Shrubs and Plants

Mixed Bog Plants

A particular community of characteristic species exist on Lowland blanket bogs. Plants such as the easily identifiable cottontails (Eriophrum spp.) with their fluffy white flowers in the summer months exist alongside the deep rooting Purple Moor grass (Molina caerulea) which creates characteristic tuft and is a straw colour in this image. These species are generally representative of wetter areas. In the back ground of this picture you can see Bog myrtle (Myrica gale) which can be identified by its reddish brown upright branches. The plant also carries tiny yellow resin glands on its bark and leaves which gives another clue to its identity. These plants have developed mechanisms to cope with the low nutrient waterlogged environment. For example, Bog myrtle has a bacteria in its roots that allows it to get more nitrogen which essential for plant growth.

With kind permission of the Irish Wildlife Trust

Mixed Bog Plants
With kind permission of the Irish Wildlife Trust

Mixed Bog Plants

A particular community of characteristic species exist on Lowland blanket bogs. Plants such as the easily identifiable cottontails (Eriophrum spp.) with their fluffy white flowers in the summer months exist alongside the deep rooting Purple Moor grass (Molina caerulea) which creates characteristic tuft and is a straw colour in this image. These species are generally representative of wetter areas. In the back ground of this picture you can see Bog myrtle (Myrica gale) which can be identified by its reddish brown upright branches. The plant also carries tiny yellow resin glands on its bark and leaves which gives another clue to its identity. These plants have developed mechanisms to cope with the low nutrient waterlogged environment. For example, Bog myrtle has a bacteria in its roots that allows it to get more nitrogen which essential for plant growth.

With kind permission of the Irish Wildlife Trust

Enlarge image

On the mountains, the formation of blanket bog followed a different course. Peat has been forming in badly-drained places, high and low, almost since the Ice Age cold disappeared. At some bogs in the west, the base layer of peat, at perhaps 5 metres deep, was formed from birch debris some 9,000 years ago. These existing bog hollows and other reed swamps served as nuclei for much of the great expansion of blanket bog when climate turned wetter. It reached up to cover the hillsides, their soils leached and waterlogged after clearance of the forests, and it blanketed even bare mountain summits.

The lowland (or oceanic) blanket bog of the west looks very different from the surviving stretches of raised bog in the midlands. Treeless as tundra, it robes the land in a shimmer of grasses and sedges, dull green in summer but turning in autumn to a tawny gold shot through with pink and purple. Two deep-rooting species, purple moor-grass and black bog-rush, leave little room for the hummocks of sphagnum. Bog-cotton, too, with its silky white tufts, can dominate whole stretches of blanket bog, so that the peat is made up almost entirely of its remains.

Ling heather

Ling heather is also known as common heather. It is one of the commonest plants found on mountains in Ireland. It gives the mountains a purple tint in late summer and autumn.

© Richard Nairn

Ling heather
© Richard Nairn

Ling heather

Ling heather is also known as common heather. It is one of the commonest plants found on mountains in Ireland. It gives the mountains a purple tint in late summer and autumn.

© Richard Nairn

Enlarge image

With their wiry, woody stems and narrow, folded-down leaves, the ericaceous shrubs of the bogs are equipped to survive drought, wind and fire as much as any excess of moisture. The cross-leaved heath prefers a wetter root-run and grows abundantly in lowland blanket bog, whereas the common heather or ling prefers the drier banks and slopes of the hills. Connemara National Park shows the knee-high vigour of heather, with its attendant lichens and liverworts - a vegetation all but vanished from the hard-grazed hills around. With it has gone the red grouse, which depends on heather for cover, shelter and food, and many moths which have heather as their caterpillars' food plant: among them the beautiful emperor moth, whose colouring blends with the green, pink and black of the flowering plant. At the wet margins of the bogs, the loss of the purple-flowered devil's bit scabious threatens the last colonies of the marsh butterfly, a species endangered across Europe.