Five Required on Skye

I awoke early and went through to grab breakfast. The rest of the staff gawped at my short hair and clean shaven appearance, I'd been a shaggy, bearded mess when I headed for England a month earlier. Then they laughed when I said my holiday wasn't over and I was taking today as another day off. Bugger it, I had five plants still to find before work kicked in again. I demolished a huge veggie grill and was soon all set to go find the five required plants. Outside it was chucking it down, aaah familiarity at last!

I headed into Portree, arriving just as the rain eased and stopped, and hit the woods behind Budhmor, half-expecting to find something weird growing beneath the tree canopy. Sure enough it didn't take me too long to track down a dozen clumps of Pleated Snowdrop amongst the carpets of Common Snowdrops.

Pleated Snowdrop Galanthus plicatus between Common Snowdrops and Daffodils

This is a mature leaf, young leaves are fully plicated (recurved) at the edges

I found these Pleated Snowdrops new to Skye a couple of years ago. This year I was a little later in the season and the leaves had straightened up somewhat, but young leaves have the edges completely curled under. Snowdrop Galanthus nivalis have flat leaf blades, plus they are a lot smaller.

Common Snowdrop being held up next to the Pleated Snowdrop for size comparison

I had a quick skirmish through the woods but couldn't find anything of interest, other than carpets of Yellow Archangel Lamiastrum galeobdolon subsp.argentatum. Pleated Snowdrop was species number 496, four more to go!

I had three gimme plants in the woods behind the Aros Centre to the south of Portree, all bird-sown aliens. The first was readily visible from the car as I approached, Tree Cotoneaster Cotoneaster frigidus lined the roadside verges beneath the coniferous plantation trees and there were a couple by the car park too. The Tree Cotoneasters here are the cultivar 'Cornubia' which stays largely green throughout the winter. True Cotoneaster frigidus is deciduous, which probably explains why 'Cornubia' is so popular in cultivation. 

Tree Cotoneaster 'Cornubia' - a bit battered and torn but definitely evergreen

I headed uphill along the forestry track until I arrived at the next of my three gimme plants. This was Stranvaesia, a plant I discovered several months ago but didn't recognise until BSBI Recorder Stephen Bungard asked me to check Stranvaesia. Bingo! Since then I've found maybe twenty bushes of it growing scattered throughout the woodland. This individual is the one I first encountered. Still no berries on it, but it is a bit shaded I guess. 

Stranvaesia Photinia davidiana sapling beneath conifers

Further along the track I found my last gimme plant in these woods, this also being one I discovered a few months back. To a degree, this is mindless botanising. In fact it isn't botanising at all, it's just doing a circuit ticking off plants I already know are going to be there. Well yep, this is what yearlisting is all about. Some plants will be encountered regardless, just see how far into the countryside you'd get without seeing Hazel, or Bracken, or Field Horsetail. These don't have to be sought out, they'll find you soon enough. Others can be fully expected if you put yourself into the right habitat - Thrift on coastal cliffs, Marram in sand dunes, Annual Meadow-grass in pavement cracks. Others will take a bit of searching for - alpine plants will be somewhere up that mountain but perhaps on just a few ledges, Bog Orchid will be on pool edges somewhere out on that moorland, Small Pondweed is in that loch, but is incredibly difficult to snag on by grapnel. Then there are the ones for which you have specific site gen, the ones you can twitch. Technically that is what I was doing today, twitching known plants. There's every probability I will stumble across them elsewhere this year, just by sheer chance, but why risk it? By securing them now whilst the season is still quiet, I can concentrate on finding other species for the rest of the year.  So here was gimme plant number three, right where I left it when I was last here a couple of months back

