Sheep on Boxing Day

View from inside the quarry on Riddlesdown, with Jacob sheep on the skyline.  26 December 2014.

There was a Boxing Day walk on Riddlesdown, along to the abandoned chalk quarry where the warden, Matt, counts the sheep every day.  There are 40 Jacob sheep grazing here to keep down the secondary growth, which allows the rare chalk plants and butterflies to survive.

The quarry is fenced and locked, so it's good to get inside occasionally.  I was last in Riddlesdown Quarry in the summer of 2011, a very interesting time to see it.  Not much is happening in midwinter, but we had a good look at the sheep.

View from inside the quarry on Riddlesdown, with Jacob sheep on the skyline.  Closeup.  26 December 2014.

This is part of the same photo at full size.  The sheep were baaing loudly.  Matt gives them some pellets to get them to come and be counted; they were clearly reluctant to come down that slope, and not intelligent enough to go around.  There used to be some goats in the quarry that would have come straight down with no problem.

(Here you can see the typical jpeg compression blockiness that is a shortcoming of the iPhone camera.)

Geologists love this place because so much of the chalk stratification is exposed.

Diagram of exposed strata in Riddlesdown quarry.

This is an iPhone photo of a handheld photocopy.  This shows the good points of the iPhone camera - it's still quite visible and legible!   The view at the top is at the left side of this diagram, showing the gully.

We clearly could not count the sheep from this viewpoint, so we went to find them.

A walker feeding sheep in Riddlesdown quarry.  26 December 2014.

This is at the top, not quite the same place shown above because they came running to us, more so when they heard that bucket being rattled.  We learned that counting 40 sheep is only possible if they stop running around.

Before the walk I had a look around Coombes Wood, near the car park, and saw this pretty late season fungus:

Mycena rosea, Rosy Bonnet.  Coombes Wood, Riddlesdown, 26 December 2014.

 There are not many annual fungi around this late, but it has been a very mild December.

Cluster of Jewels

Hoya curtisii flowers on my kitchen windowsill.  Hayes, 8 November 2014.

 Hoya flowers are beautiful miniatures, like clusters of jewels.  I have posted some before - Hoya bella here, and Hoya serpens here.  This one, Hoya curtisii, flowered for me this year.  (Those tiny greenfly get everywhere!)

A single Hoya curtisii flower.   Hayes, 8 November 2014.

They do have drawbacks.  Hoya bella is very free-flowering but the clusters all face downwards, so you need to have it trailing from up high if you want the best view.  Bot this one and Hoya serpens have inconspicuous fowers that you need to get close to to get the benefit.  Hoya serpens is probably the best, though, because its fabulous scent fills the house.

Close up, they seem just a bit more glamorous than native flowers, lovely as they can be.  For comparison, here's a Dogwood from earlier in the year:

Dogwood flowering in my back garden in Hayes, 18 April 2014.

Of course, another view is that the Hoyas look like costume jewellery, whereas this is the real thing.

And another comparison.  Here's a Stapelia variegata, a succulent plant from southern Africa, that lives indoors here in winter and outdoors in summer.  As the flowers smell of rotten meat, like an ill-tended dustbin, outdoors is good.

Stapelia variegata flower on my balcony in Hayes.  13 August 2014.

Like the Hoyas, this is exotic, but I would not describe it as jewel-like.  Of course, there are exotic native flowers too.  Orchids, for example. 

Some Local Farm Weeds

Erysimum cheiranthoides, Treacle-mustard.  Hayes Street Farm, 17 December 2013

Treacle-Mustard is another plant from Hayes Street Farm.  It is a well-known agricultural weed and it used to be common on waste ground in London, but is now much less so, perhaps because there are fewer loads of earth-covered potatoes and so on being trekked into the town from the surrounding countryside.  It keeps flowering into winter.

Galinsoga quadriradiata, Shaggy-soldier.   Hayes Street Farm, 1 December 2014.

Shaggy-Soldier is uncommon enough to be worth recording.  Again, this is in one of the ploughed fields on Hayes Street Farm and is flowering well into winter.  It has a close relation known as Gallant-Soldier, a common name derived directly from the scientific one, which has spread as an escapee from Kew Gardens.  The plant shown here is Shaggy because of its hairy flower stem. 

Thlaspi arvense, Field Penny-cress.  Hayes Street Farm, 5 December 2014.

