BoggyBrae

Galls on Enchanter’s-nightshade

A cuckoo flower and a stonefly

The first cuckoo flower to open on the Boggy Brae this year I think this is a stonefly. It was running around the building where I work this morning. I took it ouside

A few wee flowers

A liverwort and a bumblebee

I’ve been cutting up into stove-sized lengths/chunks the rhododendron wood that has been stacked in a dead headge sort of arrangement for quite a while. There is still a lot to do but I’ve done a good load and thrown them in the woodshed. A pile of rhododendron logs stacked in the boot room for final drying Some of the longer branches have what looks like turkeytail fungus growing on them. It’s…

Garden stuff 1st March 2022

A little sunshine and blue sky!

Rosemary pot with fungus

First #boggybrae snowdrop of the year today

Northern marsh orchid scythings and a cat

A faint suggestion of a rainbow I had scythed and raked and thrown on a compost heap. Looked up to incoming rain clouds with the faintest suggestion of a rainbow, soon gone. But I did get a picture of the old front bank birch before the rain started. There are still patches of scything to do where I left marsh orchids to go to seed last year. Old birch on the front bank

Top (or lid) of the lower spruce stump while covered in Variable-leaved Crestwort (Lophocolea heterophylla) in the spring of 2014 Not sure the date on this photo is correct but my attempts to change it have failed. The dark liverwort is Rustwort (Nowellia curvifolia) and it has ‘colonised’ other spruce logs on the Boggy Brae before other mosses and liverworts have got to them. The pale green is…

Lower spruce stump New Year’s Day 2022

There were breaks in the rain that allowed me to take some photos of the lower spruce stump (LSS) – and yes, there is an upper one but that’s for another time – as it is now for comparison with how it was a few years ago. The first thing you notice is how much it has broken, or been broken, up. I think most of this is bird activity, loosening bits of the moss and the rotten wood to find grubs and…

The lower spruce stump in 2018

~60cm across the top colourful lichen liverwort, lichen, moss Polytrichum moss with its characteristic haircapped developing capsules. The pale green shoots at the bottom are of Heath Bedstraw. The bright green leaves are of a seedling of Rhododendron ponticum. That had to be hoiked out! Bedstraw shoots across the top of this photo too. These pictures were taken in 2018 of an old spruce…