A violet-ant mutually beneficial symbiosis

 

Sweet violets Viola odorata produce two types of flower - the familiar scented kind that are amongst the first wild flowers to appear in spring and are pollinated by bumblebees, and a summer cleistogamous version that remains as a closed bud and self-pollinates without the intervention of insects. Insect pollination in early spring can be a chancy, hit-or-miss affair but, come what may, the cleistogamous flowers aways produce seeds in early autumn. This is a seed capsule of one such that I found in the garden, splitting open in three segments to release its seeds. Each seed has a small, white, oily attachment, an elaiosome, that ants find irresistible. They carry the seeds away so, if you grow violets in a garden, seedlings are likely to appear in unexpected places.

I’ve sown some freshly collected sweet violet seeds now, because they’ll need vernalisation, subjection to the freezing temperatures of winter, to break their dormancy.

 

Staphylinid beetle

 This tiny rove (staphylinid) beetle, about 5mm. long, found its way into the house, probably on washing dried on the washing line. But it might have flown in through an open window - the wings are tightly packaged under the wing cases, that look like a miniature back-pack, in the centre of the insect. These small staphylinids are weak fliers, generating enough lift to get airborne, but after that they’re at the mercy of wherever the wind and air currents take them.

Wood blewits

 

I remember adding a few wood blewits Lepista nuda to a compost heap at this spot in the garden many years ago. Their network of hyphae seems to have persisted in the soil, because this is autumn they’ve reappeared in exactly the same place, looking particularly lovely because they were sheltered from rain by some tall weeds. That purple/amethyst pigmentation seems to be washed away by heavy rainfall and as they age the cap colour fades, though it’s usually retained by the stalk and gills underneath.

Mrs. Peasgood's Nonsuch

 

This year the branches of the Peasgood’s Nonsuch apple are in danger of snapping under the weight of fruit. The variety was originally raised from a pip sown by the father of Emma Peasgood (nee Mamby), of Grantham in Lincolnshire in 1858. She and her husband John Peasgood settled in Stamford and planted it in their garden, and its apples won a prize in the local agricultural show in 1872. From there its fruit was sent to the Royal Horticultural Society in London, where it was awarded first prize, a First Class Certificate and named Peasgood’s Nonsuch.

It’s a dual-purpose apple, flavoursome and juicy for eating. It cooks down to a frothy puree in a matter of minutes. Perfect for baked apples and particularly good it you like apple puree with your porridge on autumn mornings. Individual apples can be very large but bruise easily and don’t keep well, so it doesn’t travel well and has never been commercially successful, but its a great apple to grow, producing a heavy crop every year.

There are far more apples than we can eat of give away, so butterflies and birds are going to be major beneficiaries of all the windfalls.

A poppy with political affiliations

 

Welsh poppy Meconopsis cambrica is simultaneously a native and an alien wild flower in Britain. As a component of the Arctic-alpine flora, which probably colonised soon after the glaciers retreated, the wild plant was mostly confined to rocky, wooded slopes in Wales, where it seemed reluctant to spread beyond its native habitat. But over the past five decades it has advanced rapidly through much of lowland England, Scotland and Wales, with gardeners acting as intermediaries. It pops up all over my garden, filling in any vacant spaces.

This is an effortless plant to cultivate for anyone aspiring to the cottage garden style of planting, and excellent for wildlife gardens because hoverflies and bumblebees find it irresistible. It’s a perennial, prolific self-sower with tiny seeds that readily establish in paving crevices and even on walls. In recent years it has become a familiar sight in woodlands near most villages in Weardale, integrating into the local flora.

A couple of miles up the valley from here, in Wolsingham, it seems to be in every garden, no doubt finding its way into local woodlands in mud carried on walkers’ footwear and on the feet, fur and feathers of mammals and birds.

The spread of Meconopsis cambrica illustrates how difficult it is to predict whether a plant will become invasive; here is a species that’s slow to spread in ancestral natural locations but which, with no apparent changes in its botanical constitution, has readily established in a variety of habitats throughout Britain.

In 2006 Plaid Cymru chose a stylised version of Welsh poppy as its new logo. A serendipitous botanical choice, perhaps, for a political party with an eye to making its influence felt throughout the union?

A harvest festival of ripe fruit and colourful butterflies

 Apples, pears and plums are ripening faster than we can eat them, so the bird table has been taken over by butterflies feeding on the fermenting juice of over-ripe fruit.

There were are least twenty red admirals and half a dozen comma butterflies getting legless on alcoholic fruit juice in this afternoon’s warm sunshine in the garden. When they are in such a lethargic, inebriated state butterflies are very easy to approach and if they do fly they settle again almost immediately.

Drinkers on the bird table ‘Last Chance’ saloon.

Comma butterflies on pears, a red admiral on a rotting apple, plus a bonus seven-spot ladybird that probably came to feed on the mould growing on the fruit.

