The I.Pot in March 2017

I cut back last year’s growth on the I.Pot the other day and so I thought it was time to do an update on what’s been happening.

This year is the first time I have actually cut the grass (quaking-grass and meadow oat-grass) leaves back to the ground (scissors, for those wondering how, and yes, I did pretend I was a sheep when I was doing it. Come on, everybody does, right?), before I carefully only cut out all the dead leaves and flower stems. This year was much quicker.

The grasses were growing a bit too strongly last year, and also were hiding the Fritillaria uva–vulpis (not native but I wanted to include a bulb in the pot and I thought it would do nicely) which I’m hoping to see flower this year as last they mainly keeled over and died when in bud for some reason (just possibly because the person in charge of watering the pot forgot *sigh*).

In other news, all three bee orchids are back and have been happily in leaf over the winter with no snails around to chomp them; and did I spot the seedling? Nope, not until I looked at the photos. To be fair, it is tiny at the moment, just under a centimetre long.

I’m not sure how quickly bee orchid seedlings grow but I’m pretty certain I didn’t see any leaves there last year. The first possible seed produced from the bee orchids growing in the pot would have been at the end of summer 2014, but they also flowered in 2015, so it could have germinated from either season. From memory I think it spends a year below ground after germinating before sending up any leaves. One thing I can say for certain is that bee orchids are definitely not monocarpic.

Comparing the I.Pot from March 2014 (left) to March 2017 (right) then, and you can see that there are a lot less species present now and in general it looks less full and the plants not as vigorous, as you would expect as I don’t feed it at all.

I finally cut back the thrift which died during the year – shame as I like that flower.

On the plus side, those little tiny seedlings are the eyebright which has done spectacularly well in the last two years and is a possible solution to conservation situations where yellow-rattle fails, as it did here. The skinny grass seedlings are silver hair-grass which I do like very much though I notice there are less of them this year. The grass-leaved vetchling (left) returns after a year’s absence, ditto common centaury (centre right), and nice to see the spring vetch (right) back and it did actually seed itself at the base of my doorstep though I doubt it will flower there before the soil dries out over the summer.

Also the pot now has three different mosses – all common, but nevertheless very welcome.