Loch Vaa and Lochain Uvie

Last week I joined some other keen botanists and went to Loch Vaa to look for some specific plants that are not found much locally. Ian Green, who is the BSBI recorder for vice-county 95 (Moray) led the walk as he knew what we were looking for, whereas the rest of us had not even heard of the plants!

Loch Vaa  is North of Aviemore and is just behind Laggantygown Cemetery so there is convenient car parking. It was a stunningly sunny day and the loch was quite low, exposing a stony shore.

Loch Vaa

The water was crystal clear and there were shoals of small fishes.

   There were two plants that we were looking for, both related to a more common species.  The first was a hybrid Spearwort.  Lesser Spearwort (Ranunculus flammula) has a flower like a buttercup but grows in damp or wet areas and has thin leaves.

Lesser Spearwort with narrow leaves (the broad leaves belong to the pondweed)

The plant we were looking for was a hybrid - a cross between  Lesser Spearwort and Creeping Spearwort with the unwieldy name of Ranunculus x levenensis.  But Creeping Spearwort  is an extremely rare plant and does not grow in Moray.  So how did the hybrid get here?  The best explanation is that it was brought in on the feet of visiting waterfowl.  As it roots readily from the stem, this would help it get established.  We found quite a few plants but it is maybe not the most impressive sight .

Hybrid Spearwort

In fact, most of the plants we concentrated on were rather small.  The next on the list was Small Water-pepper (Persicaria minor),  which prefers to grow in more southerly areas and Loch Vaa is the farthest North that it has been found.

Small Water-pepper

It is like Redshank (Persicaria maculosa) which is much bigger and sometimes has a black blotch on the leaves.  It is very common and I have seen it growing at the side of the pavement in Newtonmore Main Street.  I was quite surprised to find I don't have a photo of it!

 Another plant I had not seen before was Marsh Speedwell (Veronica scutellata).   This one had blue flowers but they can be pink or white.

Marsh Speedwell

Inspired by the trip, I thought I would visit Lochain Uvie (just at the base of Creag Dubh) to see if I could find the same plants, as when the loch is low, there is a stony bit of shore. 

Lochain Uvie looking West

Lochain Uvie with Creag Dubh in the background.

I did not find the two rarities as the stony bit was covered in grass.  But there were other compensations. In a dried out boggy area I found a lot of Great Sundew (Drosera anglica).  "Great " is a bit of an exaggeration as it is tiny!  It is an insectivorous plant and catches insects on its sticky hairs.  The leaves are longer and more spoonlike than its even smaller relative, Round-leaved Sundew (Drosera rotundifolia).

Great Sundew

It does have flowers but they were still in bud.

Another bog plant had finished flowering but its seeds were a bright, bright orange.

Bog Asphodel

And finally, there were plenty of grasshoppers pinging about when you walked through the grass. So a very pleasant trip even if I did not find the rarities.

A Yellow Lichen

Dry stone walls are a great place to look for lichens.  Usually, I pick one that is on the moor but whilst waiting in Kingussie, I looked at the one by the Duke of Gordon Hotel.

One of the capstones stood out from the rest, as it was the only one with patches of yellow.

The different stone                                  With a ruler marked in cm             Lichen at the top, moss underneath

Looking more closely, there are round orange fruiting bodies (apothecia) which is where the lichen produces spores. I collected one by chipping it off and folding it into a post-it note so I didn't lose it.

A tiny apothecium - about 0.5mm

I also added some  small drops of chemicals. Bleach did not change colour but potassium hydroxide gave an immediate purple colour. When I got home, I sliced that tiny orange apothecium, trying to get a thin slice so the light of my microscope would shine through it.

Here is the slice, and the tiny circles are the spores which are clustered in sacs called asci.  To see the shapes better, you add a few more chemicals  - in this case some fountain pen ink!

Here is a picture of one of the spores showing its odd structure.

A lichen spore - about 12 thousandths of a millimetre long

It is like a dumbbell and that helped with the identification as different lichens have different looking spores.  I think the lichen is called Caloplaca flavovirescens (no common name, I'm afraid).  It is not common round here as it likes a basic (alkaline) rock and most of our rocks are acid.  But that one capstone must be different.

