Cat’s-ear, Hypochaeris radicata, flowering and going to seed on the front lawn, which I left untrimmed during ‘No Mow May’ but which is now due for strimming.
Cat’s-ear
Tag: Lawn
Every Flower Counts #2
The flowerheads of ribwort plantain and catsear fell just outside my square metre.
It’s the last day to take part in Plantlife’s ‘Every Flower Counts’ follow-up survey, in my case to see how our front lawn has progressed since its last mowing at the end of ‘No-mow May’.
In my randomly chosen square metre there are just 9 white clover flowerheads, most of them already partially going to seed, so my nectar score is a little disappointing:
But it is a lot better than my ‘No Mow May’ score because a handful white clover flowerheads can produce more nectar than the 75 germander speedwell flowers that I counted last month so the lawn is producing 10 milligrams of nectar per square metre, an improvement on the 1.7 at the end of May, and the whole lawn can potentially support 13 bees, up from 2 in the last survey.
No Mow May
The daisies are hardly bothering to open up on such a cool dull morning but at least I don’t get a spot of rain until the end of my brief sketching session as Barbara and her brother John make their three-circuit – one mile – exercise walk around the park. A man, accompanied by his young son on a bike, has set himself the target of four miles: twelve times around Illingworth Park.
It rains properly in the afternoon, which our garden really needs after such a dry April. Hopefully we’ll now get a bit of warmth and things will burst into life.
Every Flower Counts . . .
Leave your lawn unmown for the month of May and let the flowers bloom on your lawn. Then, at the end of the month, find out how many bees your lawn can feed with our Every Flower Counts Survey.
Plantlife Every Flower Counts survey
Well that’s all the persuasion that I need, it’s got to be worth a try, although we might need a mown path across our back lawn to get to the veg beds and to hang out the washing.
I am of course a bit biased and I even think of garden weeds as wild flowers, however troublesome, so I’m not the one to judge when it comes to a dilemma between tidy management and wild & free.
Spray or Strim?
“What do you think of the change from strimming to using herbicides?” I ask a couple from the allotments alongside the park.
The man with the barrow isn’t convinced: “They’ve gone along the fence, but we’ve got bindweed down there, you think that was what needed doing.”
“We used to grow a blackberry along the fence,” adds the woman, “so people could pick the berries on the other side, but they said that we’d be liable if anyone was ill, so they’ve taken it out.”
At first when I saw rings of dead grass around posts and litter bins, I blamed the local dogs, but it’s the result of the council making the change to spraying as an alternative to the expensive business of strimming around obstacles – which can be damaging to young trees.
I know how long it takes me to edge the lawn and to try and stop the chicory in our little meadow area taking over the paths and veg beds in the immediate vicinty, so I can imagine the scale of the problem of keeping things tidy over the whole Metropolitan District.
Plantlife is celebrating the way Wakefield and eight other councils are leading the way in better managing their road verges for wildlife, so I’m sure that the strimming versus herbicides dilemma has been carefully thought out, but however environmentally friendly the herbicide is that they’re using, there’s a lot of it being applied and inevitably there must be some impact on biodiversity.
Link
Every Flower Counts, Plantlife
Molehill
3 p.m., 42ºF, 7ºC: This molehill appeared a week or two ago exactly in the middle of our back lawn. We could see it growing, like a mini-volcano erupting, but we were never able to spot the creature making it. A robin eyed the growing pile and flew over to perch and peck on it.
As it was directly under the fat ball feeder which hangs from the washing line we did at first consider that it might be a brown rat digging a bolt hole as close as possible to a source of food but no exit holes ever appeared so this is a subterranean creature; it must be a mole. At the moment there are plenty of molehills just like this on grass verges and alongside the woodland path.
I’ll rake out the soil and spread some grass seed over it. The tunnel will help improve drainage beneath what becomes a mossy lawn over the winter and the excavations will help recycle nutrients in the lower layers of the soil.
Brown Mottlegill
Summer warmth and a few heavy showers have triggered the growth of some small fungi on our dewy back lawn this morning. They’re going to get trimmed off when I get around to cutting the lawn so I pick them to draw and to take some close-ups using my USB microscope.
The cap which is about a centimetre across is smooth with no trace of ridges. It has dark brown gills, which I’d describe as distant as opposed to close or crowded.
In this photograph the gills are emarginate, meaning that there is a notch where they attach to the stem. But the notch isn’t as clear in this cross section of the cap;
The circular stem is hollow and there’s no swelling at its base.
Spore Prints
The pattern of growth, as far as I can judge by this little group, is trooping. I couldn’t see any trace of a fairy ring starting to form.
I’m taking spore prints which might help narrow down what kind of fungus it is.
My thanks to Steve Clements for this suggestion;
Most likely a Mottlegill (Panaeolus or Panaeolina) – the commonest one on mown grass round my part of Sheffield is Brown Hay Cap – Panaeolina foenesecii – which is supposed to be slightly hallucinogenic. The spores are blackish, and warted (under the microscope). The gills look mottled under a hand lens.
The Collins Guide calls this species Brown Mottlegill and adds that the ‘dark brown-black’ spores are ‘ellip to lemon-shaped’ which is how they look in 200x photograph that I took with my microscope.
Hawkbit
ON THE sunnier edge of the lawn hear the flower border there’s a small colony of Autumn Hawkbit, Leontodon autumnalis, also known as Autumn Dandelion. As that name suggests, it does look like an undernourished dandelion, but then so do so many of these hawkbit/hawkweed/hawksbeard relatives of the dandelion so in this case the name Hawkbit is a good way to remember one of the differences; the narrow leaf is deeply toothed, as if a hawk has been pecking pieces out of it.
Rye Grass
We’ve had the odd shower but it’s been so dry during the last month that we mown the lawn only once. This has allowed some of the grasses like this Perennial Ryegrass, Lolium perenne, to flower. Ryegrass is usually included in a seed-mix for a hard-wearing lawn, which our’s has to be.
Hen-and-Chickens
OUR LAWN wouldn’t win any prizes either as immaculate turf or as a wild flower meadow but wild flowers, weeds and garden escapes manage to find micro-habitats within the 40 square yard south-east-facing slope where they can take hold. On the worn route to the garden path by the shed, on the shadier side of the lawn, there’s a patch of White or Dutch Clover, Trifolium repens; the most luxuriant growth of moss amongst the grasses is in a flattish area near the middle of the lawn and Dog Daisy, Chrysanthemum leucanthemum, has crept in from where it originally grew in the flower border.
Orange Hawkweed, Pilosella hieracoides, also known as Hen-and-Chickens or Fox-and-Cubs because of the way the unopened buds group around the flowers, grows at the top end of the lawn near the patio, where it’s drier and sunnier. It’s a naturalised hawkweed that grows in grassy and waste places. As it spreads by underground rhizomes and can become a weed, I had better remove the few plants that have become established during this dry summer before it takes over.
Cherry Log Fungus
‘It looks as if someone has put a dollop of mashed potato on the log!’ says Ellie; this fungus is growing on a log – the trunk of a flowering cherry – that has been left as a makeshift bench at the corner of the car park at the Denby Dale Road entrance to Thornes Park (or to be more accurate, Holmfield Park).
I didn’t get chance to draw enough of it to identify it. Some kind of bracket fungus presumably, or possibly something similar to Dry Rot.
Ellie has asked me to come along to Thornes Park to film an interview about my booklet Walks in the Rhubarb Triangle. One of the walks starts here at the statue of rhubarb at the corner of the park. The fungus provided me with a subject to draw as I waited for the film crew to arrive.