Lastly for this post, the seed pods of another agricultural weed from the same farm.  This pod is about 1.5 cm across, and it is easy to see how its common name came about.  This was also still in flower in December, but the flowers are insignificant and this seed pod is much more showy.

Some Winter-flowering Nettles

Lamium purpureum, Red Dead-nettle, white flowered form.   Hayes Street Farm, 1 December 2014.

In December my wild flower class takes a break, and the pupils look for any wild plants that are actually showing flowers in the middle of winter.  There are many more than you might think, though many of them are ragged and there might only be a few blooms. 

I live near a farm which must be one of the closest to London.  Hayes Street Farm is always worth a visit for winter flowers.  It is bounded by houses, a main road, and some woods, and has a few nice agricultural weeds of its own.  This plant is not far from the houses and might possibly have escaped from a garden, though I don;t think many people would plant it.  It's a white-flowered variety of the Red Dead-nettle.  Dead-nettles are so called because they have no sting.

Lamium album, White Dead-nettle.   Hayes, 1 December 2014

For comparison, here is a White Dead-nettle, a much more robust plant.  You can see that the leaves are shaped differently and have more pointed serrations.  The calyx that surrounds the flowers is larger and more spiky.  This looks a lot like the common Stinging Nettle, except for the flowers.  It's worth knowing the difference.  Both grow in waste ground and at roadsides as well as in the country.

Urtica dioica, Stinging Nettle.  Hayes, 2 December 2012.

Here are some Stinging Nettle flowers I photographed in 2012.  The leaves are similar but the flowers are totally different.  This has a couple of common relatives, as well as another harmless lookalike called Gypsywort that grows by water.  One of the relatives has an even nastier sting:

Urtica urens, Small Nettle,.  Hayes Street Farm, 17 December 2013.

The Small Nettle.  Hayes Street Farm has a field full of it this year.  The flowers are similar to those of the Stinging Nettle, but the clusters are smaller.  In fact the whole plant is smaller.  The leaves are more rounded, and look at those stinging hairs!

Lycopus europaeus, Gypsywort.  Leybourne Lakes Country Park.  27 July 2012.

Just for comparison, here is the harmless Gypsywort, which you are not likely to see in flower in December.
It has small clusters of white flowers at the stem nodes.

Knole Park, Dec 2014

Pond in Knole Park, 6 December 2014

I led a walk in Knole Park on 6 December.  We had just had our first really frosty night, and in the nearby woods the leaf litter was frozen solid, so it didn't seem a good day to go looking for fungi there, but the bright sunshine was lovely and the park itself was very pretty.  And as it happened, we found quite a few fungi in the grass.  It's a good season for waxcaps, brightly coloured red and yellow fungi that love the short grass, though actually we found several species in dark woodland a week or so earlier.

Hygrocybe chlorophana, Golden Waxcap.   Knole Park, 4 December 2014.

I took a couple of waxcap photos when I reconnoitred for the walk a couple of days earlier. That was a miserable grey drizzly day, so I was very pleased that the sun shone for the actual walk.  Several waxcaps have greasy or slimy caps, as you can see by the way this one glistens, and this Golden Waxcap has a slippery stipe as well.

Hygrocybe coccinea, Scarlet Waxcap.   Knole Park, 4 December 2014.

When young, these Scarlet Waxcaps are as bright as berries in the mossy grass. The cap is slippery, the stipe is not.

I also found this next item in the grass.  I had read that the droppings of Green Woodpeckers looked like cigarette ash.  We had just seen one of the birds zooming along just above the ground, and this was not far away.  It is certainly not as pretty as the waxcaps, but just as interesting to a naturalist.

Dropping of a Green Woodpecker, Picus viridis.  Knole Park, 6 December 2014.

My last photo for the day is the Bird House folly, currently occupied by a park worker.  It was

built in about 1761 to house Lionel, first Duke of Dorset's exotic bird collection.  

Bird House Folly, Knole Park, 6 December 2014

This is a view through its front gate.  The flint walls are said to be medieval, and brought here from nearby Otford.  So I suspect that the stones were brought here and then rebuilt into wall shapes. 

Our thoughts on seeing this was that it would be very dark inside, and lacking in storage space.  That might not have worried the birds, but it would be hard on the estate worker.

[The two waxcaps were taken with my EOS 6D and 100mm macro lens.  The other photos were taken with my iPhone 6; the saturated colours make the pool shot look very punchy but the depth of field and dynamic range are not really good enough for the bird dropping.]