We were on TV last night. Well Flanders Moss and Stephen were. Flanders had a starring role in the BBC 2 TV programme "Grow Your Own Drugs" when presenter James Wong came to visit the site, shown around by Stephen Longster, Site management officer for SNH, specifically to look for cranberries. He was making cranberry minced pies and came to see the real thing on Flanders. However when it came to cooking in his nice kitchen he had large quantities of American cranberries bought from a shop. There is a good reason for this, collecting cranberries in the wild on Flanders Moss is a non-starter as they are scattered so thinly on the ground. Collecting them before Christmas not only would take days to get enough for a teaspoon of sauce but also probably involve frostbite, trench foot and drenching in water-filled ditches.
But it was not always so, going back to 1876 Dr. Buchanan White noted in the Perthshire Society of Natural Science that in the Scottish Borders enough cranberries were collected to be sold in the local markets. He also remarked that cranberries were a good way of producing a crop off unproductive land, a cultivated 5 ft sq piece of bog could yield up to 1 quart (2 pints) of fruit. Of course cranberries are coming back into fashion because of the health giving properties but it is hard to imagine anyone getting that quantity off a piece of bog today.
If you are on your winter stroll around the boardwalk look out for the thread-like stems with tiny scaly leaves and if you are lucky a gleaming jewel of a fruit. They are in fact beautifully adapted to living on the bog, the stems grow across the surface ever keeping ahead and above the growing sphagnum. The tiny leaves with their white hair-covered undersides are designed for the plant to loose as little water as possible. This may seem strange in a plant that lives in an incredibly wet situation but bogs are places where there is very little food for plants and when it transpires water it can loose valuable salts and minerals that are difficult to replace on a bog hence the need to lose as little water as possible.
The moss is a fine place for a winter walk and the new viewing tower is adding to the experience. This morning with everything crispy with frost, pinkfeet winking overhead and long tailed tits ticking at eye level in the tree tops, the bog was stunning. Eleven red deer, hinds and calves, were wandering north into the middle of the Moss after spending the night on the better grass of the surrounding fields. And to show how you should always keep your eyes peeled I looked down on a chap and his 2 dogs as they walked round the boardwalk watched unnoticed only 20 yards away by a roe deer and her fawn. People tell me that they don't see any wildlife from the boardwalk but maybe the tower will just help people see a bit more .
Happy Christmas
