In honour of World Wetlands Day, which we celebrate on Feb 2 every year, here is a selection of beautiful, weird and wonderful native plants from one small bog soak in West Cork.
Bogs are unique environments, highly acidic and with low nutrients. Nevertheless, some plants have adapted to thrive in them. It’s important we safeguard these diminishing natural habitats.
A bog seems at first like an unpromising site for photography but all it takes is getting close. This isn’t as easy as it sounds, since bogs are wet places, but having arrived home sodden but exhilarated I’ve decided it’s definitely worth getting wet. My role model in this type of close observation is Tina Claffey, whose book, Tapestry of Light, and whose Facebook Page are constant sources of inspiration. Tina – thank you! We must be twin souls because like you I return again and again to the same patch of bog. Time loses meaning as I simply lie and let my eye tune in.
My little patch is quite close to my house and I described it in my post last year “The Wildest and Richest Gardens” – West Cork Bog Soaks. It’s taken a while this spring for the Cappaghglass soak to wake up but it’s well and truly alive now so here’s what’s there already.
First of all, the soak is surrounded by heather and rock. Lying on the rock, with my face a few centimetres from the surface, I have become aware of the rich lichen growth all around me. I don’t know a lot about lichens but I have been studying this one (above and below) – Devil’s Matchstick.
It’s obvious how it got that name, and it’s sometimes also known as Nail Lichen too. It’s only about a centimetre high, about the length of my little fingernail. The Latin name is Cladonia floerkeana. In Ireland we get this bright red form of it, whereas in North America the tips are black. The site I go to to learn about Lichens is http://www.irishlichens.ie. Here’s what they say about lichens on their home page:
Lichens are dual organisms; a fungus and one or more algae in a stable, mutually beneficial (symbiotic) partnership. The fungus provides structural form and protects the algae from extremes of light and temperature. Algae are capable of photosynthesis and some of the sugars produced provide the fungus with energy for growth and reproduction. Some lichens can live for many hundreds of years and being sensitive to pollution levels they are important environmental indicators.
There are several red-tipped lichens in the Cladonia group so I must look out for others. The trunk is described as squamulose which simply means scaly, at the bottom and becoming fruticose (or shrubby) as it grows. The stems are called podetia, and they are topped by the bright red apothecia. Yikes! Don’t think I’ll become a lichen expert in this lifetime.
And look at this one, that looks like a goblet – it’s another Cladonia but I don’t know which one. And lots of white lichen to boot. It’s a whole world down there on the rock, under our feet.
Let’s move over to the the bog soak now and look at two things in particular. The first is the Sundew. At first I thought it wasn’t up yet, but as I got closer I realised that it was just emerging from the surrounding Sphagnum moss (the second thing).
Besides looking weirdly otherworldly, the Sundew is a clever little critter, well adapted to this habitat. It’s developed a special mechanism to ensure it gets the nutrition it needs, since there isn’t much in the bog. It traps insects on its little sticky hairs, then the leaf rolls rolls over and digests them.
The sundew does have a little white flower, but it’s the leaves that are the centre of all the action on this plant. Our bog soak has the Round-leaved Sundew, which is more common in Ireland than the Oblong-leaved Sundew that you saw in the video.
Finally, as I was nosing around (er, literally) among the Sphagnum, I saw that some of them had these little brown caps and I wondered what they were. It turns out that mosses propagate by means of spores, and the caps are little exploding spore capsules. When they blow, they fire the spores great distances.
Take a look at the spores exploding in slow motion – it’s quite a sight.
Some of the capsules in my little patch had exploded already – you can see the empty cup-like capsules in the photograph below – at the bottom of the picture..
Sphagnum itself is an amazing moss – we wouldn’t have bogs without it, as it’s what holds all the moisture. The Irish Peatland Conservation Council has an excellent information page on Sphagnum. It includes this:
A huge number of tiny microscopic plants and animals live with Sphagnum mosses. A few drops of water squeezed from wet Sphagnum contains hundreds of microscopic species such as desmids, diatoms, algae, cyanobacteria, amoebae, rhizopods, flagellates, ciliates, rotifers (wheel organisms), worms, nematodes (round worms), flat worms and heliozoans (sun animals). One scientist counted over 32,000 microscopic animals from a Sphagnum moss growing in a bog pool!
Now that’s a bit too miniature for my lens. I’m happy at the magnification I can achieve with my Lumix. If you need me, you know where I’ll be.
Henry David Thoreau, philosopher and naturalist, might be called the patron saint of swamps. He was in love with them. I know how he feels. Hope and the future for me he said, are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps…the wildest and richest gardens that we have.
Thoreau was talking about American swamps, but he could just as easily have been talking about an Irish bog, marsh, or wetland. I have two within easy walking distance of my home in West Cork and I am drawn to them like a magnet. One is tiny – a pond in the middle of a boggy area at the highest point in Foilnamuck townland. The other is more extensive – Derreennatra Bog, between Ballydehob and Schull.
A bog is a highly acid environment, and some plants, such as heathers, are specially adapted to deal with this habitat. The mineral-rich pools that form in the bog – technically known as bog soaks – are fed by groundwater and rain. Nutrients are more available in these patches of open water, they provide a less acidic environment and support a variety of plant life different from that of the surrounding bog.
Derreennatra Bog has been recognised as a very special habitat of the lowland bog type. It has been designated as a Natural Heritage Area and is under the protection of the National Parks and Wildlife Service. While there are several reasons for its special status, the main one is that it is home to Slender Cottongrass, an extremely rare form of Bog Cotton that only grows in a few places in Ireland and Britain.
Derreennatra Bog has other uncommon species, but they are hard to photograph without a really good long lens. The one I did manage to get close to was Marsh St John’s-wort. I had to go back several times and wait until the flower opened before I could figure out what it was. It was worth the wait – a very beautiful native wildflower.
Another reason to hang out at Derreennatra Bog is that the lovely, native, White Water-lily flourishes here. It’s an exotic beauty that been here, apparently, since soon after the last ice-age.
The soak in the bog at Foilnamuck is far less extensive – just a tiny wet patch – but it’s reliably present all the time, probably because it’s bounded by a natural amphitheatre of slightly elevated rocky ground. Here is where I was able to photograph Bog Bean for the first time, although not without getting my feet wet. It’s a fascinating plant – it sits in the water and holds the flower head well above the surface. The flower heads are pink before they open but inside the petals are pure white and fringed with long hairs.
The “regular” Bog Cotton, more correctly called Common Cottongrass surrounds the little soak and mingles with the Bog Bean.
The other plant that loves the environment of this little soak is the Round-leaved Sundew. Sundews are carnivorous – the sticky liquid on its hairy round leaves trap unwary insects, which are then digested by the plant. It’s a marvellous adaptation to the lack of soil nutrients in its habitat.
The other flowers of the bog – the heathers and asphodels, the mosses and mints – are equally beautiful and interesting, but I will leave them for another day.
Now so, why don’t you wander on over to your local bog/swamp/fen/marsh soak and see what you can see!
Just don’t fall in!
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