Easter Sunday walk along the river Wear

Probably the best weather that I can ever remember for an Easter Sunday. We took a walk along the south side of the river Wear, between Wolsingham and Black Banks plantation at Harperley.

Reassuring to find that the weird flower spikes of toothwort Lathraea squamaria were coming up again under the old coppiced hazels, where we've known them for nearly 40 years.

There's something vaguely reptilian about these parasitic flowering plants that siphon off all their nutrients from the roots of hazel.

You can read more about the strange physiology and folklore of toothwort by clicking here.

This is the plasmodial stage of the slime mould Reticularia lycoperdon [recently renamed Enteridium lycoperdon], probably only about a day away from turning into the sporulating stage. In the plasmodial stage it creeps over the alder tree trunk surface, digesting bacteria, then it forms a parchment-like skin (for pictures click here) enclosing countless dark brown spores. When the skin ruptures they are dispersed on the wind, then germinate into minute amoeba-like organisms that eventually aggregate back into this creeping plasmodial stage, which is most often seen in spring.

I found my first wild primrose of the season growing at the base of an ash tree, and ....

... hundreds of butterbur flower spikes had appeared along the riverbank in the last week.

Elm flowers. A mature elm tree in full bloom was a wonderful sight, with its crown a haze of purple, but it's one we are unlikely to see again, thanks to Dutch elm disease. Young elm trees that have regenerated from the roots of dead stumps are common enough though.

The beautiful juvenile female cones of larch, waiting to be pollinated.

Artefacts of autumn: a hazel nut neatly split in two by a grey squirrel and the stone of a fruit (wild arum?) nibbled by a field mouse.

A rather tatty peacock that had safely made it through the winter and was sunbathing on an old plastic bag.

A pair of goosander on the river. Their behaviour changes in spring. A few weeks ago they would have flown before I could get close but once they are paired up and have identified a hollow tree to nest in they are reluctant to leave their territory.

A fantastic carpet of wild garlic leaves beside the footpath, that will become a sea of white in a few days' time when the flowers open.

Those trees at the top of the bank host a rookery, so we were accompanied by their cawing along this stretch of the walk.

A luxuriance of lichens

Today's Guardian Country Diary is about the way in which the right combination of habitat factors - light, humidity and shelter from the wind - can coincide to provide conditions that favour the luxuriant growth of lichens on trees.

All of these lichen species were festooning just three larch trees in a plantation in Hamsterley forest. The trees were at close commercial spacing in neat rows, but only three on the outside row, in a dip in the ground, carried a dense population of lichens. The next row in, about five feet behind, had a few but the row beyond those, that would have been too shaded in summer when the larches carried needles, had none at all.

This beauty, also shown in the four photos immediately below, is (I think) Usnea subfloridana. Its delicate branches don't respond well to being buffeted by gales but in this sheltered location it hung like beards from the trees.

I've yet to identify the following species but they too covered the lower branches of the larches.

Ramalina farinaceae (?)

Hypogymnia physoides (?)

Evernia prunastri (?)

Cetraria chlorophylla (?)

Hypogymnia physoides (?)

Cladonia fimbriata (?) growing on an old larch cone

Shocking Pink

Today's Guardian Country Diary, which describes the impact of a sudden snowfall in Teesdale last week, also features the opening of the new season's cones on larch trees.

Image Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:William_Wordsworth_001.jpg

Lakeland poet William Wordsworth - he who "...wandered lonely as a cloud ..." and admired "...hosts, of golden daffodils..." - disliked larch trees intensely, considering that they disfigured his beloved Lake District landscape. Planting larch, for its fast-growing valuable timber, became very popular amongst landowners during his lifetime.


Wordsworth had nothing good to say about its foliage, complaining that "In spring the larch becomes green long before the native trees, and its green is so peculiar and vivid, that finding nothing to harmonise with it wherever it comes forth, a disagreeable speck is produced". He did rather grudgingly admit that he found its juvenile cones attractive, though, writing "...it must be acknowledged that the larch, till it has outgrown the size of a shrub, shows, when looked at singly, some elegance in form and appearance, especially in spring, decorated as it is then by the pink tassels of its blossoms". 


