Finally finding filicaulis

This post relates to the second day of my trip to the Scottish mainland on the 8th and 9th of October.

The weather was a bit hit and miss today, dull, drizzly, chilly and blowy, although it did clear up nicely in the afternoon. I had three target plants to try for this morning, all lifers for me, and the first could quite conceivably be in the hotel car park (I checked - it wasn't). I took a quick walk around the block, found a bakery and grabbed some food and a coffee, and continued my stroll around the backstreets of Grantown-on-Spey. I quite enjoy urban street botany, seeing whole plant communities growing in kerbs and pavement cracks never fails to amaze me. There really is no holding back Nature. Despite quite a lot of staring at the pavement beneath my feet, I failed to locate my first target plant. I jumped into my car and decided to partake in what, I guess, could be called a spot of kerb crawling. I drove down several quiet side streets at not much more than 10mph, all the while keeping one eye on the passing pavements. I found an area that seemed to have a well-established 'pavement community', parked up and got out to check more closely on foot. I kid you not, within 30ft I found my target plant. One I've searched for many, many times before without success. 

Slender Pearlwort, my nemesis these past few years!

I know, you're stunned at the sheer beauty of this gorgeous plant. I was too. No honestly, I really was! For the last couple of years or so, I've been scrutinising any pearlworts I find growing on a pavement and they've always been Sagina procumbens (apart from a single occasion in Dorset where I found a cushion of Sagina maritima). But here, in a town where I knew my target plant occurred, I finally broke the curse and Slender Pearlwort Sagina filicaulis is officially Number 6833 on my British PSL. I'm happy to say that I recognised it as being a 'non-procumbens' straight away. It just has a very different look to it. Through my 10x handlens I could see that some of the sepals were pale reddish along the edges, just to clinch the ID in case I'd somehow found Grantown's first colony of Annual Pearlwort (all Speyside records for Annual Pearlwort are pre-2000, at which time S.filicaulis was considered a subspecies of S.apetala).

Happy to have been rewarded for my persistence, I sped off eastwards towards a certain bridge over a fast-flowing river. On this occasion I am deliberately withholding site details, because the target plant is very rare and, assuming you're a reckless nutjob like me, it's not too difficult to climb down to where the plants grow. Less disturbance is definitely better, I feel. 

This is the very rare Dickie's Bladder-fern

There is a colony of Dickie's Bladder-fern Cystopteris dickieana on the underside of the bridge in the photo above. As you can see, they are small ferns which thankfully die back at the end of the season. I say thankfully because I accidentally broke an entire frond off whilst trying to reveal the underside for a pic. Hoy crap - I was mortified! Once I'd remembered that every frond is due to crisp, wither and die anyway I felt a little less mortified. A little. But if each year fifty people did what I just did, this plant could well become extinct here. So saying, I doubt more than about five people ever clamber to this particular spot in any given year, it's hardly a tourist attraction. Dickie's Bladder-fern is Number 6834. Onwards to my third and final target of the day.

I headed westwards now, slowly wending my way back towards Skye. Some years ago I found Hybrid Laburnum Laburnum x watereri growing on Skye. A few years after that I found a sapling Laburnum Laburnum anagyroides growing in woodland, also on Skye. That left just one species of Laburnum to find, Scottish Laburnum Laburnum alpinum. I've scoured through various records for Scottish Laburnum and, quite frankly, they all seem to occur in slightly iffy situations. Iffy as in they're almost certainly planted trees. The chances of my stumbling across a tickable one seemed remote, I'd have to twitch one if I wanted to complete the set. I finally found a record concerning a multi-limbed tree growing in a mature hedgerow, essentially way out in the middle of nowhere. And only a short detour on my way back to Skye. It sounded a tad more genuine than most of the other records I'd looked at. Some twenty miles later I found myself pulling up by a farm track that led through some deciduous woodland and then all I had to do was check the hedgerow for my tree. Fifteen minutes later and...

Scottish Laburnum in all of its multi-limbed glory

Initially I was somewhat concerned that this Scottish Laburnum had been planted, clearly the entire 'hedge' had been planted at some point in the past, what with it being more a line of mature trees than a hedge. But then I stood back and observed what was happening. The 'hedge' consisted of mainly Beech with a few specimen larch and lime trees. Undergrowth was effectively absent. The Scottish Laburnun appeared to be growing out from the trunk of a particularly large larch tree, in fact it wasn't clear to see that they were seperate trees at first! Laburnum seeds are not eaten and dispersed by birds, the pods twist and jettison the seeds some distance. But not for miles! So although I don't really understand how this tree came to be growing here, the fact that it is so close to the larch, when all the other mature trees are fairly evenly spaced apart, would indicate that it was not part of the original planting. And it's not in a position to be admired as an ornamental plant when flowering, it's down a dirt track next to cow pastures.  

Leafmines of the moth Leucoptera laburnella

Scottish Laburnum shows a distinct winged dorsal ridge to the seedpod

At 30x magnification the seedpod is shown to be covered in a microfungus

I've tried to put a name to the fungus that has developed all over the dry seedpod casing. I've used literature, I've looked online, I've read through various papers on Google Scholar. The best I can come up with is that it could be a Cladosporium. But there are a great many of those, I suspect I will have to let this one get away from me. Still, Scottish Laburnum is Number 6835 and concludes my overnight botanical tour of another small part of the mainland. 

To my great shock and genuine surprise, I managed to add ten species of plant to my PSL over the course of the last two days. My British Plant List now stands at 1655 species. It might take me a good few years, but I have the big 2K in my sights!