Break Out from Edinburgh

Just  want to share this vision on our local canal (the Union Canal) today. It made a great noise as it broke up the ice leaving a clear channel behind. 

A Week of Weeds - Ivy

Ivy (Hedera helix) ascending and carpeting

 Controversial, I know, because this is a "native" plant that affords food and a home to many life forms. But you can get too much of a good thing.  We have a local nature reserve which is the remnants of the wooded land in this part of Edinburgh, the bits that were found to be unsuitable for housing due to rough terrain and access problems. It is a valuable conservation area but overrun with ivy.  Reputedly it takes 30 years for ivy to reach the top of a host tree. Well thirty years have passed:

On the plus side ivy flowers late in the season, from September through to November. This helps sustain a whole host of insects in the run up to winter. It is also a refuge for birds and small mammals.  But boy does it take over.  The danger to trees is more one of increasing their wind profile rather than strangulation as ivy takes up water direct from its own roots.  At ground level it deprives competing plants of light as well as water and elbow room. 

Walls or trees its all the same to ivy

 The term monoculture springs to mind, whereas biodiversity is the sign of a thriving landscape.  Human intervention may be undesirable from a nature conservation point of view but the landscape which undeniably has been formed by both nature and man, has become a playground for this successful plant to the exclusion of many others.  It's status as a native (and consequential large number of benefiting fauna) ensures that war has not been declared on it, as it has for Japanese knotweed, for instance.  It's a bit of a bind!

A Week of Weeds - Speedwell and Chickweed

Here they are together, which explains why they share this post.  Cultivate some land and the first weeds to turn up will be these two.   Below is a typical vegetable bed scenario.  Under the fleece, along with the desired veg, these two have been thriving!

They are each individually innocuous but in volume, which they very soon develop, they bully the plants you want to grow and deprive them of nitrogen and water.

So which is which?  Here's Speedwell on its own (or nearly there is another weed, possibly cleavers, far right):

Speedwell: Veronica persica

And here is a Chickweed plant  (again ignore the extra weed on the right)

* Chickweed: Stellaria media

Both are very successful weeds that could be considered as green manures if it weren't for their ability to produce insignificant flowers and then seeds in such quick order.  Both are edible although chickweed is more like a spinach substitute whereas speedwell is better suited to a tea having a certain astringency about it.  To date I have not tried consuming either myself.   For the record chickweed has white flowers, whereas speedwell flowers are blue with a white centre.  If you can see the flowers it is time to weed!

* Mouse eared chickweed (Cerastium fontanum) is a similar to "ordinary" chickweed (Stellara media) but belongs to a different family.  The best account of the differences between them is at the following link

How to tell chickweeds apart

The leaves are either bare and pointed or hairy and round - like a mouses ear!

A Week of Weeds - Toadflax

Yellow "Common" Toadflax : Linaria vulgaris and Purple Toadflax: Linaria purpurea appear very similar as seedlings. But these siblings appear quite different when in flower.  The purple are at first glance a simple monotone purple spire, while the yellow offers a spike of individual flowers each twice the size of the purple ones and visibly displaying two pale yellow cowls atop two central deeper yellow bulges with a lower lip divided into three pale yellow parts. Add to this a long greenish spur at the back of the flower.  Purple toadflax's  flower lacks the two tone artifice and it's architecture is too small to be appreciated at a glance, but of the two it forms taller more dramatic clumps.  Yellow toadflax was probably introduced as a garden species before breaking out and travelling freely where it will.  You can see some nice pictures of the yellow flower at: Toadflax(Common)

Last year's growth and new seedlings

 The reason we tolerate both plants is because they are adored by bees.  They grow rather scruffily and are seldom the focal point for pictures.  I have dusted off a couple of snaps from last summer where purple toadflax does feature - in our shaded front garden bed:

Taken 16/5/18

Most of that greenery is toadflax!  And here is the same bed a month later with the toadflax now in flower:

The same bed 14/6/18 

We don't let it takeover completely but do tolerate it on account of the bees - and it does have some aesthetic value in its own right

A Week of Weeds - Sowthistles

Prickly Sowthistle: Sonchus asper

Smooth Sowthistle: Sonchus oleraceus

You might be as surprised as me but my research has reached the firm conclusion that both of the above are sowthistles. They form a rosette to survive the winter and then spring forth in spring getting a head start on their annual competitors.

A Week of Weeds - Hairy Bittercress

Hairy Bitter-cress: Cardamine hirsuta

Look at this fighter flowering already in January.  It's secret weapon is the speed of reproduction and explosive seed dispersal.  Brush against the plant when the seedhead is ripe and you set off a shower of projectiles, each one an irretrievable seed (on account of it's small size). Ballochory is the term for this - my new word of the day  (and not to be confused with barochory which is seed dispersal by gravity alone).  Hairy Bitter-cress  appears first as a rosette before sending up a number of stems which rapidly produce unprepossessing flowers.  Once primed the seed head reacts to your weeding efforts as a stimulus to explode.  "You are too late"  it says as it peppers your face with pellets. Moral - weed early, preferably at the rosette stage.

A Week of the Weeds - Charlock

Charlock: Sinapis arvensis

It's a brassica - you can tell that on sight.  But which one and what is it doing popping up all over the garden this winter?  It's wild alright but is it wild turnip or wild mustard.  It turns out to be Charlock, which is probably THE native brassica. In seed form it is very persistent. Garden Organic advise that seeds last 12 years in dry storage but 35 to 60 years in the soil!!  Sadly the plants are host to all the brassica problems including root fly,  clubroot and cabbage whites.  For a full verification I should let these seedlings mature, but I am not keen to do that.  The bit that nailed the identification for me was the advice that Charlock can be introduced as a birdseed alien.  It is around the bird feeding stations that these seedlings have appeared.  Either direct or after passing through the digestive tract of the birds I am convinced that the birdseed is the source of these plants.  They are all coming out.