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.
