Dear Readers, overnight the Great Tit nestlings have fledged – I saw them briefly in the lilac this morning, but haven’t seen them or their parents since. I shall keep my eyes peeled, and send you a photo when I spot them. I’m actually relieved – a few nights ago I chased off a cat that had climbed up the hydrangea and was looking speculatively into the nest box. I’m not sure if s/he could get a paw in, but no one likes to see nestlings in peril. Then last night there was lots of fox noise, and I had to march down in my dressing gown to make sure that they weren’t trying to get into the nest (which they weren’t). The stress!

The absence of the Great Tits has  been more than compensated for by the appearance of lots of fledgling House Sparrows, who sit around looking hopeful as their devoted parents try to find them enough to eat.

The young starlings are still about, and there are several young squirrels as well…

But maybe the best news is that Abbie the foster cat came out for her food this morning – she not only miaowed in a demanding fashion but she also head-butted me for a stroke, so maybe I was overly pessimistic about how long it would take her to come round yesterday. Isn’t she a pretty girl?

Dear Readers, our latest foster cat is about as different from the chatty, outgoing Jolene as it’s possible to get. Abbie is fourteen years old, and from the few glimpses I’ve had so far, she’s a very pretty long-haired cat, whose whole life has been turned upside down in the past few months.

Abbie was adopted from the RSPCA when she was four, and lived for her whole life with a lady who lived alone. Abbie was an indoor cat, something she chose quite early on, having been terrified by the neighbourhood feline tough guys. She would run and hide as soon as any visitors came, but was devoted to her owner, sitting beside her on the sofa, curling up at the foot of the bed and generally being an undemanding little shadow.

Then her owner died, and since then Abbie’s life has been very different. A kind neighbour looked after her for a while, and then she’s been looked after by the RSPCA. Now she’s with us, and we’re hoping that she’ll settle and come out of her shell a little bit so that she can go to her forever home.

Whoever adopts her will, I think, need to be someone with the patience to let Abbie get to know them at her own pace. She won’t work in a busy household, or somewhere with other pets. I suspect she hasn’t had much to do with men, but it will all depend on the personality of the owner. It will be no good trying to rush things with this cat – at fourteen she’s set in her ways, and while I’m sure she will start to show her personality and become a bit more confident, she’s unlikely to ever be a lap cat.

Poor Abbie. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that there’s an experienced cat owner out there willing to give her the time and space she’ll need. Give me a shout in the comments if you, or anyone you know, might fit the bill!

 

Dear Readers, here at Bug Woman’s Adventures in London I’m always up for something that involves audience participation, so I was delighted to hear that Butterfly Conservation are inviting people to vote for their favourite British butterfly. Well, that’s a bit like choosing your favourite child, in my opinion.I love the early ones, the Brimstones and the Orange Tips…

I love the ones that crop up on my Buddleia, the Peacocks and the Red Admirals…

I love the Speckled Wood, fluttering in a woodland glade…

And I love the Holly Blues and Gatekeepers that turn up in the garden…

But I think on balance I would vote for the Painted Lady. It isn’t as showy as its close relatives, the Peacock and the Red Admiral, but it does fly over the Atlas Mountains and the English Channel in order to breed in the UK, and to end up feeding on my Buddleia in the late summer, so it deserves a round of applause in my opinion.

I am a little disappointed that there are no moths, because the Hummingbird Hawk Moth or the Jersey Tiger are both favourites of mine. Maybe next year!

So, do go and vote. I will be very interested to see which butterfly wins!

https://britainsfavouritebutterfly.co.uk/

And if you aren’t sure, you can take the ‘Which Butterfly Are You?’ quiz here. Apparently my closest match is the Scotch Argus.

Goodness, Readers, I love this time of year. The Great Tit nestlings are still chirruping away in the nest box, and yesterday morning the sound was augmented by the wheezing sound of starling fledglings. I love the way that their parents ‘park’ them on a branch while they get some suet pellets, and then pop back to feed them. They are very clear about which fledgling is theirs, though they all look very similar to my untutored eyes. Maybe there’s something about the sound, as there is with many birds? This is the sound of a single fledgling begging for food, recorded by David Darrell-Lambert at Rainham Marsh. Imagine it magnified fifty-fold, and you’ve got an idea of what my garden can sound like at 5 a.m.

It’s the most dangerous time for fledglings – they are naïve, they can’t fly as well as their parents, and they are prone to predation by everything from crows and magpies to cats. Sometimes they fall into the pond and  I have to rescue them with a net, even though there are plenty of places to get out. But fortunately a fair number survive, and turn up in the whitebeam in mid-May as they’ve done for at least the last fifteen years.

Starlings are renowned mimics, and many times I’ve walked along our road, heard a bird and looked up with excitement, only to see that it’s a starling. For an idea of their vocal range, have a look here…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1s1YNwlM8g

And here’s a poem. A good description of a murmuration, I think, and it’s about so many other things…

Starlings
Maggie Smith 

The starlings choose one piece of sky above the river

and pour themselves in. Like a thousand arrows

pointing in unison one way, then another. That bit of blue

doesn’t belong to them, and they don’t belong to the sky,

or to the earth. Isn’t that what you’ve been taught—nothing is ours?

