Culbin’s grasses, flowers and shrubs have adapted to the unusual soil conditions - or have even taken root because of them.
Most flowers here are seasonal and the easiest time to find them is when they bloom in Spring and Summer.
Marram grass
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| Marram grass |
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Marram is incredibly strong seaside grass with sharp, grey-green leaves and a root system which spreads rapidly like a mat through the surface of sandy soils.
As a result, marram can stabilise sand dunes like those of Culbin. Its strong leaves are inedible but were once popular as thatch. Local people once uprooted marram (it was easier than cutting the tough stems) to provide roofing material, and this may have been one cause of the destabilisation of the dunes in the 17th century leading to the sand movement which eventually buried the Culbin estate and its settlements. Here and there you will see lyme grass among the marram, the seeds of which may have arrived by sea.
You’ll see marram along the sand/shingle coastal edge, notably at Buckie Loch and Findhorn Bay.
Saltmarsh and sedge
It’s easy to overlook saltmarsh and sedge as plants as they appear to be a form of turf, but in fact the seashore at Culbin is made up of a site-unique combination of sedges and grasses such as saltmarsh flat-sedge, few-flowered spike-rush, long-bracted sedge and dwarf northern saltmarsh grass.
The invertebrates which live beneath this soft and springy turf provide an invaluable food source for long-billed wading birds such as redshank and oystercatcher. It is also slow-growing and easily damaged by heavy human usage - and especially by riding.
You can admire Culbin sedge beds at Kingsteps, and saltmarsh at The Gut.
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| Sea Thrift |
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Thrift
In some areas of Culbin, notably along the foreshore to the west, you will see long strips of grey-green tussocks, crowned in spring by attractive pink flower heads growing on wiry stems. Thrift loves to grow in poor sandy soil very close to the sea but reacts adversely to total immersion in sea water. Future rising tides may force the thrift to move gradually inland. Thrift once found fame on one side of a 'thruppenny bit' coin, perhaps inspired by its tenacity in the face of very changeable growing conditions.
Keep your eyes open and you may see other rarer Culbin coastal plants such as sea centaury, which shows attractive pink flowers above 15cm high narrow-leaved stems in Summer.
Heather
heather or ling is a key part of Culbin's ecology as it is in many pine forests. Here it shows its amazing capacity to adapt to poor soil and dry conditions. Heather seed has remarkable longevity and can survive in soil for many hundreds of years. It requires light to regenerate and so will often reappear unexpectedly where the forest has been cleared and the soil disturbed, or even where a badger has rootled through an area of topsoil in search of beetles.
Berried Treasure!
Plants which provide berries play an important part in the Culbin natural food chain for birds and mammals alike.
Cowberry is a low-growing plant you’ll notice in patches under the trees. In Spring it shows small whitish-pink flowers. You can tell it apart from the more common blaeberry as it is evergreen, retaining its shiny green foliage all year round. Like the blaeberry, its berries are edible (by humans as well as forest animals and birds).
Look out for cowberry growing in shiny green mats on the forest floor, especially on the climb down from Hill 99.
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| Juniper - unripened berries |
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You will also find crowberry, a similar low-growing, berry-bearing plant, among the thrift of the seashore. This can also be found growing on mountaintops in Cornwall, indicating that temperature rather than altitude is important to this berry.
Keep an eye open too for a grey-green prickly shrub carrying small, hard, blue (when ripe) berries. Juniper berries are used to flavour gin but also provide a food source for Culbin wildlife. Look out for it growing near the Dragonfly Pond and in west Culbin.
Here and there you will also find rowan (mountain ash), technically a tree but often no larger than a shrub here at Culbin. Rowan provides a feast of red berries for birds in autumn. Its attractive, feathery leaves turn red and fall in autumn, helping build up a slightly richer forest floor attractive to a different range of plants.
Lookout for plantlife finger-post signs on the Hill 99 trail and around the Gravel-pit Ponds.
Picky plants
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| Chickweed wintergreen |
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Other rarer wintergreens such as toothed wintergreen and one-flowered wintergreen are even more site-specific. Some appear to enjoy the slightly richer subsoil where deciduous leaves fall in the autumn as well as needles and bark from evergreen trees.
Different kinds of plant develop an even stronger attachment to one particular form of habitat. Creeping lady’s tresses (a member of the orchid family) is sometimes the only plant you will find growing beneath the thick forest on dunes behind Buckie Loch, its pale yellow-white flowers looking ghostly against the dim forest floor. Even when it isn’t in flower, you’ll still be able to see its seed-heads.
Rarer still, the thicker pinkish-yellow coral-root orchid flowers in summer on decaying moss or peat of the forest floor as does the delicate twin-flower, with its double head of tiny white bells.
Mosses, fungi and lichens
Culbin doesn’t stop at grasses, flowers and shrubs - incredible mosses, fungi and lichens are essential components of Culbin's ecosystems.
Finding out more
Plantlife, the plant conservation charity, works closely with Forestry Commission Scotland and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds at Culbin. Its back from the brink campaign focuses on recovery programmes for endangered plants.
You will find lift-up plant posts marking plant species with particularly interesting stories scattered around Culbin. These will encourage you to look beyond the plant itself to consider how it relates to human use and to the wider natural environment, and are fun for kids to look out for as they explore the forest and foreshore.
Back to Culbin's plants and wildlife.
