A New-to-Skye Plant

I took myself down to Portree on my break today and spent an hour in the cemetery, dodging the rain and hoping to find something of interest. And find something of interest I certainly did! First up was the well-vegetated pile of spoil that I'd parked next to, largely colonised by Rosebay Willowherb, Raspberry, Creeping Thistle and Coltsfoot. The Coltsfoot was strangely free of any leafmines, but the Rosebay soon revealed one of the target species I was looking for. Quite a few of them, as it happens.

The pile of spoil in question

There are four psyllids (barely) visible in the tip of this Rosebay Willowherb

And a huge crop of two of them

Craspedolepta nebulosa is a psyllid that I found here on Skye way back in 2017. I notified Murdo at HBRG who notified a few other folk and pretty soon it was discovered that this "new to The Highlands and Islands" psyllid was actually pretty damn common almost everywhere up here. Screenshot of their page below

Click to enlarge

No sign of any egg-laying Mompha, or indeed of their leafmines yet. I should mention that although we are fast approaching the middle of June, I was wearing a coat zipped all the way up and it was lightly raining throughout. Warm it ain't and I suspect many invert populations will be very suppressed.

A couple of bushes caught my eye as being something different. Clearly an alder, but with rounded glossy leaves and a cordate base surely they had to be Italian Alder? 

I broke a branch off and promptly returned to the car to identify the species

Sure enough, this is Alnus cordata (with the cordate leaf base...) aka Italian Alder, a species I've never recorded on Skye. A quick look online revealed that Stephen Bungard, Skye's BSBI Recorder, had recorded it from exactly here in 2021. I do sometimes wonder if there's anywhere he hasn't already been or anything he hasn't already seen...

Returning to my spot by the Italian Alders I duly noted Skye's only known plant of Rock Stonecrop, sat atop its wall as per usual

Rock Stonecrop Petrosedum forsterianum - a lovely plant

It was then that I looked down at the gravel track underfoot and thought to myself, "hmmm, this is very similar to the cemetery track in Inverness where I found all that Mossy Stonecrop a few weeks back. I wonder..." and boom! There in front of me was a small patch of Mossy Stonecrop, already turning a characteristic bright red. Wow, talk about knowing the habitat of a plant and expecting it! Mossy Stonecrop is a plant I see often whenever I'm in the Inverness/Nairn area, typically on sandy soils but also, as here, in gravelly tracks and paths. I checked the BSBI maps to see how many records there were for Skye, certainly I couldn't recall ever seeing it here before so it must be fairly uncommon. 

No records for Skye! 

I double-checked I wasn't making a stupid mistake, but it really was Mossy Stonecrop. I took some pics and pinged them to Stephen, just to doubly double-check that I wasn't being an idiot.

First record of Mossy Stonecrop Crassula tillaea for Skye!

Stephen came back with "Oh I like that - sort of! I added it to the VC105 list a few years ago and have been expecting it". I had a mooch around the rest of the track and several paths in the immediate vicinity and found small scraps of it dotted about in quite a wide area. The greatest concentration was along the margins of a small parking area, in fact I had parked directly on top of a patch, something I didn't notice until I returned to the car afterwards! Rough and ready map of the plant's distribution in this particular section of cemetery

I shall have to return soon, do a proper sweep of the cemetery and see where else it occurs. Presumably it arrived with the gravel used to surface the paths a couple of years back, or possibly fragments were brought in on visitor's boots or wellies. Mossy Stonecrop is considered native in Britain, but it would appear to be an accidental introduction to Skye. Either way, I'm happy it was me that finally bumped into it!