Apples

  I have just finished harvesting the apples in my garden, and have been noticing "wild" apple trees in the area. There is one on the Lower section of Newtonmore Golf Course, about 15m from the fairway.  

It is  a big spreading tree and the apples are a yellow and red colour and could be spotted from some distance away. 

I tried one - it looked fine and smelt  quite fragrant but tasted unpleasant.  Not sharp or sour like an unripe apple, more a strong bitter taste from the skin. How did the tree get there?  I suppose that someone threw an apple core away and one of the seeds germinated. You might wonder why it did not taste like the original apple.  I think the answer is that the blossom on the garden or commercial tree, can be pollinated by any other tree, such as a crab apple, and although the fruit will be true to type, the seeds will be a mixture between two trees and not come true.

There are two other "wild" apple trees near the Folk Museum and alongside the Kingussie Road. They are probably apple core throwouts as well. The first one is quite close to the entrance and had lots of tiny apples on it and plenty on the ground.

The second one is much older and is alongside the cycle path.  I thought at first that it had no apples at all, but there were one or two very small ones.

Here are the apples from all three trees:

You might wonder why I have put quotes around "wild".... Strictly speaking the wild apple is Malus sylvestris, the Crab Apple, and the tree that is grown in gardens and orchards is just known as Apple, Malus domestica. The Crab Apple is native and the fruits are much smaller, 2-3cm, about an inch, across. The Apple is the result of breeding and when the tree is self sown the apples tend to be small, yellowish and sour - which would fit the one I tasted. Another difference is that the leaves on the domestic apple are hairy underneath - and when I checked my garden apple trees, this was certainly true.  When I looked at the "wild" apples I could not see any hairs but whether they were just hard to spot, I don't know. Maybe the one with really small apples is a Crab Apple.  It's hard to tell.

In 2018, I heard an interesting talk by Markus Ruhsam who works at the Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh,

How much pure wild Crab Apple (Malus sylvestris) is there in Scotland?

His PowerPoint presentation is available online, just click on the title above. Lots of photos!

They analysed the genetic make-up of different apples.  The Braeburn is 99% M. domestica whereas the Cox's Orange Pippin is about half-half M. domestica and M. sylvestris.

The Bramley (which grows well in my garden in Newtonmore) originated from a pip sown by Mary Ann Brailsford in 1809. The original tree is still alive and has been bought by Nottingham Trent University. Here is a clip from an article giving the history.  The full article can be accessed here.

 In 1809, a pip planted by Mary Ann Brailsford grew into a tree that bore strange fruit. The apples were large, hardy and sour, which drew the attention of seventeen-year-old Henry Merryweather, a local gardener and nurseryman who offered to take cuttings from the tree and cultivate them in his own nursery. As Brailsford had sold the property and the original tree to her son-in-law Bramley, Merryweather was asked to name the new breed in the lad’s honour.

Cotoneasters again

 I decided to have a go at identifying the cotoneasters along the school wall and  fence. I compared them to the one in my garden, which I am fairly confident is Wall Cotoneaster (Cotoneaster horizontalis).  There was a similar spreading one on the school wall, near the car entrance. I'll call it NPS1 (Newtonmore Primary School 1) as I don't have a name for it yet. There is also a more upright one which I'll call NPS2. Here are the three together:

Wall Cotoneaster and NPS1 and NPS2

Wall Cotoneaster and NPS1 look pretty similar. NPS1 has the same herringbone pattern as Wall Cotoneaster. 

Cotoneaster NPS1 on School wall 

 Is it the same species? Here are the leaves of both next to each other:

Wall Cotoneaster leaf and NPS1 leaf (on right)

As well as being different shapes, the Wall Cotoneaster has a little point at the tip and NPS1 doesn't.  The undersides are different as well; NPS1 is much hairier underneath.

So now I know they are different but I still don't have a name for the school one (apart from NPS1)! 

The berries are different  sizes as well:

Berries of Wall Cotoneaster, NPS1 and NPS2 (on 1mm graph paper)

NPS2 is more upright and the berries are oval rather than round. The leaves are bigger as well especially on the newer shoots.

NPS2

NPS2

And I don't know what this one is either!  Part of the problem is that you really need the flowers to help you work through the key, and at this time of year, there are no flowers.

Being somewhat impatient by nature, I thought I would see if I could get any hints from elsewhere.  As they have been planted as landscaping, I tried googling commercial planting of Cotoneasters. This took me to a fact sheet on Cotoneasters by the Landscape Institute.  This was interesting reading as it is about the problems that Cotoneasters cause in the wild where they spread rapidly and choke out native plants.  The berries are eaten by birds and then grow where they are dropped (in droppings!). The reason they are such popular landscaping plants is that they will grow in very poor soils.  Here is their table of the culprits:

Looking at the options, I wonder if my two mystery Cotoneasters could be C. integrifolius and C. simonsii.  Why not C. microphyllus?   Only because one of my books (Stace) said that most IDs of microphyllus were usually integrifolius! So now I will have to wait until next year to find out if I have guessed correctly.

