Tag: winter fungi

Necrobotany!

Deceased Teasel plant.

There’s a fabulous article in the current issue of the BSBI (Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland) – magazine – written by Suki Pryce – on plant hunting in winter. In order to contest winter brain fade when we all forget everything we thought we knew about plants; her group – based in Norfolk – carries on hunting and recording plants through the winter when all they have to go by is often dried up remnants like the Teasel in the photo, or rosettes of leaves on the ground. Someone with real flair for words conjured up the term “necrobotany” to describe it.

I read the article with real delight because any excuse to get outside and do some botanising during the winter season is fine by me. I miss the dubious fun of having no idea what a plant is so much that the prospect of photographing it and taking a small sample home for a wrestle with the field guides is marvellous. I get through the long wet season of darkness by doing fungi in late autumn and early winter, and then explore the inexplicable complexity of lichens and bryophytes at any other time when everything else has disappeared. The pleasure – it has to be said – is not just wingnut fodder, it’s also deeply aesthetic. How beautiful is the Teasel with all its spikeyness revealed and ribs dried into a design for a cathedral ceiling by Escher?

When we’re lucky enough to go out with friends who specialize in different passions – insects; butterflies and moths; ferns, birds etc. then the pleasure is even greater, although the weather can be a bit trying. When the wind’s blowing a hoolie and the rain is running down inside your collar some smartass is bound to remind you that there’s no such thing as wrong weather, just wrong clothes. The trouble is, really good breathable and lightweight clothes cost a fortune, and wearing a cheap raincoat can leave you sweating like a jockey the morning before a handicap race. But fashion can even play a part in field trips. Wrong brand of binoculars? Whoooa! Black wellies? My God who does he think he is???? Everyone here wears Royal Hunters. Attempting to identify a fungus from a 1940’s I spy book could get you sent home.

So kit lust can easily grip the most fervent nonconformist. I saw a pair of neoprene insulated wellies in the Rohan shop this week. I watched and circled them several times. Picked them up, weighed them in my hand and had a furtive sniff (doesn’t everybody?). They were exactly the thing for struggling up muddy tracks in winter, or for shovelling snow. Have you any idea how many men land up as cardiac emergencies after shovelling snow? I think the sale of very warm wellies should be banned in order to save lives. Anyway eventually – when I felt safe from potential sales assistance – I hunted through the fifteen attached labels and found the price – £97.00. I put them back on the shelf as fast as if they were about to call the police. My old and very cold wellies will have to do after all.

I’m doing a talk in the spring on how to use sensibly the multitude of available wildlife apps – especially with fungi. At best they get it bang on, but all too regularly they get it just plausibly wrong enough to send you to a premature date with the place where no-one is going to come looking for you when they’re bored.

Hunting for signs of spring

We set out to double check and photograph a patch of wild leeks that we found a couple of days ago and which I’ve never seen before so we needed to document them properly with grid references and detailed photos in order to get them double checked by the local County Recorder. There is a kind of trainspotter sickness that can grip you when you get into plants but fortunately it’s a sickness whose symptoms are air punching for no apparent reason and feeling absurdly happy even on a cold grey day in winter.

Glistening Inkcap, Coprinellus micaceus

The secondary reason was the competitive urge to find a Celandine in flower. The results of the New Years plant hunt, organised by the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland are coming in and the general impression is that this is a rather late season. Last winter we photographed them in flower down here on 17th January and by the look of the leaves today we’re running a fortnight late this year following the continuing bitterly cold weather. We did however find a lonely violet – not my strongest subject but Sweet Violets, Viola odorata are the earliest to flower. Winter Heliotrope were in flower too and a solitary Cyclamen was hiding at the top of a hedge bank which – while photographing it – provoked the strong perfume of wild garlic under my feet. There were abundant purple catkins on an alder tree. In the fungus department we spotted a Glistening Inkcap on a moss covered log.

More than anything, seeing the growing leaves of a multitude of other flowering plants made me wonder how many terawatts of sheer green energy are sitting there underground waiting for a daylength and temperature signal to let them burst forth. Hemlock Water Dropwort doesn’t look half as dangerous when it’s vibrant green and only a few inches tall.

As for the very local Wild Leek, we await the verdict from the County Recorder but here are the photos we sent to him. Cocoa and toasted saffron cake were consumed.

All’s well on the canal

Winter Heliotrope – Petasites fragrans

Exactly as I predicted there was a really good showing of Winter Heliotrope on the Kennet and Avon canal today. As we walked to the first deep lock the river was in full spate and at its most dangerous as we went along, and in places the banks were flooded. At Pulteney Weir the steps had disappeared and water was shooting upwards like a fountain as it curled back at the river bed. Heaven help anyone falling into that maelstrom – they’d have no chance at all. The eddies and deep currents seem to illustrate constantly changing anatomical illustrations of the musculature of unknown beasts. Fallen logs lifted helpless arms into the air, like Excalibur, and all the while there was a dangerous sound – far from the comfort of waves and waterfalls but the fretting water feeling for any weakness along the bank. The boats moored alongside the footpath were lifted high on their moorings. Any higher and they’d start to list into oblivion as the water flooded in. The canal, of course, is at one remove from all the mayhem and there’s a more peaceful regime altogether.