Haven’t you learned to keep the loosest possible hold?

The small portion of sky boils with birds.

Near the river’s edge, one birch has a knot so much

like an eye, you think it sees you. But of course it doesn’t.

Shakespeare really knows how to put a sonnet together, eh. This begs to be read out loud.

Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

By William Shakespeare

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

 

Dear Readers, the yellow flag iris have certainly established themselves in the pond since I wrote my first Wednesday Weed back in 2020. It always amazes me  how some plants are happy and some aren’t – the water mint has gone and so have the marsh marigolds that I was told were indestructible. Hah! Still, the damselflies love the iris leaves, and I love the buttery yellow flowers, so everyone is happy.  And the boggy patch by the tennis courts in Cherry Tree Wood is getting more interesting by the year.

Let’s time-travel back to 2020.

Dear Readers, round by the tennis courts in Cherry Tree Wood there is a place which is damp and muddy almost all year round. Some say that this is actually where the Mutton Brook arises before it makes its way through Hampstead Garden Suburb and eventually into the Dollis Brook. Whatever the truth of it is, I have never seen such a fine batch of yellow irises  (Iris pseudacorus) as are there this year. They are the colour of butter, and those strange flowers are decorated with faint landing pads to show the hoverflies and bees exactly where to go to pollinate them.

I have some of these plants in the garden too, and the flowers are fleeting, appearing in the morning and sometimes gone by late in the afternoon. Still, I am not complaining – this is only the second year that they have flowered, and they are better than last year, when I only had a single bloom. For all its delicate beauty, it can be a bit of a thug – it is counted as an invasive species along the whole west coast of North America, and in New England as well. You can see how a stand of this plant would soon squeeze out everything else.

In the UK, the plant has a host of vernacular names, including butter-and-eggs, ducks’ bills, queen of the meadow and soldiers-and-sailors. Regular readers will be delighted to hear that this is yet another plant that’s considered to be unlucky if you bring it into the house: Roy Vickery speculates that it’s because the plant grows in treacherous, boggy areas. However, in Guernsey it was used to strew the path in front of a bride as she made her way to church on her wedding day, so it’s not all bad. In Shetland, irises are known as ‘segs’, which comes from the Anglo-Saxon word for a sword, an obvious reference to the blade-shaped leaves. Biting a ‘seg’ meant that you would develop a speech impediment such as a stammer. Goodness knows what it all means, except that people do love a good story, and plants are so often vehicles for such things.

The roots of yellow iris can be used to make a dye: in the Western Isles the dye is said to be black, and sometimes used as ink, while in Shetland it’s blue-grey or dark green. The flowers can be used to produce a dye too, while the leaves made a green dye that was used to colour Harris tweed. In short there’s a veritable rainbow of potential colours in the various parts of this plant.

Medicinally, yellow iris was used as a cathartic – it contains chemicals which can cause dermatitis, and is said to be mildly toxic to cats and dogs. However, it’s been used for everything from toothache to cramp and, if ground into snuff, was said by one Dr Thornton to have ‘cured complaints of the head of long standing in a marvellous way’.

Furthermore, it is said to have cured a pig following a bite from a mad dog. With all these medicinal uses, it’s no wonder that the Roman word for the plant was consecratix, because it was used for purification ceremonies.

It’s often thought that the yellow iris was the origin of the fleur-de-lys, symbol of French kings and boy scouts. The Frankish king, Clovis, was said to have replaced the three toads on his flag with three fleur-de-lys as a symbol of Christian purity. Later legends have the name ‘fleur-de-lys’ being a corruption of the phrase ‘flower of Louis’, for King Louis IX. However, it might also refer to the River Leie in Flanders, where yellow irises grew in great profusion. For me it will always be a symbol of the scout movement. How I remember trying to join the Cub Scouts as a child because the Brownies seemed a bit wet. Oh, the shame of being rejected at such a young age!

Although Claude Monet was famous for his paintings of waterlilies at his garden in Giverney, he was not averse to yellow irises either: I love how, in the painting below, the citrus-lemon colour of the flowers is offset by the blue-green of the leaves. Although the painting is not photo-realistic, it gives a real sense of the coolness of the plant – whenever I look at them, I seem to smell the freshness of water and see the faintest glance of a dragonfly out of the corner of my eye.

And finally, a poem. I think a lot of us are coming back to the sounds of nature during the lockdown, hearing the birds singing early in the morning, and the thrum of bees. Sadly, here in East Finchley the builders are back and the road (which was closed for some sewage works) is now open, so the rumble of vans is ever present. Nonetheless, things are still quieter than they were, and I find myself quieter inside too. I hope that you enjoy this as much as I did.