Wordsworth and the late, great forester Alan Mitchell (1922-1995) who was always equally forthright in his opinions, would never have established a meeting of minds if they had lived in the same era. Mitchell described larch as "...amongst the most valuable and decorative of all the trees we grow". He also drew attention to its value to our native wildlife: "Larches attract a variety of birds", he wrote, "crossbills feed on the seeds available to them from August while their staple diet of Scots pine seeds is not yet ready; tits feed in summer on caterpillars and aphids and in the winter on aphid eggs; redpolls, siskins and bullfinches nest in plantation trees, and buzzards and ravens in the spreading tops of big, old trees. The light, deciduous foliage allows the persistence or development of the pre-vernal herb layer so prized under oakwoods: bluebell, bugle,sanicle,wood-sorrel, and grasses, and their associated butterflies and other insects". (1)



On the tree, if not on its place in the Lakeland landscape, I tend to side with the pragmatic forester and naturalist rather than with the romantic poet ... but then, I rather like those shocking "pink tassels" and those bunches of new needles, like lime green shaving brushes ..... but maybe that's all to do with growing up in the 1960s, when psychedelic art was all the rage.... although, even then, I would never have chosen those colours for a shirt and tie combination.


1. Alan Mitchell. Alan Mitchell's Trees of Britain (1996) HarperCollins. ISBN 0 00 219972 6

A Tree-Spotter's Guide to Fruits and Seeds: Part 3

European larch Larix europaea is our only deciduous conifer so it should be easy to identify, but there are two Larch species grown in Britain and a hybrid between them, so it's sometimes tricky to identify a tree unequivocally. Unlike their needles, larch cones stay attached to the twigs for several years and this one, with wavy-edged cone scales that hardly curve outwards at the tip, is L. europaea. European larch has elegant pendulous branches that can sweep down to ground level and if it's given space to grow it will become a graceful specimen tree; sadly, most are destined to grown at close spacings in plantations.

Faster-growing Japanese larch Larix kaempferi produces cones with scales that are emphatically curled outwards and downwards at the rim. The extremely vigorous hybrid between L. europaea and L. kaempferi, known as Dunkeld larch L. x eurolepis has cones that are similar but the lip curls outwards without curving downwards .... but, when this hybrid then crosses with L. kaempferi it all gets very confusing....

When I was a kid, my parents took me Christmas shopping in Charlotte Street market in Portsmouth, where there were hot chestnut sellers on street corners who would serve you up a brown paper bag full of smouldering chestnuts that you had to toss from hand to hand until they were cool enough to peel. They probably imported their chestnuts from southern France, or Spain where the tree is native. Sweet chestnut Castanea sativa was brought to England by the Romans, who recognised the value of its nuts and coppiced timber. It needs a good summer to produce chestnuts that are worth roasting here in County Durham - and this hasn't been one of them. Most British trees produce several small nuts per spiny fruit, rather than one large one.

Autumn, when acorns are ripening,  is the best time to identify our two native oak species. The sessile or Durmast oak Quercus petraea bears acorns that have little or no stalk.

English or pedunculate oak Quercus robur acorns dangle from a long stalk (peduncle). Occasionally the two species form hybrids, bearing acorns on short stalks. Oaks, like beech trees, tend to bear heavy crops of seeds on alternate years ('mast' years). It's a mast year for oaks in Durham city this year and they are lying thick on the ground, attracting flocks of pigeons and a lot of jays that are carrying them away to bury for winter emergency rations - if they ever remember where they have buried them. Last year there was hardly an acorn to be found under the same trees.

 

Elder Sambucus nigra berries are popular for making home-made wine but they also have a history of use as a source of dye. Freshly dyed fabric tends towards a rich brown but addition of metal salts like aluminium, chrome and copper as mordants produces subtler shades that vary from umber to blue, violet, grey and through to black, although they all tend to fade after a while in bright light.

For more posts on tree ID click here