Yellow flowers

 The places  have visited recently seem to be full of yellow flowers.  There was a visit to a fantastic garden in Nethybridge and, more prosaically, exploring behind the Badenoch centre and looking at a cutting on the A9! But for a curious botanist/nature enthusiast there is always something to notice and learn from.

The garden in Nethybridge was open to raise money for charity, and it is always a pleasure to be able to explore someone else's garden and even better, there were cream teas...

Peacock butterfly and a very tattered Tortoiseshell - correction - it's a Comma

There were some large yellow flowers that the butterflies loved. The flower is Inula or Elecampane.  The Peacock butterflies looked fresh and iridescent whereas the poor old tortoiseshell  must have overwintered. UPDATE Thanks to Audrey for pointing out that it is not a tortoiseshell but a Comma.

Now for the less exciting visits.  I had recorded the plants behind the Badenoch Centre in the Spring, but there was a Hypericum (St John's Wort) that I could not record because I needed to see the flowers to narrow it down to the species. It is finishing flowering right now so I was just in time.

It turned out to be Tutsan (Hypericum androsaemum) which was a new find for me. The red fruits turn black (you can see some on the right hand side of the photo). Another yellow flower which is growing around the Badenoch Centre is Sticky Groundsel (Senecio viscosus).  It is a bit like Groundsel (Senecio vulgaris) but is taller, has petals and is ... sticky.

Here are the two together for comparison:

Sticky Groundsel on the left of each picture, and Groundsel on the right

The reason it is sticky is easier to see with some magnification The stem is coated with hairs which have blobs of sticky liquid on the ends.

The sticky hairs seem to have caught a few things

The last visit was to  the A9, a cutting where I have been before, but decided to revisit as parts of it have had new topsoil added, though I have no idea why.  The slopes have been covered with yellow flowers for months. The older areas look brown as the flowers are now fruiting, but the newly topsoiled areas are bright yellow.

Nearly all the plants are crucifers - the cabbage family that has 4 petalled flowers. Much of it was oil seed Rape (Brassica napus) and Treacle mustard (Erysimum cheiranthoides)

These yellow crucifers are hard to tell apart unless you have both the flowers and the seed pods.

As a bit of relief from the relentless yellow flowers, now is a good time to see Devil's-bit Scabious (Succisa pratensis).  It is mostly blue but can be found in shades of pink as well.

I have not quite finished with yellow things, but next time it will be a lichen!

Panthers in the garden?

I am seeing fungi popping up in the garden a bit earlier than I expected - maybe something to do with the wet July?

An unusual purple one popped up in my raised beds.  The beds are a new addition to the garden this year and have loads of compost (from my compost heaps) which might explain the new fungi.

 

I have recently bought a microscope and I am having a lot of fun looking at lichens and their spores (that will be another post!) so I thought I would try and see the spores from this fungus.  To get  spore print, you just put the cap, gill side down on a piece of paper and leave it for a few hours. I put a microscope slide there as well. The photo shows a different fungus but you get the idea.

Getting a spore print (from another mushroom)

The results were a bit underwhelming!  The spores are very small and round and that's about all I could make out. They really all very small - about 7 um (micrometres) long,  That's 7 millionths of a metre or 7 thousandths of a millimetre. So about 140 would fit in a millimetre if lined up end to end.

Mushroom spores

I tried to ID it and thought it might be Lepista sordida, but I got some help from an expert friend (thank you ,Liz) and it is Wood Blewit (Lepista nuda). There were some older specimens which had lost their purple colour on the cap but were still purple underneath (though not that obvious in the second photo).

A more regular visitor is this one which pops up in the lawn each year, probably growing on birch roots. 

It starts off as a round bump in the grass and then pushes up to the more usual mushroom shape with a circular pattern of beige  flecks.

The flecks are the remnants of  the bag or veil that enclosed the growing mushroom and which breaks as it grow up, leaving the flecks on the top and a collar around the stem.

There is a bulbous base to the stalk and the gills are white

I thought it was Panther Cap (Amanita pantherina).  So did I have panthers on the lawn? I'm afraid not - I was wrong again! It is The Blusher (Amanita rubescens), so called because the flesh turns redder when bruised.  I did try this test but hadn't realised that the colour change is quite gradual so I was too hasty in assuming it did not change.  It all goes to show that a little knowledge is not enough when identifying fungi.  

