Ha! I have heard it said that “the Devil makes work for idle hands,” maybe he does, I don’t know about that. Today we are going to talk about Monkey Business, of the botanical kind.
I just want to mention the star of today’s show.
Pretending to be Old Nick himself, this beautiful little innocent is one of our ASBO lambs. Born into the wild, this one has survived. I just met him about an hour ago and I was struck by his inner beauty.
I wish he was mine 🙂
Let’s talk about flowers (and hanky panky)
Primroses are lovely.
No question about that.
The Cowslip is so tall and strong.
Handsome even, that is just another word for beautiful.
But…
Should we leave them alone together?
I don’t know how much that you know about the birds and the bees but if you leave Primroses and Cowslips alone together then there is a very fair chance that they will get up to Hanky Panky.
This is a flower called the False Oxlip, real Oxlips are very rare and a species in their own right. A False Oxlip is the result of a liaison between a Primrose and a Cowslip. We are not here to judge.
As you probably realised I have been away for a few days, gathering botanical specimens for the benefit of our understanding and not what Fizz said, that is just her impish sense of fun.
I was not lying in a ditch, I was in the pink.
Starting with pinks, I have got Primroses. Not pins or thrums or even yellow ones, I have got pink Primroses.
This is the real thing, not a hybrid or garden escapee, this is the pink form of Primula vulgaris subspecies vulgaris a pink wild Primrose. They are not that rare but I didn’t have pictures and now I do 🙂
Now put pink out of your mind or the colours might clash.
This next one was a wonderful find.
I have been walking miles to get photographs of the various stages of Coltsfoot. A couple of days ago I was walking back from just such an expedition when we came to the gate.
This is where Fizz likes to play “The Gate Game.” This particular gate is by the side of a track we regularly walk and it is very close to home.
The rules of the game are simple. She runs under the gate with the ball and sits there looking at me, she won’t budge. If I climb over the gate she runs back under, to the other side and we play again. She can play this game for a long time. It is so funny. (Her impish sense of fun, again)
This time when I climbed over, I forgot all about her and didn’t bother coming back.
Coltsfoot on my doorstep. I have shown you the flower, it is a beautiful flower but that’s not it.
We had been out for about three hours in bright sunshine and we hadn’t seen an insect, not even a Butterfly. The Coltsfoot was swarming with them.
I need these photographs again for Easy Wildflowers. It is okay to say, “Provides a valuable source of nectar and pollen early in the year” but it is much better to have photographs.
Honey Bees. When I photograph insects I really want to get the eyes and it can get very frustrating trying to capture Bees on Thistles or Dandelions because they bury their faces in the flower. Coltsfoot is lovely and flat and it doesn’t give them anywhere to hide.
Moving on…There were lot’s of Butterflies but all of them Small Tortoiseshells and some of them were quite badly torn so today I will move past them quite quickly. (We will have lots of Butterflies later)
(Butterfly nectaring on Coltsfoot)
I just want to show you one more insect today. This next one is a Hover Fly, called a Drone Fly it is a Bee mimic.
This is Eristalis tenex.
You can tell it is a Hover Fly and not a Bee because it only has two wings and it has a thick waist.
It has huge eyes that would meet in the middle if it were a male, this one is female and it has stubby little antennae.
It is not quite so easy to get it to species, they can vary in colour a lot.
This is Eristalis tenex because it has a banana shaped back leg (curved rear tibia).
The hairs on it’s back legs are longer in the centre of each section and that is indicative of species.
If you look closely there are two lines of fine hair running down it’s eyes. That is probably not very clear unless you are looking for it.
Oh dear. Am I boring you?
Just one more little flower today.
I have been fretting over this one. It is already in flower and I haven’t put it on EW yet. There are two subspecies and I wanted the pictures to show the difference. This is the flower in question.
The Ivy-leaved Speedwell.
You have to look closely
Really closely.
There it is.
A British pond coin is about the same size as a wedding ring and an Ivy-leaved Speedwell is the same size as the “G” in “REG.”Inside the flower there are even tinier bits (smaller than Fizz) and what I have been looking for is a picture of the anthers just before they open to produce pollen. There is a fairly small window of opportunity.