Mystery Trees and Bugs

 While walking along the Spey, I saw a tree I could not name and when I went for a closer look, there was an interesting looking bug on the leaf.

With some searching on the internet I found a similar picture which named it as Hawthorn Shieldbug - so it really is a bug!

Hawthorn Shieldbug nymph
https://www.activenaturalist.org.uk/shieldbug/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Hawthorn-Shieldbug-2-768x856.png

Asking for advice from the FaceBook page of the Inverness Botany Group, Highland and Moray Wild Flowers, produced confirmation from Stephen Bungard, who has his own blog, Plants of Skye, Raasay & The Small Isles .  Stephen seems very knowledgeable on all sorts of things - flowers, fish, insects...

I know very little about Shieldbugs, but there are plenty of sites to visit.  What I saw was not the adult but one of the younger stages - a nymph - and as they grow and shed their "skins" they change their appearance so can be tricky to ID. Here is a good set of pictures. The Hawthorn Shieldbug has the rather unpleasant scientific name of  Acanthosoma haemorrhoidale.

The mystery Cotoneaster growing in the centre - with the red berries

Now that the bug was named, there was still the tree to be identified. I had no joy trying to name it from my books, but again I was given help - it was a Cotoneaster (pronounced Co-TONE-ee-aster).  Looking in one of my doorstop sized books (Stace: New Flora of the British Isles) listed 86(!) species.  Luckily I was given pointers from Stephen, and Ian Green (both Vicecounty Recorders with the BSBI) that it was probably Hollyberry Cotoneaster (C.bullatus) or Bullate Cotoneaster (C. rehderi).  In order to decide which, I went back and took a sample twig with berries and eventually decided it was probably Hollyberry Cotoneaster.

Hollyberry Cotoneaster

Hollyberry Cotoneaster leaf and stalk

Hollyberry Cotoneaster leaf with hairy underside

Since then I have spotted a few of these trees in people's gardens along Glen Road.  I have Wall Cotoneaster (C. horizontalis) growing in my garden from a bird-sown seed.  It is covered in bees in the summer and has red berries and orange red leaves in the autumn.

Wall Cotoneaster

The herringbone pattern of the small branches coming off the main stem is typical of this Cotoneaster.

Wall Cotoneaster

Newtonmore Primary School has a hedge of a more upright Cotoneaster but I think I will leave identifying that till another day!

Bindweeds

 Bindweeds are those plants that twine around fences, trees and other plants - anywhere they can get a grip - and if nothing is available they carpet the ground.  There are two areas in Newtonmore where Large Bindweed (Calystegia silvatica) has taken hold and covered large areas - near the Clune Terrace Playpark and the Jack Richmond Memorial Park.

Large Bindweed near Clune Terrace, climbing a tree

Large Bindweeed at Jack Richmond Park

The flowers are large and white, a trumpet shape with green "bracteoles" - little green leaves- at their base.

Large Bindweed flowers

The arrangement of the bracteoles helps to distinguish it from another lookalike, Hedge Bindweed (Calystegia sepium). In Large Bindweed the two big bracteoles overlap and look as if they are inflated.

Overlapping bracteoles of Large Bindweed

Where I was brought up, in North Cheshire, my route to Primary School went along a lane where Large Bindweed grew up the fence.  We called it "Granny-pop-out-of-bed".  The video shows you why (apologies for the sound, it was very windy when I filmed this.)

A similar Bindweed grows on the back path from the Golf Clubhouse to Curly's Lane. It is Hedge Bindweed (Calystegia sepium).

Hedge Bindweed

From the angle of the photograph, you could be forgiven for thinking this was the same as Large Bindweed, but if you look from the side, you can see that the bracteoles (the green leaves at the base) don't overlap, so it is Hedge Bindweed.

Hedge Bindweed - non overlapping bracteoles.

In Hedge Bindweed you can also see the sepals, which are paler green and beneath the bracteoles.  In Large Bindweed, the sepals were completely hidden.

 I found a third Bindweed in my garden, and I think it must have arrived with some manure as I had not seen it before. Here it is among my courgettes.

Black-bindweed

It has tiny white flowers and is much smaller. It is Black-bindweed (Fallopia convolvulus). Apparently it has black seeds, but I have been weeding it out too soon to check that.  It had certainly managed to appear at lots of other places in the garden so I can't have been thorough enough.

Seeds of Black-bindweed, enclosed in green sepals

It is in a different family to the previous Bindweeds (which are in Convolvulaceae) as it is in the same family as Japanese Knotweed and Buckwheat.

Two nice finds

 During the recent warm spell, I have been walking on the Etteridge and Phones tracks, doing some botanical recording. (Phones and Etteridge are two Estates south of Newtonmore.)

 Most of what I found was fairly common but I was surprised to find this plant by the side of the Etteridge track:

Hemp-Agrimony

It is Hemp-agrimony (Eupatorium cannabinum), which I have never seen round here before. The nearest recorded plants are in Nairn and Pitlochry. It's always a buzz to find something new to the area! 

Hemp-agrimony flower

The leaves are similar to Hemp (Cannabis sativa) leaves, hence the name.

