Witches' Butter

In winter, on a wet day, sometimes you see something coloured like egg yolk up in a tree. It is a mushroom, Witches' Butter (Tremella mesenterica), a yellow gelatinous mass (no, it is not like butter) on a dead branch in an oak tree. In this picture the branch is covered in green lichens.



If it were a plant and not a mushroom you should call it a saprophyte ('phyte' from 'plant'), living on dead organic material, but mushrooms are not plants but part of the kingdom of fungi.












The Witches' Butter lives in an indirect way from dead wood, it is a parasite and lives on the mycelium of another mushroom that grows in the dead branch.

Primroses

Primroses grow mostly under trees and start flowering in March, before the new leaves of deciduous trees develop.



This is the very first primrose of this year, a common Cowslip (Primula veris) with small, dark yellow flowers. It grew all alone in a very grey and brown chestnut-wood, and it looked quite out of place and out of season.













Often you find primroses in larger groups, as here. You notice some dark yellow Cowslips and a lot of pale Common Primroses (Primula vulgaris).















The flowers of the Common Primrose are larger and have shorter and less upright stems.All primroses have clear green, cockled leaves.
















Intermediate forms between the two species are quite common. Here you see one.