Settle Wildflowers - Day 30 - Orange 2 - Sedges

There are very few orange flowers.
Go on - tell me how many do you know?

Pendulous
Sedge

There will be lots of flowers for our next colour yellow - but very few orange. We have used up the Orange Welsh Poppy at the beginning of May and "Fox and Cubs" are not out yet.

SO,

 We are going to divert into browns, and  orange pollen.
Today we have two sedges and a conifer:

There are plenty of sedges coming out now.

From distance sedges look a bit like grasses, but their flowers are very different.

Sedges have edges - they have triangular stems.
There are c 76 species of Carex (the Sedge Genus) in Britain. they belong to the Sedge family (which also includes Cotton-grasses) and there are over 100 species in the Sedge family in Britain.

In many sedges the top flower head has lots of tiny male flowers with anthers and pollen, and the lower flower heads have female flowers with either two or three stigmas that catch the pollen. It is really good to find them in May and early June because you can still see the stigmas.

 You can see one third of all the British Sedges within 8 miles of Settle (i.e. 25 out of c 76) - ( c.22 of them near Malham Tarn) and I have seen five species on my walks from Settle already: (but not shown them - I will do that tomorrow)

Spring Sedge -on the grassland over the river from Fairhursts
Pill Sedge on the golf course.
Lesser Pond Sedge (Carex acutiformis) - in the Mill Pond between the Locks and the Langcliffe Paper Mill,
Common Sedge (Carex nigra) - in the same pond
Glaucous Sedge (Carex flacca) - the graceful one with a head in a stalk that can be made to droop -  on limestone grassland with  and eventual pendant lower head.

But today I will show the two new sedges I saw on Wed 20 May:

The two sedges are from my walk on 20 May south from Settle along the Ribble into the flood plain.  One is a plant of woodland streams .. and gardens one that is increasing in Britain. The second is one of Flood Meadows.
Both can be big plants and both have the undersirface of the blades glaucous.

2. Pendulous Sedge  Carex pendula

This is easy to recognise because it is BIG, and grows in tufts.  The leaves are over 1cm wide, often over 2cm. It is often planted in gardens and has a danger of taking over. Its seed can be used as food (says the internet)
The people at Holy Ascension, Settle Anglican Church spent a lot of energy weeding out huge tussocks of this plant at the back of the church in 2019

On Wed 20 May I found it in rocks beside a trunk at the side of the Ribble south of Settle. This is a natural habitat for it - though whether it had come from the wild is debatable

.

The second species is one that is much less common and does not grow at Malham Tarn, so I am pleased to find it near Settle.

3.  Carex acuta: Slender Tufted Sedge

Carex acuta: The top of the inner-face of the sheath is brown

This is a big sedge with rhizomes that can, given the space, fill big areas. It grows in patches rather than tufts, in spite of its English name. When not in flower it can be recognised because the  top of the inner-face of the sheath is a brown colour.

This is a lowland species that likes flood meadows and flatland next to streams and rivers,   There is lots of it in the Derwent Ings. Flood Meadows near York. (Before the last ice age the Ribble went past Hellifeidl and joined the Aire and continued to York.  The glacier not dumped huge drumlins and moraines at Hellifield so the valley got blocked and the Ribble turned south back to the west coast).

This area was once a glacial lake. This sedge would have grown in large swathes across the marshy land that existed here before the valley bottom was drained
 A little Carex acuta grows lower down the Long Preston Deeps SSSI towards Cow Bridge, in places that are usually too wet to walk to.. But the tiny patch that I discovered for myself last year is quite close to Settle so I can include it in my Lockdown walks. - It grows in an area that floods near the Ribble. (That's not very specific - a huge area gets flooded)

I found the tiny patch again.. Two small patches. One patch had been completely  grazed down by cattle and all flowers removed and the shoots reduced to 15cm stumps.  The drought that we have had this year meant that the surrounding ground has become dry and the sheep and cattle have been able to reach the patch of sedge and graze it. I hope we get some more rain to stop them eating any more of it

   The rain we had had two days before the 20th had made the soil damp - good for the sedge. Maybe that rain will allow the more palatable grass elsewhere to grow. Then the animals will not be tempted by the tall patch of vegetation, standing proud of the very much grazed Marsh Spikerush nearby and the extremely closely cropped ordinary grass elsewhere.  They had been selective in leaving the coarse Tufted Hair-grass and coarse Rushes.

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1. Scots Pine - 
is profusely producing pollen this week.  Saturday's wind might have blown it all away. .
This tree is next to the Railway bridge across the road between Settle and Langcliffe. 
There is also a fine tree behind the stands of garden plants outside booths 






Click here for more flowers coming out around Settle