The flora is wonderful. First impressions are the yellow stars of Bog asphodel, fading to gold. Pink flowers of Cross-leaved heath mingle with White-beak sedge. Heather, or Ling, is in tight bud. An osprey flies in with a fish for its young. Large Heath fly over the bog.
Knowing there’s cranberry at Foulshaw Moss I hope to find some here too. After that first glimpse of ripening fruit I find many more. There are beautiful pinkish berries, looking tasty. Green berries ripen, some are speckled and brown. At first all you see is cranberries on a cushion of sphagnum moss. Cranberry is a low, ever-green, creeping sub-shrub with reddish stems that trail over sphagnum moss and hummocks. The plant is interwoven in sphagnum and if you look closely more and more rounded berries become visible, often hidden in sphagnum. Flowers are pink and petal-lobes reflex as they mature. The flower stem is the colour of cranberry juice. Down among the sphagnum lurks blood-red sundew with glistening sticky droplets on each tendril. If an insect touches these droplet the sundew’s tendrils trap it, the leaf closes over it and the carnivorous plant digests its prey.