If the anthers are bright blue, before they get covered with white pollen and all the other bits add up then it is Veronica hederifolia subspecies hederifolia and that is what I think that I have got here.
Don’t worry. I did think about putting some Spider pictures here to frighten you but then I thought better of it 🙂
Friday the thirteenth was a bit of a damp squib.
So I will tell you about yesterday instead.
First I went back to have another look at the flowers of the Dog’s Mercury  because something in my last photographs was troubling me.
What I had expected to see was a two lobed stigma (the white bit) sitting on the ovary and nothing else but there is something else. There are two extra organs, the thin green things either side of the white stigma.
So I went to the experts to find out what they are and the experts don’t know, at least not so far.
I have done some research of my own and found this
and that just says, “Female flowers stalked, with perianth similar to the male flower. Two subulate, abortive stamens are transformed into glandular filamentous nectaries.”
If that is correct then they are nectaries but it does not appear to be common knowledge or at least  it is not a common agreement.
Well, it does seem to me that science isn’t an exact science and there is still lots of stuff that we don’t know but here on Tramp we remain committed to pushing forward the botanical boundaries.
It is a pretty flower.
These pictures are pretty special, you will be lucky to find such clear pictures of the pistillate flower of Mercurialis perennis anywhere else on the web, luckier than me anyway because I have searched.
There is something wrong with my search engine.
If I do an image search for “Mercurialis perennis nectaries” I get pictures of Fizz.
Why?
Because Google personalises your search and returns the results that it thinks you want to see.
I find that frustrating, I want to see flowers and I have never in my life searched for a picture of Fizz, I own them.
Plus I have just kicked her out of my flat for being a mucky pup.
I took pity on her when we got back from our walk today, she was cold and wet. “Come into my home,” I said, “Be warm and have company.” She ran in circles for about an hour and then peed on my floor.
Let’s talk about Cramp Balls. Fizz likes them.
She likes to sit on her cakes. That little brown thing by her feet is a fungus.
It is known as King Alfred’s Cakes or Cramp Balls. (Daldinia concentrica)
King Alfred’s Cakes because it looks like a burnt cake and Cramp Balls because it was once believed that carrying these around with you would relieve the pain of cramp.
They can usually be found on fallen Ash wood and in truth I think that it is the wood that Fizz likes rather than the cakes, she thinks it’s furniture and so she gets on it.
Chop one in half and you will see where the scientific name  concentrica comes from, it grows in rings.
So you can’t eat them, what are they good for?
You can start a fire with them.
They are an excellent natural tinder and take a spark very easily.
That is important because…. In England it is always wet and cigarette lighters and matches don’t work when you really need them. So you carry a firesteel. A modern firesteel is a rod of metal alloys that will produce sparks when scraped with the back of your knife. It always works, it still works when it is wet but it only produces sparks and not a flame. You need something that will ignite with a spark.
Birch bark is good. You have to scrape it with your knife to get a little pile of tinder.
Pop it in your brand new titanium burner and have plenty of dry twigs for when you get a flame.
Give it a little spark and whoosh, up it goes.
That little burner is one of the best bits of kit I ever bought. I don’t normally do camp fires because dead wood is the most valuable thing in the forest and burning it is stupid but the smaller the wood the less value it has and this burner lives on twigs and leaves. There is always free fuel, the only problem is because the fuel is so small I have to constantly feed it, even to boil a kettle. That burner is carbon black today, it was shiny five years ago.
Cramp balls take a spark well but I always prefer Birch.
Have you finished burning the cakes now?
What do you think?
Next we have Primroses and we had thrums last time so I am only doing pins today.
Well there is no wildflower post today because my time has been taken up trying to find out about the Dog’s Mercury.
Instead of wildflowers you can have an absurdly cute cartoon dog.
She  is not real, she is a Toy Dog (I read that on Wikipedia)
It is like a Spring day out there today. It is like it is March and the sun is shining 🙂
In March the Butterflies come back and so today we are going out to look for them.
Fizz has got her happy face on.
I haven’t seen that face for a long time. She is not really happy (well, she is always happy) she is hot and she is panting and it hasn’t been hot for a very long time.
