Cwm Idwal

First trip for me and early for most botany. But Purple Saxifrage flowers now and will be over later when this botanist's paradise is in full flow.

It took a while to find the first plant below the Devil's Kitchen - but as usual once the "right type of rock" had been identified, finding more was easy.

There were several interesting lichens there as well which I may or may not have identified correctly. The British Lichen Society multi-access key helps a lot, full marks to them - but I still need to know more about lichens to use it to full effect.

The only slight problem with the photos was that  the biggest ever dust particle was apparent on my sensor when I got back - just a little extra work with Photoshop but definitely the downside of a digital SLR.

And the scenery was magnificent as well, naturally.

Filmy-ferns

A trip to West Cork for family reasons but the challenge to find something new for me was the same as ever.

Glengarriff came up trumps with Wilson's Filmy-fern. I was sure this must be there but found that the Tunbridge Filmy-fern I stumbled upon a few years ago, when I hardly knew what they were, is very much dominant there. (In places the plant is abundant.)

The identifcation is hard as well but, as usual, once I found it I realised straight away that this was "significantly different" - and there is only one other species in the genus in the UK.

They were growing together with Wilson's higher up the tree trunk on which I found them.  To me the longer vein cells were more diagnostic than the vein ends being at the end of the frond - I find that even with a x10 lens the vein ends of the Tunbridge fern are often at the end of the leaf to my eyes.