Ashdown Forest, August 2012

View over the Forest.  Sue Buckingham's outing to Ashdown Forest on 17 August 2012.

I am well behind with some of my photos.  These are from an outing to the Ashdown Forest in East Sussex.  It is mostly hilly open heath on sandy ground, with some dry areas and some boggy ones.

This was a botanical expedition, with the aim of seeing several interesting and unusual plants.  Everyone goes for the Marsh Gentians, which are the most showy of those.

Marsh Gentian, Gentiana pneumonanthe. Ashdown Forest, 17 August 2012.

They were just coming to their best, in a boggy area at the bottom of a slope.  There were also the remains of some Bog Asphodels, lovely when they are in bloom; earlier, I posted some Bog Asphodels on Keston Common.   This was a very tussocky area, with deep wet hollows between the grasses.  I came out with one wet foot.

Among the grass, someone found a Wasp Spider, a colourful immigrant.

Wasp Spider, Argiope bruennichi.  Ashdown Forest, 17 August 2012.

No-one really knows what that zigzag feature in the web is for. 

But there were many more common plants on the heath as well as these rarities.  Cross-leaved Heath was everywhere.

Cross-leaved Heath, Erica tetralix.  Ashdown Forest, 17 August 2012.

The flower is a lighter pink than the more prevalent purple-flowered heather, Calluna vulgaris.  We also saw the yellow flowers of Tormentil and Creeping Cinquefoil in the drier grass, and many patches of Dwarf Gorse, smaller and slightly less prickly than its larger relations.

There are cattle on some parts of the heath, and they leave their cowpats here and there; and there are fungi that specialise on cowpats, like this one:

Petticoat Mottlegill,  Panaeolus papilionaceus var. papilionaceus.  Ashdown Forest, 17 August 2012.

The Petticoat Mottlegill, distinguished from other Mottlegills by that little frilly rim around the base of the cap.  I found an Egghead Mottlegill, a close relation, on a cowpat not far away last year.

More to follow ...