Plant hunting at Baddidarach in late December
We were logging plants much later than usual in 2024, with two very productive visits to Achmelvich in November and another to the ‘Atlantic Rainforest’ at Torbreck in early December. The final excursion was to have been the New Year Plant Hunt for the BSBI at Baddidarach (NC0822) on 29th December, but the forecast was so dire that it had to be cancelled.
In the event, Friday 27th looked reasonable for a couple of hours in the morning. The Plant Hunt could not be re-scheduled at short notice, but we thought that we would go anyway. Although the primary purpose of the exercise is noting what is in flower, we gave ourselves a wider brief, logging anything we could identify, whether wildflowers or other plant and animal life.
Muddy creek, burn and marsh
We left the car on the track by the playpark at the bottom of Kirk Road (NC089228) and dropped down onto the edge of the muddy creek to its west (map in photo 1; photo 2). Here we soon picked up three key saltmarsh species, the matted sprawling stems of creeping bent Agrostis stolonifera, scattered through them shiny new leaves of common scurvygrass Cochlearia officinalis and, nearer to the sea, cushions of thrift Armeria maritima.
Walking up the burn which feeds the creek to find a crossing place, we reached two well-grown trees on a bend in its eastern bank, which we had not before noticed. The nearest was a smooth-barked sycamore and next to it a fine old three-stemmed alder covered with next year’s male catkins (photos 3-4, taken from above later). Alders were quite thinly distributed across Assynt, prior to quite recent plantings, so that was an interesting find.
Crossing the burn at this point, we made our way over to pools in a very squidgy marsh at the bottom of the shrub-covered bank (photo 5). They were greened over in places with water starwort Callitriche officinalis (photo 6), with scattered, tiny, floating plants of fat duckweed Lemna gibba, a rarity in Assynt, occasionally found in garden ponds, but first recorded ‘in the wild’ here.
Some larger leaves at the edge of the pools later keyed out as hemlock water-dropwort Oenanthe crocata,. This is exclusively coastal in Assynt, and one of our few poisonous plants. There were also the spear-shaped shoots of yellow iris Iris pseudacorus.
Colourful gorse
This far north, one of few plants flowering in December is common gorse Ulex europaeus, and some bushes were covered with flowers; we wonder what insects pollinate them at this time of year, possibly flies.
One bush, on the western bank of the creek, had some colourful additions, on dead stems. An upright branch bore jelly-like fruiting bodies of a cup-fungus yellow brain Tremella mesenterica (photo 7); it is parasitic on an underlying crust fungus. Another, detached, branch had a fine crop of the fruiting bodies of the gill-fungus velvet shank Flammulina velutipes (photo 8), with blackened velvety stems, a species that can survive being frozen solid.
Some unusual seaweeds
Working our way carefully through some very muddy patches on the edge of the burn, we were soon out on to the intertidal area (photo 9). The first part was a ‘bumpy’ area of saltmarsh we had not previously visited (photo 10). Its short grassy sward was dominated by a mixture of saltmarsh grasses, including a form of red fescue Festuca rubra, interspersed with dense patches of a small brown seaweed known as moss wrack Fucus cottonii (photos 11-12). This is a speciality of very sheltered sites on the west coast of Scotland, where mudflats and saltmarshes form, it can also be found in quantity at the mouth of the Oldany River.
Since the tide was well out, we were then able to explore the intertidal area, where we found another unusual brown seaweed, a detached form of egg wrack, known as crofter’s wig Ascophyllum nodosum ecad mackaii. We first came across an isolated clump (photo 13) and then a substantial bed of this aberrant alga (photo 14), which is restricted to extremely sheltered sites in sea-lochs on the west coast of Scotland, often in areas of low salinity, where burns cross the foreshore.
Ian had mapped its occurrence on the coasts of West Sutherland in 2012 (Evans, 2013) and found it in scattered sites as far north as Rhiconich, at the head of Loch Inchard. He was unable at that time to locate it at ‘Loch Inver’, for which there was a vague record dating back to 1945-46. It is also present in Assynt, often in quantity, at the mouth of the Oldany River, on Loch Nedd, in Loch Ardbhair, and on the south side of Loch Glencoul at Newton.
