I hope our videos in the Patch on the Planet series encourage you to look closely at a place in the countryside that you visit regularly.
Here is a report from Nicole, age 15, who did just that and sent in photographs to share.
The patch is not far from ours, but it lies in a deep wooded valley with a stream rushing through it. There is a path alongside the stream which leads deep into the trees.
As Nicole entered the valley, she was surprised to see a roe deer looking back at her.
A little further on, a disturbance in the grass revealed a frog.
Patches have plants that flower at different times of year, and as this was earlier in the season, snowdrops were almost everywhere.
Rainforest Trees
Our patches are in an area where the trees form a temperate rainforest. You can tell this because their branches, and even the twigs, are covered in other plants that thrive in the damp, such as moss.
Around here they are also coated in lichens. These are part plant (algae) and part fungi, living together and helping each other to survive.
At the top of a high wall is another plant which enjoys damp surroundings – a fern.
Forming a dome rising from the ground, and looking a little like a fungus (but not one), is the butterbur, about to catch up with the snowdrops and burst into flower.
I was talking to someone recently who was interested in when all these different living things first appeared. Briefly, the deer is a mammal – an animal group that began to flourish after the dinosaurs became extinct. The frog is an amphibian – a group that became established before the dinosaurs appeared. Snowdrops, the trees in the valley, and the butterbur are flowering plants that diversified after the end of the dinosaurs. However, the algae and fungi in lichens represent groups of living organisms that began to flourish much earlier – around 1.6 billion years ago for algae and about a billion years ago for fungi.
So the final surprise – an extra one – is that when you look at the living things on your patch, you are also looking back in time!