Comma butterflies seem to have a particular liking for pear juice

A red admiral with its proboscis sunk deep in the hole left by a plum stalk, drinking sun-warmed plum juice

As sometimes happens, a fight broke out between drunkards when this red admiral and comma butterfly were competing for the same feeding cavity in a pear. Wing blows were exchanged and the comma prevailed. It seems even some butterflies can become aggressive if they over-indulge with alcohol, although most seem to just become semi-comatose, to the point where they’ll crawl onto your finger rather than fly away if you poke them.

Titanic struggle: Garden spider versus bumblebee

 

We witnessed a titanic battle between an unfortunate bumblebee and a female garden spider Araneus diadematus that had spun her web on the flight path to Michaelmas daisies in the abbey garden, Hexham, Northumberland last week. For a while it looked like the frantically buzzing bee might escape, but then the spider’s poisonous fangs found a weak spot and the struggle subsided.

Then the spider suspended its prize on a thicker thread and spun it round and round with its feet, wrapping it a silken shroud paid out from the spinnerets on the tip of her abdomen.

Oxford ragwort - rail traveller extraordinaire

 

Oxford ragwort Senecio squalidus, growing on the wall of Hexham Moot Hall. 

A native to the volcanic cinder slopes of Mount Etna in Sicily, introduced into Oxford University Botanic Garden in the 17th. century where its plumed, airborne seeds soon carried it over the garden wall. It didn’t get far until the railways arrived, when the ballast between the tracks proved to be a good substitute for Etna’s volcanic slopes.

 Its buoyant seeds, wafted along in the slipstream of passing trains, carried it along the route of the great Western Railway, then beyond along the tracks of other railway companies. Sometimes it even travelled inside trains: Geoffrey Grigson, in his An Englishman’s Flora, recounts the story of botanist George Claridge Druce watching a seed drift in through his train window in Oxford station, travel with him suspended in air then drift out again when the train reached Tilehurst in Berkshire. It’s now a common sight in towns throughout Britain, brightening up our walls and pavements.

Oxford ragwort’s population was boosted by the German Luftwaffe blitz on Britain’s cities during World War 2 when, along with rosebay willowherb, it colonised rubble-strewn bomb sites.

Autumn crocus Colchicum autumnale - beautiful but deadly

 

Beautiful but deadly poisonous autumn crocus Colchicum autumnale, cultivated in a woodland garden near the main car park in Hexham, Northumberland. Sometimes known as meadow saffron but not related to the Crocus sativus whose stigmas are the source of saffron spice. 

Used medicinally in the past in poultices for treating gout, but there is a fine line between a therapeutic and a fatal dose when used as a drug and there have been many fatalities. 

A native wild flower that is now rare and largely exterminated from pastures where it poisoned cattle. Flowers in autumn but the leaves don’t appear until spring, when they could be fatally mistaken for wild garlic (ramsons).

Alder leaf beetles

 Low Barns is Durham Wildlife Trust’s largest wetland reserve and the commonest trees there are alders, whose leaves are currently being consumed by a population explosion of these jewel-like, metallic-blue alder leaf beetles Agelastica alni.

Until quite recently, the alder leaf beetle was considered to be a rare species, in danger of extinction in Britain. Then, in 2004 it reappeared in north-west England and over the last twenty years it has become increasingly common in the north east. No one has really identified the reason for its success but it’s common in France, so perhaps it arrived with imported plants from continental Europe. The adult beetle and its larva partially defoliate alders but they recover every spring. The adult beetles fall with the alder foliage in autumn and survive winter in the leaf litter.

Twenty-plume moth and honeysuckle

 

Fragrant honeysuckle Lonicera periclymenum that grows in our garden hedge provides nectar for moths in summer ……

…. berries for birds in autumn …

…. and a breeding site for this exquisite little twenty-plume moth Alucita hexadactyla, which has wings composed of tiny plumes that resemble feathers. It lays its eggs in honeysuckle leaves and flower buds. Plume moths fly at dusk and are strongly attracted to lit windows; I found this one, with a wingspan of about a centimeter, settled on our living room wall.

The common name is a misnomer because each of the four wings has six plumes, so it should really be the twenty-four-plume moth, but the scientific name is accurate: hexadactyla means six fingers.

Crab spider lurking in a teasel seedhead

 Teasels Dipsacus fullonum are wild flowers that just keep giving. Bees love their flowers, goldfinches eat their seeds and the empty honeycomb seed heads survive for months, providing winter accommodation for tiny insects - but not without hazard.

This teasel seed head, at my local Low Barns nature reserve, had a predator lurking amongst its prickly seed chambers. It’s a tiny crab spider, waiting to intercept any small insect arrivals.

Crab spiders don’t spin silken webs, but often lurk in flowers with their front pair of legs held like crab claws, ready to grab unwary prey. Some species can change their colour to blend with their surroundings, making them very effective ambush predators. 