Once again we revisited the walk that kept us sane during the lockdowns, and in Henrietta Park an ever reliable tree stump was growing Oyster Mushrooms and what I think was almost certainly Silverleaf Fungus as well as the usual Turkey Tails. Further back in the park the magnificent trunk of an old pine looked especially beautiful. Hundreds of walkers were out and about celebrating New Year. We were passed by one crocodile comprising upwards of 20 walkers – no doubt a rambling club. It’s crazy how easy it is in England to assign social class to whole groups. I remember once taking a midweek communion service which usually had about four or five communicants but on this particular Wednesday the Lady Chapel was full to the brim with identically dressed, late middle aged men in tweed jackets and flannel trousers. It could have been a Monty Python sketch. Afterwards I asked them who they all were and they told me they were all High Court judges on a course in the hotel next door. Today’s walkers were equally monocultural. Several of them wished us a happy new year in clipped received pronunciation and I relapsed into full churl, willing my cheek muscles into a rigid smile as I responded with imperceptible grace.

It was a joy to find plants and fungi to identify at this time of the year. Even the vivid green of new foliage brought a foretaste of plants just waiting in the earth for the kairos – the appropriate time. Alongside the river a large group of Long Tailed Tits kept themselves busy in the branches of trees overlooking the cricket ground. On the other side at St John’s Church we not only saw a pair of Peregrine falcons on the tower but also heard their unmistakable voices. Before we’d even taken that unusual sight in, a pair of herons fled downstream in their prehistoric way, and later a couple of cormorants flew downstream as well. All this in the very centre of the city.

Back home again I cooked the last of the Christmas leftovers and we had an early supper. Below are some of the things we saw.

Doing the right thing beautifully

Since the sun shone this afternoon, once I’d finished baking we went over to Dyrham Park for a walk. In fact the park itself was closed because it’s a fairly unique combination of grass and limestone, so quite thin soil and easily damaged by walkers – which didn’t bother us much because we could walk down the main tarmac path to the house, following the course of a stream in full spate after all the rain. There were patches of waterlogged soil in many places, and we couldn’t drive home the back roads because the road was completely flooded at the top of Dyrham Hill. It’s a steep walk down to the house and gardens, and we were met there by one of the terribly efficient welcomers who offered us a leaflet about the gardens parts of which are in the process of restoration to something like the original plans.

I’m not a fan of formal gardens, I don’t like things to be too orderly and sterile, and so my heart sank a bit when this process began. The notices boast something like 40,000 bulbs planted, and new yew hedging no doubt accompanied by finely cut and weed free stripy grass. However once you leave the formal garden, which amount to less than half of the total area, things are altogether more interesting – with a lake, or I think more accurately a large pond with flowing water taken from the stream; a waterfall, and a much more informally planted area of shrubs and flowers. The leaflet described all the exotic plantings but could have made much more of the wildlife potential. Someone, somewhere had made the decision not to deadhead or cut back all of the seed bearing grasses but to leave them over the winter, a marvellous food source for birds and small mammals and very beautiful in their own right. I thought the leaflet had missed an opportunity to show people the potential of wildlife gardening. Dave Goulson’s book “The Garden Jungle” was on sale in the shop, and the subject seems to be rising higher and higher in the consciousness of gardeners everywhere, so why not put up some signage to say “this is what it can look like” – which is very beautiful.

Outside the house the snowdrops are flowering and you could almost have thought spring had arrived if it weren’t for the cold wind blowing steadily up the escarpment. We could see that it’s going to take weeks for the soil to dry out. Apparently things are even worse in Northern France.

On the allotment today Madame followed up on my idea that perhaps our rat trap had not been stolen but dragged off by a fox who’d found a rat in the trap and had carried it off to a more private place to devour the remains. My hunch turned out to be true, and the fox had eaten all bar the tiniest scrap of fur and even cleared out the last remains of the crunchy peanut butter bait, leaving the empty trap in its box about 50 yards away in some long grass. I’ve said before that I don’t in the least mind the foxes eating the rats, but I’d prefer it if they didn’t steal the plates and the cutlery as well – it’s such bad manners.
Naturally we were relieved that it wasn’t another visit by our burglarious predecessor who now just owes us two net cloches, two water butts, two very expensive cold frames and a max and min thermometer. We can solve the fox problem by attaching the rat trap boxes to some long pegs, and on the plus side another neighbour who is moving to a different site has given us an enormous tarpaulin and a storage bench which he doesn’t want to take.

It’s lovely to see our early sowings taking off so well. I was so concerned about the waterlogging in one part of the plot which lies above an underground stream, that I gently mooted the possibility of digging a small pond on it, sealed by puddling it with the plentiful clay. Madame didn’t just disagree, she saturation bombed the whole idea and could see nothing but drowned creatures and malaria infected mozzies. I think I’ll put that one to one side – for the time being!

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Daldinia concentrica – Cramp balls

Back at the park, as we walked up the track I spotted a felled tree trunk – there are lots of them lying around with their associated brash, another sign that the National Trust policy is changing very much for the good. Once again the instinct for tidiness is being restrained to the benefit of the many plants, fungi, bacteria and small creatures who can both eat and shelter under the piles; and this particular tree had an array of turkey tail fungi – Trametes versicolour at one end, and cramp balls, or King Alfred’s cakes – Daldinia concentrica – at the other; neither of them the remotest bit rare but fun to name.

Nothing more to do this evening than bake a loaf and pack the cakes and scones into tins for our grandson’s charity cake sale tomorrow.IMG_20200115_134048