It didn’t take us long to find a Butterfly. This is a Red Admiral.
The Red Admiral is a migrant species that arrives here in the UK in May and June flying in from Europe and North Africa.
It is only fairly recently that it has been considered a resident species, they don’t like our cold winters.
Butterfly Conservation says on it’s website, “There is an indication that numbers have increased in recent years and that overwintering has occurred in the far south of England.” That needs updating.
This animal has survived the winter in Gloucestershire and hopefully I will soon see a lot more. Hurrah for global warming 🙂
It does look a bit tatty but so would you if you had been outside all winter.
We better find it some nectar plants. You can try some of these.
Lesser Celandine.
Dandelion
Common Field-speedwell
There is another one, a Small Tortoiseshell.
Oh Joy. The flowers are flowering, the Butterflies are coming back and Fizz has got her happy face on.
Primrose
ColtsfootNow Fizz and I are tired of all this sunshine and Butterflies and flowers.
We are going up on the bank to get our photographs taken with the sheep.
On the way we find another little flower that we haven’t seen yet this year.
This is Hairy Biittercress.
It’s good for Butterflies.
Okay, let’s make some selfies.
Everybody crowd in.Our shadows are getting very short, mine used to be about ten sheep long.
I have written about Stellaria media today but I have had to leave quite a lot of important stuff out because I just didn’t have the photographs. I haven’t seen it in flower yet but it won’t be long and then I shall get the pictures and update the post.
Stellaria media, The Common Chickweed
Common Chickweed is a member of the Stellaria genus of flowers. It is a very small flower, about a quarter of an inch in diameter (6-9 mm) and in common with other Stellaria species it has five white petals.
The  five petals of Stellaria media are divided right down to the base, giving the flower the  appearance of ten petals and note that the petals of Common Chickweed are shorter or no longer than the sepals and that the sepals are hairy.
(Common Chickweed, Stellaria media 6-9 mm) Compare Common Chickweed to two other Stellaria species that are commonly found here.
(Lesser Stitchwort, Stellaria graminea 7-12 mm)
(Greater Stitchwort, Stellaria holostea 15-25 mm) Common Chickweed has three styles that sit on a green ovary. The number of stamens can vary from three to eight.
(Stellaria media, 3 stamens)
(Stellaria media, 8 stamens) Common Chickweed has a weak stem, it will often trail along the ground but it seldom rises more that about eight inches. It is a small plant but if you find it growing in any quantity it is worth remembering that it is a tasty edible. The leaves can be eaten raw in salads.
The leaves are oval and smooth edged with a point at the tip, they grow in opposite pairs along the stem. Leaves at the base of the plant have quite long stalks and toward the top they are stalkless.
Common Chickweed has a tradition of use in herbal medicine and is most commonly used to treat skin conditions, cuts, bruises and burns
It is a valuable wildlife plant, a food plant to several moth species it is probably best known as being favoured by birds. Chickens eat both the plant and the seeds and that is how it gets it’s name, many small birds like finches eat the seeds and you can also feed it to cage birds.
Starting with Fizz and for anyone who didn’t see it already this is Fizz proving that dogs do actually say, “Bow, Wow,Wow.”
The little bird is still here.
He is landing on my hand now.
I am getting way ahead of myself. I am thinking that he might bring the young to me for food just as he will show them the bird feeders in the garden.
Maybe when it is warmer and I can leave the door open he will learn to come into the kitchen and have breakfast with me.
Shut up, Colin 🙂
The other little thing that I have got today is Primroses.
Don’t worry about the flowers we will have plenty of them. Last year the mice ate most of the flowers and I might have a go at filming them in the act. Pesky little animals.
Today I am looking at the buds, these are really special.
One last little thing that is bringing me a lot of pleasure, the Long-tailed Tits.
Last year they visited the garden but they didn’t stay here, these have been here every day for the last six weeks and obviously now I am hoping that they will stay and nest here.
I couldn’t photograph them today because the light was just too good. At this time of year the sun comes up behind the feeder and I can only see silhouettes and by the time it moves around it has dropped too low in the sky. Cloudy days are better for birds until the summer.
