Just back from a trip to The Burren

On Monday I went down to The Burren, the famous small corner of the West of Ireland that sports three quarters of the native species of plant. I will post some of the better images on this thread over the coming hours & days...
Mike

Day 1... I arrived to see the typical Burren landscape - untold thousands of limestone boulders with very little soil between them... The actual area is about 500 sq km of apparently barren limestone hills. It is characterised by the bareness of the rock, but also the amazing diversity of the flora (and fauna). Picture shows a typical lowland area.

Because the ecology is so friendly to a wide variety of plants, garden escapes are common. This was growing in a hedgerow (some sort of monkshood, maybe) and it turned up in a garden a couple of hundred yards along the road...

Three quarters is so much! You say small area, do you know how large? Are specimens marked for identification? Is there a field guide? Marking this a thread to watch. Can't wait to see what you have to share.

Before dinner I was en route for a walk in the hills overlooking the village of Ballyvaughn where I was staying... I was looking for a footpath, but ended up going through someones back yard and into a n almost impenetrable forest of hawthorns and blackthorn bushes. During this rather painful encounter, I noticed this little gem, which, with the help of a local guide book, I believe is Dactylorhiza fuchsii ss okellyi 'O'Kelly's spotted orchid'. (This picture is somewhat over exposed making the markings difficult to see.)

Angele... it's a diamond-shaped area about 20 miles long and 15 wide... You can see much on the following site... http://www.burrenbeo.com/. It is very famous locally and a heritage site. I was moved to visit after 30 years living in Ireland by a TV documentary screened in UK a fortnight ago...

It's obviously much easier to know the plants that you see when they are in flower, but sometimes really interesting foliage shows up... this was sprouting up all over the place and it is probably not very exotic, but without the flowers, whatever it is seemed worth a picture...

Most of the unusual plants were quite small, and having to share their footprint with a whole load of other species. These diminutive plants were about three inches tall, and I wasn't able to tell which of the leaves in view belonged to them. They are a beautiful 'gentian' blue, but not the Spring Gentian which is the area's most famous floral inhabitant.

By this time I was climbing a steep stoney path with a fabulous array of plants on both sides. In particular there was many, many of these beautiful little orchids which I believe to be - again thanks to the guide book - Orchis mascula, the Early Purple Orchid.

There are rocks everywhere and on many of them there are enormous colonies of White Mountain Avens (Dryas octopetala)... This is a plant that, like the Spring Gentian, has become a famous part of the Burren flora. This picture was meant to show the simple beauty of the flowers.

Looks like an interesting place to poke about for plants! Is the Dryas a native of the region?

This is a great time for orchid hunting although down this way it's not such a good year as the last one

The interesting leaf one is Argentina anserina http://davesgarden.com/pf/go/2053/index.html and the tiny blue is probably a Polygala serpyllifolia, here's some I found in the New Forest

Mike, I am so sorry for interrupting the flow of your thread! When I read the first post I thought your intention was to share this adventure like a fine box of chocolates! One or two treats a day. My sincerest apologies.- Angele

Could be Baa... certainly looks like it. I was just looking on a site to check the appearance of the Polygala, when I saw that the 'Orchis maculata' might actually have been a 'Fragrant Orchid' (Gymnadenia conopsea)... I'm profoundly ignorant about orchids...

Dryas is native of the area...
Angele... de rien... feel free to interrupt away...
This is a picture of my little 'mountain' path (it's only at about 500 feet), but the 'mountain' rises straight from the ocean's edge... (This is very near the famous Cliffs of Moher).
If anyone is interested in exactly where this is, this link has a map of The Burren and I was walking up a path between Cappinawalla and Gleninagh Mountain. http://www.burrenbeo.com/burrenmap.html .

This message was edited Jun 8, 2005 5:27 PM

Baa... from this link, the Polygala is probably just Polygala vulgaris... (http://www.burrenbeo.com/milkwort.html ).

Could be, it's hard to tell from an image. P. vulgaris is less common in the UK than the P. serpyllifolia which is a smaller plant all over.

Which book are you using for ther orchids?

Here is another unusual small plant throwing itself with gay abandon over a rock. The image suffers a bit from camera-shake (sorry). At the bottom of the image, you can see a sort of hole in the rock. This is very characteristic of the Burren where the rocks have been weathered in the most extreme way. The area was heavily glaciated and the topsoil scoured from the rocks, followed by 15 or so millennia of western atlantic gales!!

There is a book called 'The Flora of the Burren' which was available for consultation at the B&B I stayed in, though I couldn't find it to buy. on the 'burrenbeo' site there are photographs of several of the orchids.
Also, let me apologise for the quality of some of the images. My camera is quite expensive (it's an Olympus D-600L), but I haven't got the hang of adjusting its autofocus to isolate what I am interested in. You will see that the background is in focus in many of the pictures...

For this reason you are to be heartily congratulated in identifying the genus!!!

A nice little viola, which I believe is Viola reichenbachiana. (From the reading). Again the flower is over-exposed and was a light mauve colour fading to white.

Just found a better picture of a different example of the violet...