Living on Others

It's all interconnected, is Nature. And here is the perfect illustration; a parasite from the plant world, broomrape (Orobanche sp.). It might be Thistle Broomrape, Orobanche reticulata, but then it might be quite a number of similar but different broomrapes. The lack of any green makes them very obvious, in this year's wet and sunny Spring:

No greens for me, chum

The wet spring has also meant a bloom in funghi, and this, I think, is Tremella mesenterica, growing on a felled oak in the woodlands. In a few years, the funghi will have liquidised the tree, enriching the humus and helping recycle the nutrients back to the new trees already growing around it.

 
We are alive thanks to these cycles and recycles...ad infinitum.

Floral sex

There are lots of ways of reproducing in the animal kingdom, as the brilliant Olivia Judson has shown; her 'Dr Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation' is the funniest biology book I've ever read. Here are a couple of much more mundane examples from plants and fungi, gathered yesterday at the Croft. 

In the flowers camp I have picked two that illustrate another point - food and sex; the first is a Broomrape (Orobanche alba), a parasitic plant that has no chlorophyll and survives instead on the juices of, in this case, the thyme plant. The Thyme Broomrape has a sort of sweet smell of cloves and cinnamon. The second is an orchid, Orchis militaris. Both flower, and thus depend on pollinators to reproduce. The orchid may, like many orchids, have a specific pollinator species - which would mean that both it and the Broomrape depend on another species for survival.

Thyme for more juice

Military Orchid, in pacifist pink

 For spores, here is a splendid fungus; I am rubbish at identifying them, which is why I rarely collect them to eat them, but a friend of a friend suggests it might be the edible Leccinum Lepidum, or possibly but less likely a Suillus granulatus. 

Faeries be here