Fruity

It looks like being a very poor year for brambles up here in Durham but it was a different story down in North East Lincolnshire at the weekend, where the blackberry bushes at the back of the sand dunes at Cleethorpes local nature reserve were laden with fast-ripening fruits.

The scrubby vegetation at the back of the dunes here is dominated by sea buckthorn, which also carried a fine crop of ripening berries, that look particularly attractive against the shrub's silver-grey foliage. Birds never seem very interested in these berries, which often are still untouched well into winter. The same can't be said for the elder berries here, which were being consumed rapidly by large, noisy flocks of starlings.

Many of the juvenile starlings were in their transitional plumage, still bearing traces of their first set of brown feathers but rapidly moulting into their smart spotty winter attire. 

Evening primrose

We came across this patch of evening primroses when we were walking through the sand dunes at Cleethorpes local nature reserve at the weekend. There are about twenty very confusing evening primrose species and interspecific hybrids but I suspect this one is probably Oenothera glazioviana (formerly known as Oe.erythrosepala), which comes from North America. 

There are no native species of evening primrose in Britain but this is one very attractive alien species that no one seems to object to when it escapes into the wild. It seems to thrive in waste places, especially in poor, arid soils. Recently I've seen it flowering well in a supermarket car park and on the edge of a pavement in a city centre. The seeds are very small and I imagine they are easily distributed on birds' feet, and the pale yellow flowers, which seem almost luminous at dusk, attract moths which must very effective pollinators; Sir Edward Salisbury, former director of Kew Gardens and noted authority on weeds and alien plants, once calculated that these plants commongly produce around 33,000 seeds each.

One species of evening primrose, Oenothera biennis, is sometimes cultivated as a crop, on account of its herbal medicinal value. The oil extracted from the seeds contains high levels of linoleic acid, which has a variety of medicinal uses.

Resurrection

This is one of the many cushions of Tortula moss that grow on the felt-covered roof of our garage, which is beginning to resemble an ocean studded with miniature rainforest-covered islands.

At this time of year the moss plants are lush and are growing well on mild, wet winter days, but in summer they can be baked by the sun during periods of drought that can last for weeks (if we're lucky!). This moss genus has a remarkable mechanism for resisting the long term effects of drought, thanks to specialised proteins called dehydrins and rehydrins within the leaf cells that protect the delicate cell membranes when the plants dry out and when they rehydrate again after rain.

This is a very droughted sample of a closely related species called Syntrichia ruralis subsp. ruraliformis (which used to be called Tortula ruraliformis before taxonomists changed their minds about its name). It grows in environments that are even more arid in summer than our garage roof - on coastal sand dunes. I subjected it to artificial drought - 10 days on a sunny indoor window ledge with no water..... 

...... and here it is five minutes after one half  of the cushion has been re-wetted, simulating rainfall ....

... and five minutes later still after the whole cushion has been re-wetted...... flourishing green moss again (Syntrichia ruraliformis leaves are naturally yellowish-green).


There are several plants commonly referred to as 'resurrection plants' (see Google for more) that have evolved the capability for this apparently miraculous recovery after drought and, understandably, the underlying physiological and biochemical mechanisms that allow them to tolerate drought are of great interest in scientists who are working towards breeding more drought-tolerant crops.


Some mosses  are much tougher than they look. They were, after all, amongst the first plants to colonise the land surface around half a billion years ago..... and they are still here, after five major mass extinction events and drastic climate changes. Maximum respect for Syntrichia and related Tortula species, for sheer resilience and durability.