Two more cemeteries in Edinburgh

 This week, I continued my wildlife survey of Edinburgh's cemeteries by visiting two cemeteries outside the centre of the city. On Monday I visited Morningside cemetery. 

This is a wide open cemetery, with some lovely trees, including some beautiful silver birches, which look particularly fine at the moment 

This is a cemetery that is rich in fungi at this time of the year, including this collared earthstar 

and this, which after a bit of research, I found out is a parrot waxcap - I never realised before that they could be so green!

 In fact Morningside Cemetery has so many waxcaps, like the snowy waxcap and yellow waxcap below - that it woulc almost be considered to be a waxcap grassland. Plantlife (the charity for plants and fungi in the UK) is currently running Waxcap Watch, which encourages people to get involved in recording these amazing fungi.

As in many cemeteries in Edinburgh, ladybirds gather here to hibernate, choosing the gravestones under trees. These orange ladybirds look very cosy

and I couldn't count how many pine and two spot ladybirds had hidden themselves away here 

On Thursday I continued my survey by visiting Comely Bank Cemetery, near the city's Western General Hospital. This cemetery has a good number of mature trees 

and a good variety of  of fungi including these puff balls

and these parrot waxcaps 

There were ladybirds and other invertebrates on many of the gravestones, including this rotund harvestman (that's my own translation of its scientific name Leiobunum rotundum, I'm not sure whether it actually has a common name)