Solomon’s Seal Fate Sealed

The patch of Solomon’s seal Polygonatum x hybridum in our garden is just coming into flower, looking immaculate after a light shower of rain, but within about a month its leaves will be reduced to skeletons. Yesterday I watched the current generation of Solomon’s seal sawfly Phymatocera aterrima emerge from their pupae in the soil and begin to climb the stems, with the sawflies' wings still not fully expanded. Within five minutes the males had found the females and they were mating. Within fifteen minutes the females were laying eggs in the leaves. Every year the larvae that develop strip away all the leaf tissue but there doesn’t seem to be any fatal long-term consequences for the plants, which has been spreading steadily in the flower border for the last ten years. The top picture is the sawflies'-eye view of the plant arching overhead, as they emerge for another breeding season and the picture below......


 

...... shows their highly destructive larvae at work.

Fulmars and Gorse

We spent the afternoon on the Northumberland coast, setting out to walk from Craster (after lunch in the Jolly Fisherman) to Howick, but only made it half way before the weather turned nasty. We left the pub in bright sunshine but there were already dark clouds on the western horizon. The display of gorse along this stretch of coastline at the moment is stunning – it’s so bright you could get a suntan just from looking at it. Its coconut scent is wonderful, although you needed to get pretty close to appreciate it today, with a strong, blustery wind blowing its fragrance out to sea. The kittiwake colony at Cullernose point was a cacophony of birds, perched on their narrow nesting ledges, but it was the fulmars that I really wanted to photograph. If ever there was a bird that seems to exalt in its power of flight, surely it’s this one, gliding along the edge of the cliffs with scarcely a flap of its wings, effortlessly riding the updraft. They passed so close that we could see the turbulence over their wings ruffling their feathers; too close most of the time, whizzing past so fast that nine out of every ten photographs were out of focus. I could watch these birds all day – but not today, because then the rain arrived - horizontal, driving rain. We were soaked by the time we got back to the car, but we'll be back.

The Afterlife of Trees

I think it might have been Oliver Rackham, botanist and noted expert on woodlands, who once commented that the only object in woodlands more valuable than a live tree was a dead one, since they host so many species of wood-boring beetles and other insects that breed in dead wood. This ancient beech stump, in Durham University Botanic Garden’s new woodland nature trail, is riddled with emergence holes from insects that have bred in it, but its most conspicuous features are the magnificent specimens of the bracket fungus (Ganoderma sp.) that was almost certainly the cause of its death. This parasitic fungus weakens the tree and infected trunks typically snap somewhere above head height during gales. The fungus is perennial, so each year the bracket develops a new zone of spore-producing tissue around its periphery and generates so many spores that they cover the vegetation below with what looks like a layer of cocoa powder. You can estimate the age of the bracket by counting the number of ‘steps’ on its upper surface; each marks the end of a year’s growth. During their ten years of existence, these brackets must have produced billions of spores. You can read more about the woodland nature trail at http://www.dur.ac.uk/botanic.garden/?itemno=7173