant

It had double yellow flowers and big lobed leaves.

A bit of research named it as Greater Celandine, the double flowered version. (Chelidonium majus "Flore pleno") I've never seen it before, either in the wild or anyone's garden.  How it got there is a mystery.  It is not much like the usual Lesser Celandine  (Ficaria verna) which is in the Butttercup family whereas Greater Celandine is in the Poppy family. Other poppies have sap called latex and Greater celandine has latex too when you break a stem - but it is a bright orange! The picture doesn't really do it justice.

Orange latex of Greater Celandine

Lesser Celandine

The name Celandine comes from the Latin and Greek words for swallow as it was supposed to flower when the swallows arrived and die when they left. This would make sense for the Greater Celandine, but not for the Lesser celandine which blooms in early spring. You can see the root in the scientific name of Greater Celandine (Chelidonium majus as  chelīdonius  is Latin for "relating to the swallow."

Another nice surprise was under a log.

It is a baby newt.  It is very small, probably about 4cm (1.5 inches)long, as you can see by the old sycamore helicopter wings near it.   I have never seen newts in our pond, but maybe they are there after all.  Like frogs, they start off as tadpoles and then leave the pond.  The etymology of newt is interesting as it was originally "an ewt" but now we say "a newt." Even longer ago it was known as an eft. In some words the "n" has moved the other way: "an apron" was originally " a napron"