More Orchids. Morchids.

When I said a couple of posts ago that orchids just litter the roadside around here: here's a fairly extreme example of that.

This is a common spotted orchid (Dactylorhiza fuchsii) which, as the name suggests, is one of Britain's commonest wild orchids. The roadside that I spotted it next to was the main road between Stornaway in the Isle of Lewis and Tarbert in Isle of Harris. Technically, they're the same island - as in there is no water between them - but while Lewis is predominantly flat, Harris is not. The road winds up the side of a mountain over looking Loch Seaforth and we stopped to admire the view. 

You can't blame us, really, can you? Harris makes Lewis look like the garden of eden. This, we joked, was 'troll country' and were listening to Norwegian band Wardruna just to add to the effect.

I went for a short wander up the hillside and spotted this little beauty on the marshy soil. Photographing the picture at the top came at the expense of my knees, kneeling in the damp bog but I think it was worth it.

Still more orchid pictures to come.
The Common Spotted Orchid http://www.wildlifetrusts.org/species/common-spotted-orchid

Wardruna. The song's about Odin and sung in old Norse.

Pretty Pictures Of Flowers

In yesterday's post, I mentioned 'matter', which was the 'fertile plain' between the alkaline sea and the acid moor? Well here's an example of that. The yellow-ochre patch to the right is seaweed and I'm afraid I don't know a damn thing about seaweed so can't help you on that. To the left is grass (I'm guessing marram grass) and the pink flowers are thrift (Armeria mafitma). Thrift is tolerant of salty sea water - I've seen it quite happily living underwater in a nearby loch - and so can handle the occasional high tide.

This is the same patch of land, showing the large tussocks and the channels of water running between them. The area is prone to very violent winter storms, and these patches are built on tiny patches of earth on a bed of very tough rock. The rock in question is lewisian gneiss, which is a type of granite and igneous, if you remember your geology from school. Some of the oldest rocks in the British Isles apparently, although I thought they were all pretty old.

Now, moving inland, the place where we are staying comes with a croft, which is a patch of land that comes with the house and is intended for agricultural purposes. It is used occasionally for agricultural purposes - specifically grazing sheep. However, a quick jaunt around provides some surprising finds. Not just the northern marsh orchids as described in the previous posts (I've counted six in the immediate garden of the house alone) but such beauties as these:

This is Red rattle (Pedicularis palustris) or marsh lousewort, which was very prolific on the site. This is a 'hemi-parasitic' plant, which attatches it's roots to the roots of nearby grasses and 'borrows' water and mineral salts. Back down south, it  and it's cousin yellow rattle are often sewn into fields to improve biodiversity, as the grass there would otherwise crowd out everything else. Here, it just grows of it's own accord in a scrubby, rush infested bit of sheep grazing land.

According to the 'Reader's Digest Field Guide To Wild Flowers of Britain', which I found on the shelf here, it got the name 'lousewort' from a theory that it infected sheep with lice. However - and again according to the same book - lousewort is popular with snails and snails are carriers of liver fluke, which can infect sheep. Unhealthy, liver fluke stricken sheep would have been prone to catching lice and then spreading lice through the rest of the flock. Happily for sheep, shepherds and wildflowers, sheep are inoculated against liver fluke these days.

This is a round-leafed sundew (Drosera rotundifolia), which is a carnivorous plant. The leaves are covered in red hairs, each of which is covered in a droplet of sticky liquid. Midges mistake them for water and get stuck, where upon the leaf curls inwards and the insect is digested. Like all carnivorous plants, it also photosynthesises, so the insect-eating is an addition to, rather than a replacement for, the actual nutrient factory of photosynthesis. Chomping the occasional insect allows the plant to thrive on a highly acid bog with very few essential plant minerals.  

So there you go. There's more, much more but we'll get round to that presently.

Orchidorama

Just to get everybody up to speed, I'm on holiday on the Isle Of Lewis in the outer Hebrides at the moment and am keeping my eye open for anything interesting. We'd already spotted porpoises, jellyfish and a dead monkfish before we'd even got there and, on arrival, we were not disappointed!

The western Isles, which are a very remote, wet and windswept place are renowned for their machair, or beds of wildflowers. This is from the gaelic for 'fertile plane' and represents a flat bit of coastal land, stuck at a fairly neutral pH level between the alkaline sea and the acid bog of the inland.

To expand briefly on that, all soil is either acid, neutral or alkaline. Soils such as chalk, which is the predominant soil type down where I live on the south coast, are alkaline while "good" soils tend towards either neutral or very slightly acid. It's one of those things you get a lot in ecology, where a healthy soil helps maintain a healthy soil. Plants die and are eaten by various critters, down to and including microbes, which creates a rich hummus that is ideal soil for plants to grow in.

It's one of those weird, chicken and egg type situations, where perfect harmony is perpetuated somehow. However, in some places, heavy and persistent rain will wash all these nutrients out of the soil. The western isles are all about heavy and persistent rain. And wind. This makes the soil very acid indeed and, as we know acid and microbes do not get along very well. The rain washes nutrients from the soil, making the soil more acidic, which inhibits microbial life in the soil and microbial life is basically the bottom of the pyramid that all life rests on. Without it, nothing happens.

Last time I was up here, it was February 2015 and I was moving stones around amongst other things. Down south, even in February, when you moved a stone, lots of little critters like woodlouse and centipedes would scurry out of your sight but here... nothing. Not even worms. It was one of the best illustrations of a line in a text book that I'd ever seen. Without microbes, stuff does not rot and so you get great, springy, squishy matts of peat building up over the centuries. Remove a core from these bad boys and you can bring up seeds going bucket just after the last ice age.

So, just to recap, rain washes out nutrients, creating a highly acidic soil. This creates a difficult environment for most plants - the interior of the Isle of Lewis is not thick with fields of wheat, for example - however, this makes it a just fantastic habitat for plenty of rare plants. Orchids, for example.

The four pictured are in the driveway of the place where we are staying. Just to confirm that: in the place where we are staying, there are at least four wild orchids IN THE DRIVEWAY. The one in the picture above is a good foot high. According to my research, it's a northern marsh orchid, on account of the fact that it looks like one, it's in the north (we're about 20 miles south of the most northerly point in the British isles) and it's on a marsh. Dactylorhiza praetermissa to give a species name, though be warned I am not an expert, just a bloke with a book on wild flowers.

This one was probably a common spotted orchid, although according to this same book, they tend to grow on lime soils, which this very much is not. But putting all that aside, isn't it pretty? And they're all over the place. Literally: you look in a roadside verge and think 'oh, another orchid'. Back home, I got quite excited when I saw a few on a roadside verge that had specifically been planted for wildlife. Here... they just grow.

Anyway, just to wrap up, this is not the machair that I described above. That is mostly buttercups and daisy as far as I can tell. This is on the acid bog that covers most of the island. More to follow... stay tuned.