This luxuriant growth on a roadside wild rose bush is a robin’s pincusion. It’s a gall, an abnormal growth caused by a wasp which lays its eggs in the rose’s leaf buds. The gall looked the worse for wear after lots of heavy rain. But it was probably still protecting the wasp larvae due to emerge in the spring.
Delicate umbellifer already putting on its spring growth, beginning to develop a seed head in the middle of December.
King Alfred’s cakes, also known as cramp balls and as the coal fungus. Fairly common, but sometimes similar in colour to the bark of the trees (often dead trees) they grow on, so easily missed. This fungus was used for tinder when lighting fires took real skill.
These were growing on the trunk of a tree, blown down by gales a couple of years ago, at the edge of the Bantock Park Pitch and Putt course. One of the pictures also shows a horses hoof fungus beginning to expand.
Earth stars, fungi which look like nothing on earth. Quite often to be found half-hidden in the vegetation under hedgerows or in undergrowth.
These were the commonest species of the group – collared earth stars.
Witch-hazel (hamammelis): the yellow flowers on one shrub just emerging, the orange flowers nearby already more developed.
Candlesnuff / stagshorn is a small, common fungus which grows on dead wood, including tree stumps and sometimes dead roots.
In its candlesnuff form it is a little like a part-used and currently unlit candle wick: as stagshorn it branches like miniature antlers.
Both forms of the fungus were on the same fallen tree trunk.