I made a video.
That’s it, no wildflower post because I didn’t have time today, I was too busy walking the dog 🙂
Today I have just a couple of wild flowers and a couple of rather good selfies to show you but before we get to that…
My story starts yesterday on Sunday the first of March, Spring Eve.
There was a cold north westerly blowing and I could have stayed at home but, you know, the Dog needs a walk. We headed out along a woodland track and the trees gave us some relief from the bitter wind.
I wasn’t expecting to see much but this is where I have been coming to look for Primroses and this time there were signs of life.
There were the first tiny flower buds showing and IÂ thought, “At last, it is happening.”
I started to take some photographs.
Then a little message appeared on my screen, “Built in memory full.”
What!
Fizz! You stupid, stupid dog, you have forgotten to remind me to put an SD card in the camera. What were you thinking of?
It had taken us thirty minutes to walk out there, what I had seen was captivating, there was no choice but to walk back to the farm, pick up a card and come back out.
By the time we got back the English weather had kicked in.
I should warn you that I use bad language in this next video (quite mildly) but you shouldn’t watch it if you are under twenty one.
That was yesterday and I missed the Eve of Spring. If, as a team we had a bit more fortitude then I still think that we could have got the pictures but I was outvoted.
So today I can show you what I failed to capture yesterday.
Yesterday there were no Primroses in flower and today I found two.
The first that I found was a pin.
The second was a thrum.
If you don’t know about Pins and thrums then I wrote it all down on Easy Wildflowers and you can read it here The Primrose it is a sexy story.
But that is not the thing. I have photographed thousands of Primroses, they are lovely and I am very pleased to see them.
I don’t believe that I had ever noticed before how very beautiful and unique the buds were. They have taken my breath away and also made my day, year, life complete. How could I have missed this?
These are very much not the best shots that I will get. I am taking these pictures under very difficult conditions. I hope that they will give you an idea of what I am looking at 🙂
The pup and I moved on, that happens when you throw the ball.
Further along this track I have been watching for Tussilago farfara, the Coltsfoot. I found it today.
Again, if you don’t know the story of this extraordinary little flower without leaves then you can find it on Easy Wildflowers here The Coltsfoot.
Some of you may be aware of my obsession with self portraiture and earlier in the day I had a go in the mud.
I was quite pleased with the results but still felt that I could do better and then the hail started.
My idea was to stand my dog in the hailstorm and take a picture of myself reflected in her eyes.
She wasn’t overly supportive at first.
Somebody call the Humane Society!
Shut up, you’ll be famous.
It kinda worked.
Well, that’s enough fun with animals, this is my flower post.
Senecio vulgaris, The Common Groundsel
Groundsel might be a bit of a hard sell. It is not everybody’s first thought when choosing a favourite wild flower.
Regarded as a weed by many it is a wild flower native to the UK, I will show you how to identify it.
(It’s native range extends throughout Eurasia and North Africa and it is naturalised in many other places including North America)
Common Groundsel is a member of the Asteraceae or Daisy family,
The flower head is made up of dozens of small disc florets (flowers) like the centre of a daisy, without the white “petals,”
The lack of ray florets (“petals”) helps to distinguish this species from it’s close relatives Heath Groundsel (S. syllvaticus) and Sticky Groundsel (S, viscous) Â which do have ray florets with the appearance of petals.
The flower head is contained within a cylinder of green bracts called an involucre. These are not sepals each individual flower inside the flower head has it’s own sepals.
There is a second outer ring of black tipped bracts at the base of the involucre,
Inside the cylinder of bracts there is a dense cluster of small flowers. Each flower sits on top of an ovary which will become the seed. At the top of the ovary there are a series of fine white hairs these are the sepals and they will become the parachute that will carry the seed away. Through the centre of the sepals runs the long white tube that is the corolla of the flower (Coralla is a word that is used when the petals of a flower are fused together)The corolla opens out into a small flower with five yellow lobes.
As each flower opens the  style emerges. The style has two yellow lobes, this is the pollen receptive female part of the flower and it is connected through the corolla to the ovary. The flower also has five stamens, the male pollen producing part, these form a tube around the lower part of the style and as the style grows through them it collects pollen.