A Swarm of Orchids

 Last week - when the weather was a bit drier - I went for  walk up the track from Tromie bridge  to Killiehuntly, just for the walk with no plans of botanising.  But I can't help looking...

To my surprise I found 2 fields on either side of the track with plentiful orchids, in flower, which seems quite late for this year. Not only were they plentiful, they were big and sturdy and on taking a closer look, I couldn't quite place them in a single species.  Because they were puzzling, I went back a day or so later and took photos and measurements of some important features.

First of all, I took a photo against a clipboard marked in 1cm squares, to give an idea of the scale. You can see that the biggest one in the photo is about 30cm tall.

I also squeezed the stem to check whether it was hollow or solid - you don't need to pick or cut the plant, as it is easy to tell if it gives a bit. (Spotted-orchids have solid stems and Marsh-orchids have hollow ones.)

The leaves were wide and unspotted (unsurprisingly, Spotted-orchids have skinny spotty leaves).

So far this seems to fit Northern Marsh-orchid (Dactylorhiza purpurella) though it is much bigger and flowering later than I would expect.  So let's check the flowers.  The shape of the flowers is really important in distinguishing between orchid species, especially the front lip of the flower.

A diamond shaped petal

This plant has a diamond shaped front petal (called the labellum)  which is characteristic of Northern Marsh-orchid - but it is the wrong colour. I would have expected it to be a dark beetrooty purple, whereas this lighter pink is typical of the Heath Spotted-orchid (Dactylorhiza maculata). Some of the flowers did have the petal shape of the Heath Spotted-orchid, with a little tooth in the centre:

A lobe (tooth) in the centre of the petal

but then it did not have the spotty leaves.

So I came to the conclusion that maybe it was a hybrid between the 2 species i.e. Dactylorhiza x formosa = dac. maculata x purpurella.  In order to check, I sent the details to the orchid referee Richard Bateman (the expert) at Kew and was delighted that he confirmed they were the hybrid. Richard is one of the many professional botanists who volunteer their time and expertise to check amateur observations.

I have never seen so many hybrids in one spot (there were well over 100). Although hybrids are known for their vigour, they are not always fertile.  It seems that this strain was and has produced many offspring in the same place (an orchid swarm). I was surprised that no-one had recorded orchids in this spot before, and I have sent off the records to go on the BSBI database.

Candy Striped spiders?

It is hard to believe that it is a month since my last blog post.  I have the slight excuse of going on holiday for a week and a week of intensive gardening beforehand trying to catch up with jobs that needed doing before I went away.

When I got back from my holiday I went for a walk to see if the orchids were still around and managed to find plenty on Newtonmore Golf Course and even some round Loch Imrich. The ones round Loch Imrich were Common Spotted Orchids (the leaves are spotted as well) and is uncommon locally as it prefers non-acid soils.

Common Spotted Orchid (Dactylorhiza fuchsii) 

On the Golf course, the orchids were interspersed with yellow Lady's Bedstraw (Galium verum).

Lady's bedstraw with Fragrant Orchids at the front and a Greater Butterfly Orchid at the back.

Orchids - left to right -  Small-white, Fragrant and Greater Butterfly

Whilst I was away, my row of Chard had started to bolt and needed picking.  I know it as "Silver beet" which is the name I learnt for it when I lived in New Zealand.  I am not a great fan of it, but the packet of seed said it was beetroot so I was a bit surprised when it came up as chard!  Anyway, when I picked it I found 2 spiders amongst the foliage. One was quite striking as it had two red stripes on its abdomen. I put each one in a small container and tried to take a decent picture - not very successfully I'm afraid.  The bright red stripes don't look very vivid in the photo, though its reflection in the container wall looks very scary!

The second spider looked very different but turned out to be the same species.

I think they are both Candy striped spiders (Enoplognatha ovata) which comes in three colour forms.  The red striped one is called the redimita morph and the greenish one is called the lineata morph.  There is a third pattern which I have not seen yet which is all red on the back.  There is lots of information here.

I read that they produce blue egg sacs, and surprisingly I found one today on my blackcurrant bush. It really is an amazing colour.

These spiders like low growing vegetation and are quite likely to be in your garden, so keep yours eyes open and you might find one.

Update - found another one today on the blackcurrants so took a better photo in the sunshine.

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"