Draw-ling

Giving beauty; A mossy puzzle to solve

Starter: seeing and sharing

“Nobody sees a flower really, it is so small. We haven’t time, and to see takes time. When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else”.

Georgia O’Keefe

Don’t you just love Georgia’s words? Especially the ‘I want to give that world to someone else.’ That’s how I feel about this place, and the things I notice, and I love sharing them with you.

This week I have been playing detective in between sojourns to the moss. I thought I might be sharing a mystery but in the course of writing this I have found an answer to my puzzle.

Main course: playing detective in the moss

Initially it was something I simply noticed; the second year I was intrigued but chasing more obvious water. Recently it’s niggled as I spend more time haunting the moss itself. You’d think that it would be relatively easy to ID something with a marked colour shift. If it was a tree or a shrub there would be a fan fare; if it was a garden plant we’d pay a premium, but it’s a graminoid (grass-like plant). The fact that it inhabits what we humans have commonly considered to be waste land - wet moor and bog - probably doesn’t help.

I thought I had a starting point, having done some gardening with ornamental grasses. The leaf form, fluid lines and colour suggested sedge (Carex) but I could find no mention of a species with autumn tints. Over the past month my searches have been fruitless and it’s only when I circled back to a photo shared in Vessel that I began to make some progress. I hadn’t been 100% sure of my flower identification and it turns out I had jumped incorrectly.

Vessel

If I had been more thorough with my observations last year I would have got there sooner but I blame the bog asphodel, prolific in a wet summer, and then I was playing with the heather, and then autumn… In the end that photo led me to search for cotton grass; it wasn’t the first time but the results are dominated by flowers or more correctly seed heads. Foliage is rarely shown and certainly not in detail. But there in an old blog post by Kate Flood, in the last photo it was… captioned ‘Slender leaves of Common Cottongrass turning red’ with the intriguing explanation:

Another adaptation of these plants relates to the recycling of nutrients in their roots during the winter months. The long narrow leaves turn from green to red-brown, as the nutrients are drawn down into the underground storage organs, to be recycled for growth the following Spring.

Kate Flood

Surely that merits better press?

The rich autumn and winter colours of Common Cottongrass (Eriophorum angustifolium)

I’m immensely grateful to the now wonderfully named Dr. Flood who I have tracked to X/Twitter and is still writing about irishboglife.

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I wrote the above on Monday night, concluding:

I shall be watching closely… I know from what I do remember seeing that it won’t be a sea of white fluff, flowering seemed erratic and in places absent. It now seems strange that I have only recently begun to consider that those few seedheads must have sprouted from something.

In the meantime my cultivation of interest is growing towards a new flowering. I’ve been busy folding, alternating with thinking. I now know how I want to next make a book after working through a few mock-ups and miniatures.

One of us is working

I have also been writing words and lines to mould into an accompaniment for a series of images of orange-red cottongrass. Here are a few:

Silver coins 
lie 
at 
the 
foot 
of a Scots pine 
bound 
with rusting 
wire straps 
hidden treasure 
the gift of an afternoon in April

Photo-bombed by a beetle

The winter leaves of Common Cottongrass (Eriophorum angustifolium) contrast with sphagnum moss (probably Sphagnum fallax) in a wet flush at the foot of a lichen clad Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris).

There’s an unexpectedly quick postscript to my contemplation. On Tuesday morning the night’s rain and the chance of brightness before more showers tempted me out. After examining those orange leaves, a freshly fallen pine branch, and even the growth of a green algal bloom (the water at least is warming up) I turned to go. And there it was: conclusive proof for my Holmesian deductions: a spike with a cluster of about-to-open flowers. Of course I had to photograph it!

The first flowers of Common Cottongrass (Eriophorum angustifolium)

I can now say with confidence that we have both Common Cottongrass (Eriophorum angustifolium) and Hare's Tail Cottongrass (Eriophorum vaginatum), and I have gone back and corrected my photo caption on Vessel which I now know is Hare’s Tail.

For nerds like me there is a footnote at the end with some of the local names for Cottongrass.

And the icing on the cake? As I left the mired section of path I met a basking Common lizard in a sunny patch of grass, and for a minute had the luxury of watching it amble away into the vegetation. It’s only the second time I’ve seen one, and the first was a ‘blink and you’ve missed it’ encounter.

To end

Thank you for joining me and for reading this. If you’ve enjoyed it, there are lots of ways to share this: every like, comment, recommendation for FLOW or restack on the Substack app prompts a fuzzy warm feeling and makes it all worthwhile.

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Until next week, you’ll find more image rich writing in previous posts on FLOW’s home page.

Digestif

A footnote for fellow obsessives:

The wonderful Dictionaries of the Scots Language has in its entry under Ling

• downy ling, the cotton-grass, Eriophorum polystachyon

• draw ling, (a) the hare-tail variety of this, Eriophorum vaginatum.

• pull-ling, purlaing

and elsewhere

• drawmoss

Each term for Cottongrass stems (!) from the way that sheep, if given the opportunity, graze the flowers. I wonder now if the deer might be responsible for the absence of seedheads last summer.

The Gaelic name for Hare's Tail Cottongrass (Eriophorum vaginatum) is: sìoda-monaidh, or moor silk. How much nicer than bog cotton.

All words and images copyright © Michela Griffith except where otherwise noted