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Thursday's Guardian Country Diary is about this November-flowering dog rose that we found blooming amongst the rose hips, on a bush growing at Hawthorn Dene on the Durham coast.
The recent record-breaking spell of warm late-autumn weather has extended the flowering period of many plants and even induced some to flower for a second time. Recently we've found holly in bloom and also elder flowers opening alongside berries on the same branch, as well as the usual late-blooming suspects like yarrow, hogweed and clovers.
This rose was one of two fully-open flowers on a bush covered with ripe rose hips on leafless stems. None of the other roses around it had any flowers. Presumably this individual plant was genetically predisposed to reacting to warmer-than-normal November temperatures. I've seen burnet rose flowering at Christmas in a couple of mild winters but have never seen this kind of behaviour in dog roses.
It seems unlikely that these late flowers will produce seeds because there were no bee pollinators around and the plant had almost no leaves to provide sugars to fill seeds, unlike ...
... the late-flowering yellow-wort that was blooming at the same site. These flowers were being visited by small fly pollinators that are quite numerous at this time of year and especially attracted to yellow flowers. This species is a fast-growing annual and I suspect that the late-bloomers that we saw might have been second-generation plants themselves, benefitting from the unusually long growing season this year.
Like many annuals, yellow-wort is one of those plants that can grow large and carry scores of flowers in good soil conditions but can also survive in tiny pockets of soil, producing very small plants with just a few flowers and setting seed rapidly when conditions are challenging. Thanks to those fly visitors, the tiny plants flowering in limestone fissures that we found might well produce some viable seeds before winter finally bites.
Found some lovely toadstools in Auckland Park at Bishop Auckland last week. I'm pretty sure this is the trooping funnel Clitocybe geotropa - this was the largest in a ring of eleven under a beech tree. Beautiful arrangement of gills under that funnel-shaped cap.
I think this must be hairy curtain crust Stereum hirsutum .......
.... and this is probably the same species, perhaps paler because the rain had washed out some of the pigment.
Bollihope, just south of Frosterley in Weardale, can be a bleak place at this time of year. Acres of brown heather and withered bracken, with a few small conifer plantations. But if you follow some of the burns that flow down into the bottom of the valley you soon find yourself standing on a tropical coral reef, albeit a 325 million year-old one.
This is the subject of Thursday's Guardian Country Diary
This is the rock known as Frosterley marble, which is not a true marble at all but a fine grained, dark limestone full of fossil Dibunophyllum
bipartitum coral. In this slab you can see one almost complete piece of the horn-shaped coral in longitudinal section and two pieces in transverse section. The contrast between the fossil and the stone matrix becomes much greater when you make it wet or polish the surface.
The state of preservation of the coral structure is astonishing. This particular specimen is embedded in a slab that must have once been a small waterfall until the burn changed course. It has been worn smooth by flowing water.
Medieval craftsmen spent months cutting and polishing the rock by hand to achieve a smooth, marble like black surface that revealed the fossils in this detail. Their work can be seen in pillars of the Chapel of the Nine Altars in Durham cathedral and in the pillars in the Bishops' Palace at Auckland castle in Bishop Auckland, as well as in smaller objects like the font in Frosterley church.
It's also in the flagstones on the floor of the bar of the Black Bull pub in Frosterley.
Frosterley marble floor decoration in the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne
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