It's the pale rounded shrub right of centre

I quite like this image, it tells a story. In the far background are tall cliffs. Between these cliffs and the trees in the foreground is a large expanse of gently sloping hillside which was planted up with various conifers for forestry. These trees were harvested several ago, but you can see some dark green Sitka Spruce Picea sitchensis regeneration coming up. But it's the plants in the foreground that are of most interest. These are lining the undercliff of the forestry track and are self-sown rather than planted. The runaway offspring of the planted stuff, if you like. The conifers are Lodgepole Pine Pinus contorta and Sitka Spruce, the bare trees are Hybrid Larch Larix x marschlinsii. All of these trees are self-sown from the planted trees that have now been harvested, hence are countable as wild plants. And the pale green bush that I was here to yeartick is Koromiko Veronica salicifolia, more usually known as either Willow-leaved Hebe or Narrow-leaved Hebe. Or sometimes Willow-leaved Speedwell. Probably others too, which is why many folks stick to the scientific names, though these do change too. DNA work is stabilising the taxonomy of most organisms nowadays, so hopefully these changes will become fewer and fewer once the inevitable upheavals have stopped.

Detail of the all important 'leaf sinus', a critical feature when keying this genus

My mission in Portree had been a success; Pleated Snowdrop, Tree Cotoneaster, Stranvaesia and Koromiko were all safely in the bag, I now needed to move on and find something else. The day was still young, the rain had stopped, I felt buoyant. I decided to head over to Dunvegan Woods where I knew of a couple more gimme plants. 

Dunvegan Woods has a weird history. Situated opposite Dunvegan Castle, the woods were planted up with various exotic shrubs and tree species in the Victorian times. The Skye Nature Group have visited these woods several times in recent years, and it was on an earlier trip that we discovered a sprawling New Zealand Broadleaf that was producing numerous seedlings in the surrounding area of woodland. That was my target for today as I set off on the half mile muddy slog up through the woods. A short while later, boots covered in mud, I arrived

New Zealand Broadleaf Griselinia littoralis with its distinctive lopsided leaf shape

Grisellinia produces copious small berries in the autumn and these are apparently attractive to birds, who then poop out the seeds and hence help spread the plant around. But I do wonder if the local birds are aware of this. The seedlings here are cropping up within just a few metres from the parent plant and nowhere else, I suspect mice and voles are scurrying away with the berries to eat them in the safety of the nearby undergrowth and the seeds are germinating once off of the footpath. Anyway, there are lots of very small Grisellinia cropping up which I've counted as wild for my plant yearlist. And just like that, I was halfway to my target of 1000 plants in 2022!

Species 500 of 1000 - New Zealand Broadleaf seedlings

I continued on along the path for a short while longer, being rewarded with an extra addition for my efforts. Not that it looked particularly magnificent in the rain, but it will look decidedly better as the year progresses.

The tall twiggy thickets are Salmonberry Rubus spectabilis

Salmonberry is reasonably widespread around the westernmost area of Skye. It's also all around the Broadford area, presumably as a garden escape. It has big blousy blossoms in the spring and produces large orange fruits in the autumn. You know me, see anything worth foraging/scrumping and I'm in there. I've tried Salmonberry fruits several times, but I find them rather insipid, and just a little bit unpleasant tasting. A pity really, there's acres of it in these woods. 

The rain then really came crashing down. I retreated to the car and headed back to Uig to dry out. On the way back I took a very minor diversion and dropped in to say hello to the Pick-a-back-plant Tolmiea menziesii colony at Prabost. Despite much recent ditch-digging, the Pick-a-back-plant was still present around the edges. It will take more than a mere JCB to wipe out this colony! One more for the yearlist anyway. 

Of course, now that I was back on Skye (and starting work again tomorrow) the yearlist additions would slow down to a crawl. I figured I'd be lucky to add another ten species by month end, which was still almost a fortnight away. 

This track is The Halfway Point by Reliqa, a band that are described as "an outrageous alt. metal four-piece hailing from Sydney, Australia. They wield a unique blend of aggressive riffage, powerhouse vocals and progressive modern grooves. The underlying concept beneath every track is a door waiting to be opened". Quite enjoyable actually, the singer reminds me a lot of Tatiana Shmailyuk from Jinjer when she's not doing her distorted vocals. Hope you enjoy!