Common Grounsel is extremely self fertile. It can flower throughout a mild winter, when there are no pollinators about and still produce seed. The plant is very short lived (about five weeks) but in that time it can produce thousands of fertile seeds.
When the seeds are ripe the green bracts open to reveal the seed head.
Now the flowers that served to pollinate the fruit have done their job they will fall away from the seeds before the seeds disperse.
As the corolla tubes fall away all that is left is the seed with the white sepals that now become the pappus or parachute to carry the seed away on the wind.
The plants ability to produce thousands of seeds at any time of year coupled with it’s preference for disturbed ground make Groundsel a particular pest to gardeners.
(Common Groundsel seedling)
However, whilst prolific the plant has a very shallow root system and is easily removed through weeding.
The shape of the leaves is best described with a photograph.
      The leaves can be quite smooth but they are often covered in long white hairs.
These hairs also often cover the stems beneath the flowers and they are often described as cobwebby, they do sometimes give the plant the appearance of being covered in cobwebs.
      The Latin Name Senecio is derived from the word “Sinex” which means “Old man,” It is a reference to the wispy white hairs of the pappus.
The common name Groundsel comes from the Old English “Grundeswylige” and means “To swallow the ground,” a reference to the plants ability to cover large areas, quickly.
Other common names include Common Butterweed and Ragwort.
In the UK at least Ragwort is a misnomer because that name belongs to another plant, Jacobaea vulgaris.
(Common Ragwort)
Ragwort used to be known as Senecio jacobaea and the two plants are closely related. Common Groundsel contains some of the same alkaloids that make Ragwort poisonous to livestock.
Small quantities of Groundsel ingested over a period of time can cause irreversible liver damage.
However there are few reported cases of Groundsel poisoning in livestock, it is only really a threat when feed such as hay bales become contaminated.
As a plant for wildlife Groundsel has some value. There are a few moth species that utilise it as a food plant including the Flame Shoulder (Ochropleura plecta) and the Cinnabar Moth (Tyria jacobaeae). There are also several species of beetles and flies that eat it.
I suspect that these interactions are under reported given the known value of Common Ragwort and the very similar qualities of the two plants.
Small birds also eat the seeds which are very often available mid winter.
This is just a quick Easy Wildflowers update. I wrote about primroses this morning and I thought that I should share a few images with you.
I don’t expect people to read that blog. It is intended as a reference work to accompany this blog and I plan to have it populated with a decent range of common flowers by next spring. You are not going to need it before then 🙂
The posts that I put there are actually pages. They won’t appear in your Reader even if you have followed that blog (sorry) for now I am using pages because they have a hierarchy that I may use to link different plant families and create a sort of taxonomy (I am not sure how that will work yet). My reservation about using pages is that I can’t put Tags/labels on them so they might be harder for search engines to find but my experience of search engines is that they pick up titles quicker than labels.
Pretty flowers.
The pin.
The Thrum
If you don’t know about pins  and thrumbs then you have to read the article but it is only really there for people who can’t recognise Primroses.
Anyway I told you that we would have flowers in the winter.
Today I have a lot of responsibility on my shoulders. There is a Fox in the Hen house and I have been left on my own to look after an over sexed Dog who keeps trying to escape and misbehave. I have got to get a CCTV system up and running and….. wait a minute…. maybe I can use the CCTV to keep an eye out for canine intruders.
🙂
I am not supposed to let the sheep roll on their backs or they will be unable to right themselves and they will explode (that is what I was told) Video camera at the ready for that one. No! kindness shall prevail.
Pretending to be Old Nick himself, this beautiful little innocent is one of our ASBO lambs. Born into the wild, this one has survived. I just met him about an hour ago and I was struck by his inner beauty.
No question about that.
Handsome even, that is just another word for beautiful.
But…
This is a flower called the False Oxlip, real Oxlips are very rare and a species in their own right. A False Oxlip is the result of a liaison between a Primrose and a Cowslip. We are not here to judge.
It seems to me to be a very beautiful offspring.
But I noticed his sister.
Beautiful animals.
A Tramp in the Woods 