Hemp-agrimony leaves

The second day I walked in from the Phones end, and saw these strange yellow tuning-fork structures amongst the heather:

The next photo gives you an idea of the scale, and the green branching stalks are the same plant.

Fruiting Stag's-horn Clubmoss

It is a Clubmoss, Stag's-horn Clubmoss (Lycopodium clavatum).  It is similar to another Clubmoss, called Interrupted Clubmoss (Lycopodium annotinum) which I have seen near Wolftrax.

Interrupted Clubmoss

They both seem to grow in heathery places and are only easy to spot when there is a bare patch of ground. If you are not sure which one you have found, look carefully at the "leaves" which are scales along the stem. the Stag's-horn Clubmoss has white hairs at the end of each scale.

Stag's-horn scales with hairs

Interrupted Clubmoss - no hairs

Clubmosses are not mosses, but belong to a group of plants that produce spores.  Nowadays you find clubmosses in mountainous areas and they are all small but millions of years ago there were tree-like Clubmosses that grew to 45m!  You can read more about Clubmosses here.

I put a sample of the Stag's-horn Clubmoss under the microscope to take a picture of the cones (the yellow parts that produce the spores).  

Close-up of Stag's-horn Clubmoss cones

I left the sample under the microscope and had a look at it just now - and got a surprise! The cone scales have opened up and released a little pile of yellow spores.

Spores of Stag's-horn Clubmoss

The spores are called Lycopodium powder or Dragon's breath and can be bought on the internet.  They are used in science experiments and cosmetics as they have two opposite properties - they don't get wet, and the powder can burst into flames explosively when sprinkled over a flame. Hmmm- what to do with my little pile....

Taking the pith!

 There are two kinds of Elderberries locally - one with black/dark purple berries and one with red.  I was familiar with the black berried one, Elder (Sambucus nigra), which grows all over Britain and Ireland apart from a few mountainous areas of Scotland.  As a child, I used to try and make ink from the berries, without much success. In Newtonmore, most of the berries are green at the moment, with the odd few turning black.

Elder

Elder has white flowers, usually appearing after the last frost, in a flat-topped "umbel," which can be used to make elderflower drinks. And, as is usually the case, I find that the really common things are the ones I don't have a photo of! (When I wrote the Wildflower Walks book, I found I didn't have a photo of a dandelion....)

The other Elder is Red-berried Elder (Sambucus racemosa), and I had not noticed it when I lived in Cheshire.  It is mainly found in  the North and East of Scotland:

Red-berried Elder

Its flowers look similar to Elder but are arranged differently, in a panicle - a loosely branched arrangement of flowers, rather than having a flat top like an umbel.  You can see what I mean in this photo of the buds, taken in April near the church at Loch Insh.

Flower buds of Red-berried Elder

The leaves of both trees are so similar that I could not tell them apart when there were no flowers or berries. However, there is an amazing book by John Poland and Eric Clement, "The Vegetative Key to the British Flora" - in other words - how to tell what a plant is when it doesn't have any flowers to help you. There was a useful tip on telling the difference between the two Elders:

Elder: "Twigs with white pith and fetid gravy odour"

Red-berried Elder: "Twigs with orange-brown pith, often with a faint blackcurrant odour"

Well, I can't say I noticed the smell but the colour of the pith certainly works, with one proviso which I'll come to in a minute.

Here's the  white pith of an Elder twig:

White pith of Elder twig

And on the left hand side is the orange brown pith of a Red-berried Elder:  

Pith of Red-berried Elder

Now for the proviso.  Choose your twig carefully. The first shoot I tried had white pith (the right-hand side of this photo).  That didn't seem right.   I knew it was a Red-berried Elder as I was standing next to the red berries.  But what I learned was that you have to pick a woody twig like the one on the left, (definitely orange pith) NOT a green shoot as the pith is still white in the new shoots.

There are a large number of Red-berried Elder bushes on the steep slope alongside the road between Newtonmore and Kingussie.

Rosebay Willowherb

 You must have seen Rosebay Willowherb (Chamerion angustifolium) wherever you walk as it is both striking and common, forming extensive stands wherever it grows. It is also very tall and with its bright purple-pink flowers can be seen from a distance.

The flowers are attractive close up and if it wasn't so common and invasive, it would be sold as a garden flower. (In fact, the white flowered version is sold as a garden flower.)

Rosebay Willowherb flowers

It forms a spike  with new buds forming at the top, open flowers below and then the seed pods lower down.

Rosebay Willowherb buds, flowers and seed pods

Every flower forms a seed pod and each seed pod splits to release lots of seeds with a fluffy parachute attached.

Seed pod splitting

Each bit of fluff is carrying a seed:

Rosebay Willowherb seeds

When you consider how many seeds must be produced by just one flowering spike, it is no wonder that  it manages to spread itself far and wide (Someone, not me, has suggested 80,000 seeds per flowerhead). It is quick to colonise bare and waste ground such as bonfire sites and bombsites.  The seeds are carried along railways by the air currents of passing trains. Once it has taken root, it will persist for years as it is a perennial.