Bog Myrtle & Peat

Walking around the boundary fence last night, I had both eyes constantly peeled for the vixen who barked at me last week. As the light failed, I turned for home and set off through an area of meadow land to the west of the Chayne. When I started this project in October, the entire farm was in a gradual state of decay. The summer was well past and the heather was browning. Throughout the winter, I watched the plant life fall away into nothing. In January and February, it seemed hard to imagine that anything had ever lived on the vast boglands where the icy wind whipped over the undergrowth to sting my ears and make my eyes water.

As I walked through the meadows, I was amazed at the abundance and variety of delicate flower species which have sprung up over the past few days. The heather laboratory is proving to be an invaluable control experiment time after time, and looking over the narrow rylock barrier, I saw far more flowers than anywhere else in the surrounding area. Heath rush and hare’s tail cotton grass has leapt out of the soil, although the latter plant has really benefitted from protection against grazing. The ling is extending anxious tendrils through the leaf litter, and although it looks a long way from flowering, it is already taller and more prosperous in appearance compared with that outside.

Two flowers in particular really attracted my attention in the heather laboratory, both of a similar size and shape. I am wholly ignorant on the subject of wild flowers, but posting two photographs on http://www.ispot.com quickly led me to a correct identification. Ragged robin (lychnis flos-cuculi) was once a widespread meadow flower, but has suffered major declines over the past twenty years, apparently due to a decline in traditional farming methods and an increased use of weedkillers. Although it is not exactly rare, it is no longer a common sight in Britain.

The other flower is bog asphodel (narthecium ossifragium), a pretty little concentration of scruffy, pointed yellow flowers with a strong smell of aniseed. From what I can gather, shepherds once believed that bog asphodel gave sheep brittle bone disease, but recent research has shed new light on the subject. Sheep certainly got brittle bone disease in areas where bog asphodel was found, but it has nothing to do with the plant. Bog asphodel only grows in extremely acidic soils where there is a natural deficit of alkili minerals such as calcium. Without calcium, sheep were growing weak bones and developing the disease while the pretty yellow flower was only a symptom of poor soil, rather than acting as a negative force in its own right.

As I walked back to the car in the half darkness after having gathered the flowers, a fox raced through the rushes and dived into the woodcock strip one hundred yards ahead. He never even slowed down, much less presented a decent shot, but now I know where he lives, his days are numbered.