Dancersend

By Dancersend

Brown slug on corpse flower

Had a lovely walk once the rain eased today. I was thrilled to find some special plants doing well in a Silverdale wood, where I first found them around 20 years ago. Green Hellebore was luxuriant and had now gone to seed. Toothwort, Lathraea squamaria, had spread along both sides of the footpath. It is a wierd, ghostly member of the Broomrape family that is a parasite on the roots of Hazel, Ash and Sycamore. It exists underground for most of the year and just pushes up its strange stem of puple-white flowers at this time of year. It was known as 'Corpse Flower' in some country areas as people thought it was living on buried corpses rather than tree roots. It is probably our most eerie wild flower, but this slug didn't seem to mind.

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