Stench

A beautiful sunlit glade in the Gaunless Valley in County Durham, on an idyllic late summer afternoon ...... and there's a sickly stench drifting down-wind. A decaying corpse? Sewage? No, just ..........

..... a stinkhorn toadstool Phallus impudicus, with an attendant swamp of bluebottles, protruding through the wood sorrel leaves. That netted cap of the fungus is coated with a gelatinous mass of brown, sticky spores when it first reaches maturity, but by the time I found this one the flies, attracted by the evil smell, had either eaten them already or carried most of them away on their feet. Stinkhorn spores can pass through a fly's gut without harm and are dispersed in their droppings.

John Ramsbottom, in his classic Mushrooms and Toadstools in the New Naturalist series, published in 1953, relates several entertaining anecdotes about stinkhorns. "The stinkhorn is often the cause of needless anxiety about sanitation", he observes, and mentions how he was able to pinpoint the fungus as the cause of noxious smells that were ruining the business of a tea room on the Norfolk coast. He also mentions that in a letter to The Times in 1865 the correspondent put forward the theory that the fungus could cause cholera and similar epidemics. Of more interest to the naturalist, he relates how the fungus is very attractive to slugs, that can detect the smell from a distance of 'six or seven yards away", on account of their ultra-sensitive antennae. Apparently they visit the fungus at night and help to disperse the spores by eating them. Rather them than me.....

Trees Under Attack

By this time of year many trees are showing signs of fungal attack. This strange growth on a developing alder cone is caused by a gall-forming fungus called Taphrina alni and is commonly known as alder tongue gall. An uninfected cone is illustrated below, for comparison. When the gall is mature it resembles a crimson tongue and occasionally you find several protruding from a single cone. Taphrina alni first arrived in Britain from France in the 1940s but didn't reach North East England, where it's becomong increasingly common, until the 1990s.

Turn over an aspen leaf like the one above and you may find its underside covered with clusters of golden spores, belonging to aspen rust fungus Melampsora larici-tremulae. Rust fungi have complicated life cycles, infecting different hosts at different times of the year.

When these leaves blacken, wither and fall to the ground they'll release spores that will infect next spring's new growth of larch needles, and the spores that form on those will then reinfect aspen foliage. This leaf came from an aspen growing near a larch plantation.

Aspen, whose leaf stalks are flattened along their sides, so that they flutter sideways in the wind and seem to tremble in the slightest breeze, normally turn an intense shade of lemon yellow in autumn, but the rust infected leaves simply wither and fall without changing colour.

Butterfly Haven

Today's Guardian Country Diary is an account of a visit to Hawthorn Hive on the Durham Coast, just south of Seaham. As soon as you start to descend the steep steps down to the beach you leave the cool south-westerley prevailing wind behind and find yourself in a sheltered bay, looking outwards towards the North Sea horizon. Until about thirty years ago the bay was used for dumping colliery waste (you can still detect a whiff of coal and find colliery artifacts, like bits of conveyor belt), but since that stopped it has gradually recovered. The shelter and warmth at the base of the cliffs provides a haven for wild flowers and insects - notably butterflies.

Down at the cliff base the warmth and shelter encourage early flowering and rapid seed development. These downy rose hips were ripe and already beginning to soften.

This is the seed head of a greater knapweed (Centaurea scabiosa) plant. It's particular warm close to the limestone cliffs, thanks to the reflected heat of the sun, and there the dry seed heads open into this star-shaped conformation, releasing the seeds. You can see a couple of seeds, with their pappus of bristles, still there in the centre.

There's a wealth of limestone-loving native wild flowers down on the beach and one notable alien introduction - a massive clump of montbretia (Croscosmia x crocosmiiflora). The parents of this garden hybrid orginated in South Africa. It's a bit of a mystery how the plant reached this bay, which is a long way from the nearest house garden, but it thrives at the base of the cliffs, where the temperature when this photograph was taken must have been close to that of its ancestral home.

Bees visit the montbretia flowers but most of the butterflies, like....

.... this peacock, which was drawn to the knapweed ....

... and this one, feeding on the dense patches of devil's bit scabious just below the cliffs ....

.... feed on the native wild flowers. On this visit we counted 16 species of butterfly, including commas (above), small whites, large whites, green-veined whites, small coppers, common blues, red admirals, peacocks (in large numbers), small tortoiseshells, meadow browns, a single painted lady, wall butterflies, speckled woods, small heaths, ringlets and a large skipper...............................but definitely no heath fritillaries - the photograph of these butterflies that accompanies the piece in the on-line Guardian is pure fantasy on the part of the newspaper's picture editor - there are no heath fritillaries in the north east, or indeed anywhere north of Essex.

 There are more accounts of the flora and fauna of Hawthorn Hive at http://cabinetofcuriosities-greenfingers.blogspot.com/search/label/Hawthorn%20Hive