This one was tiny and they are notoriously difficult to identify, but I suspect it might be a female running crab spider, Philodromus dispar.

Larch bolete Suillus grevillei

 

These caramel-coloured larch boletes Suillus grevillei began to appear around the roots of larch trees in the Deerness valley this week. They are said to be edible, but those slimy caps are unappetising and it’s their biology rather than their flavour that I find interesting.

This is a mycorrhizal fungus, living in close association with larch tree roots, increasing their ability to absorb minerals from the soil in exchange for sugars from the tree that fuel the fungal growth. It exists for most of its life as a mass of hidden hyphal threads, thinner than human hairs, but early autumn provides a signal for a switch to reproductive growth, reorganising its weft of threads into these elegant toadstools.

When they first break through into the daylight the underside of the cap is covered with a veil that ruptures when the cap expands, exposing the spore-producing tissues.

In boletes the spores are produced inside thousands of fine tubes on the underside of the cap, that open via pores, to release the spores into the airstream.

To appreciate the beauty of the pores, and marvel at what finely-uned organisms toadstools can be, you really need to take a close look at their surface with a hand lens, and then …

… slice down through the cap with a razor blade, to expose the vertically-aligned tubes. In order for these to function effectively the microscopically-small spores lining the tubes must be able to freefall down and out through the pores, unimpeded, into the airstream. This depends on the toadstool’s finely tuned perception of earth’s gravitational pull, so that the tubes are always perfectly aligned with gravitational force; any deviation and the tubes would become clogged with spores that would stick to their walls. When toadstools are tilted, growth of the tubes (and gills of toadstools that have those) is quickly readjusted, to bring them back into vertical alignment.

So could you grow functional toadstools in outer space? For decades scientists have contemplated the potential for growing fungi in microgravity, to feed space travellers but its doubtful whether these beautiful, gravitationally-sensitive, aesthetically-pleasing toadstools would grow. There is, though, a SpaceX experiment in progress to see if toadstools will form, using oyster mushrooms (which have gills, not pores), in the microgravity environment of an orbiting space station.

Spectacular year for oak leaf cherry galls

 I don't think I can recall a year when oaks hereabouts have hosted so many different kinds of galls, in such abundance. These oak leaf cherry galls, caused by the cynipid wasp Cynips quercus-folii, are growing on an oak near Blaids wood, just south of the city of Durham.

There will be a single gall wasp larva inside each, which will pupate and then emerge in late winter as a mature wasp, after the gall has spent the winter in the leaf litter.

,

Sharing a leaf with a severe infestation of silk-button galls caused by Neuroterus numismalis, and a single pea gall caused by Cynips divisa

Sharing a leaf with spangle galls caused by Neuroterus quercus-baccarum

Dryad's saddle rides again

 For the fourth time in a little over two years this old sycamore stump has produced a magnificent display of dryad's saddle Cerioporus squamosus bracket fungi. The previous crop appeared this spring, in April.

It's likely that the fungus was the original cause of death for the mature tree, which must have been felled as a safety precaution since it was growing close to a road.  The fungus has been digesting its remains every since.

In classical Greek mythology 'Dryades were nymphs that presided over the woods. Oblations of milk, oil, and honey were offered to them, and sometimes the votaries would sacrifice a goat. They were not generally considered immortal, but as genii, whose lives were terminated with the death of the tree over which they were supposed to preside.' J. Lempriere. A Classical Dictionary: containing a copious account of all the proper names mentioned in ancient authors. Originally published in 1788.

The underside of the cap, with thousands of tiny pores releasing millions of spores.

Exquisite pattern of scales on the cap of a bracket.

Darwin wasps

  Ichneumon wasps in the garden, menacing with their twitchy antennae and jerky movements, taking a break from parasitising insect larvae to satisfy their own energy needs.

Black Darwin wasp Ichneumon delicatorius

Yellow-striped Darwin wasp Ichneumon xanthorius feeding on nectar from lovage flowers. Its larvae develop parasitically inside the caterpillars of moths and butterflies.

 They are known as Darwin wasps because their gruesome life cycles played a role in undermining the great naturalist’s belief in a benevolent creator. “I cannot persuade myself,” he wrote, “that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their [larval stages] feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.”

Who nibbled these clover leaves?

 

Clover leaflets neatly nibbled around their edges, probably by the clover leaf weevil Hypera postica (?)

Flying Ant Day

The fourth heatwave of the year arrived, the temperatures soared and the ants in one of the garden waste recycling bins took to the air in vast numbers. 

For the second year in a row ants have nested in a black 'dalek' compost bin, many of them visiting the near-by cardoon plant in July to collect honeydew from a spectacular aphid infestation. Today was the day when the temperature inside the bin triggered the emergence of a new queen, pursued by the mating flight of hundreds of large winged males.