A closer look, and animal life
A small sample of the crofter’s wig was taken home and, on closer inspection, was found to be harbouring strands of two much smaller filamentous seaweeds, one green and one brownish (photo 15), about 3-5 cm long. Under a low-power microscope, the green one (photo 16) proved to have branched chains of barrel-shaped cells; it is probably one of the green branched weeds Cladophora species. The elegant brownish one (photo 17) was, in fact, a red seaweed, clawed fork weed Furcellaria lumbricalis, which grows on rocks in the lower intertidal area and deeper water.
Animal life in the intertidal area was sparse, with a curlew and two hooded crows foraging along its outer edge, but we did collect the empty shell of a common periwinkle Littorina littorea (photo 18). This would not have been noteworthy, except that it was, at 3.5cm, the largest we have ever seen. We normally associate this gastropod mollusc with rocky shores, but ‘in sheltered areas it makes feeding excursions over muddy shores’ and is ‘tolerant of brackish water’ (Hayward and Ryland, 2012), which all fits. The shell carried one example of the common intertidal acorn barnacle Semibalanus balanoides, and its outer surface contained many shallow excavations, the work of the tiny boring sponge Cliona celata.
Back to terra firma
After all that excitement, we left the shore and recorded coastal vegetation on the rocky peninsula at the western end of the ‘beach’. We added predictable species such as crowberry Empetrum nigrum, buck’s-horn plantain Plantago coronopus, and sea plantain P. maritima.
We then made our way north and east to the car park of Highland Stoneware, and negotiated gorsy thickets to log some woodland species from a well-vegetated north-facing crag (photo 19). These included broad buckler-fern Dryopteris dilatata, wood soft-grass Holcus mollis, honeysuckle Lonicera periclymenum, great wood-rush Luzula sylvatica and the shiny new leaves of lesser celandine Ficaria verna. There were also, nearby, some old fruiting spikes of common figwort Scrophularia nodosa, which is not uncommon around Lochinver.
‘Slumming’
Large concrete planters at the eastern end of the carpark (photo 20) contain bare soil which has been colonised by a variety of small ‘weeds’. These were both perennials, such as dove’s-foot cranesbill Geranium molle and germander speedwell Veronica chamaedrys and annuals, such as common whitlowgrass Erophila verna. Such micro-habitats may be at the ‘slumming’ end of field botany, but can be surprisingly productive.
Flower-beds beside the pottery contained the heart-shaped young leaves of garlic mustard Alliaria petiolata (photo 21); this southern species was first noted in Assynt at the edge of this carpark in 2000. Self-seeded at the foot of the walls there were two plants of purple toadflax Linaria purpurea (photo 22), a garden escape, originally from Italy, which was recorded new to the North-west of Scotland, at Little Assynt, as recently as 2004.
We added to the list a single plant of maidenhair spleenwort Asplenium trichomanes in the unexpected habitat of landscaped gravel (photo 23). Later a handful of the larger perennial ‘weeds’ were noted around the edge of Inver Park. Then we made our way back to the car around the outside of the playpark (photo 24), finally being able to log two further species actually in flower, predictably annual meadow-grass Poa annua and common daisy Bellis perennis, making just three in all, the same as last year.
Reckoning up
However, the total list for flowering plants and ferns amounted to 78 species. Several were ‘new’ to the area, and all useful 21st century updates for 1km square NC0822. And we had found a small area of saltmarsh and muddy/stony shore, formerly unknown to us, with unusual seaweeds, in the heart of Lochinver. Not bad for two hours in late December?
Ian M. Evans and Gwen Richards
References
Evans. I.M., 2013. Wig wrack Ascophyllum nodosum mackaii in the North-west Highlands: an update. The Highland Naturalist 9, 13-14
Hayward, P.J., & Ryland J.S., 2012. Handbook of the marine fauna of North-west Europe. Oxford, University Press
Photos by the authors