Glencolmcille Soundtrack by Moya Cannon

All day long, as I climbed,

in sunshine, up to the holy well,

then on to the Napoleonic watchtower,

and halted behind it, on a headland

tramped brown by sheep, to watch the sea

carve slow blue paths through cliffs and skerries,

May’s soundtrack played on and on-

bee-hum, the high meheh of hill-lambs,

the lifted songs of larks in warm grass

and later, near the court tomb in the valley,

the cuckoo’s shameless call.

When did I forget it,

mislay it or roll it up,

this tapestry of sound

which pleasures us

by spilling hawthorn hedges

in whin-scented summer,

as pools of yellow iris

are conjured out of wet fields

and late bluebells, vetch and fern

capture the ditches?

 

 

 

 

 

 

A series following the 72 British mini-seasons of Nature’s Calendar by Kiera Chapman, Lulah Ellender, Rowan Jaines and Rebecca Warren. 

Well, Readers, it may be lilac time somewhere, but here in East Finchley we’re at the end of the road for this year’s flowers – the photo above is from the beginning of April. There is still a hint of scent, even on this unseasonably cold day, and Kiera Chapman describes how the scent is when the plant is first cut.

“Hyacinths, lily of the valley, marzipan, with a note – this is strange – of the rubberised smell of a new car“.

Once indoors, though, she remarks that

“the weight of the scent seems to increase dramatically, becoming sweeter, dirtier, almost headache-inducing”

Of course, lots of flowers are a bit much in an enclosed space, but there is a variety of lilac (pictured below) where the composition of the perfume changes during the day. I would hazard a guess that this is to maybe attract different kinds of pollinators at different times, but who knows?

Lilac is not a native plant, but its origins have caused no end of confusion. Lilac comes originally from the Balkans, but arrived here via the gardens of the Ottomans, and so was thought  to be an exotic Persian plant rather than a European one. But as often happens, lilac has  been embraced both here in the UK and in North America, where the lilac is the state flower of New Hampshire. I’ve also embraced this poem by Amy Lowell (1874 – 1925) and think it deserves another airing today. As I said previously, it’s worth reading it slowly, preferably with a cup of tea (and a biscuit 🙂 )

Lilacs

by Amy Lowell

Lilacs,
False blue,
White,
Purple,
Color of lilac,
Your great puffs of flowers
Are everywhere in this my New England.
Among your heart-shaped leaves
Orange orioles hop like music-box birds and sing
Their little weak soft songs;
In the crooks of your branches
The bright eyes of song sparrows sitting on spotted eggs
Peer restlessly through the light and shadow
Of all Springs.
Lilacs in dooryards
Holding quiet conversations with an early moon;
Lilacs watching a deserted house
Settling sideways into the grass of an old road;
Lilacs, wind-beaten, staggering under a lopsided shock of bloom
Above a cellar dug into a hill.
You are everywhere.
You were everywhere.
You tapped the window when the preacher preached his sermon,
And ran along the road beside the boy going to school.
You stood by the pasture-bars to give the cows good milking,
You persuaded the housewife that her dishpan was of silver.
And her husband an image of pure gold.
You flaunted the fragrance of your blossoms
Through the wide doors of Custom Houses—
You, and sandal-wood, and tea,
Charging the noses of quill-driving clerks
When a ship was in from China.
You called to them: “Goose-quill men, goose-quill men,
May is a month for flitting.”
Until they writhed on their high stools
And wrote poetry on their letter-sheets behind the propped-up ledgers.
Paradoxical New England clerks,
Writing inventories in ledgers, reading the “Song of Solomon” at night,
So many verses before bed-time,
Because it was the Bible.
The dead fed you
Amid the slant stones of graveyards.
Pale ghosts who planted you
Came in the nighttime
And let their thin hair blow through your clustered stems.
You are of the green sea,
And of the stone hills which reach a long distance.
You are of elm-shaded streets with little shops where they sell kites and marbles,
You are of great parks where every one walks and nobody is at home.
You cover the blind sides of greenhouses
And lean over the top to say a hurry-word through the glass
To your friends, the grapes, inside.

Lilacs,
False blue,
White,
Purple,
Color of lilac,
You have forgotten your Eastern origin,
The veiled women with eyes like panthers,
The swollen, aggressive turbans of jeweled pashas.
Now you are a very decent flower,
A reticent flower,
A curiously clear-cut, candid flower,
Standing beside clean doorways,
Friendly to a house-cat and a pair of spectacles,
Making poetry out of a bit of moonlight
And a hundred or two sharp blossoms.
Maine knows you,
Has for years and years;
New Hampshire knows you,
And Massachusetts
And Vermont.
Cape Cod starts you along the beaches to Rhode Island;
Connecticut takes you from a river to the sea.
You are brighter than apples,
Sweeter than tulips,
You are the great flood of our souls
Bursting above the leaf-shapes of our hearts,
You are the smell of all Summers,
The love of wives and children,
The recollection of gardens of little children,
You are State Houses and Charters
And the familiar treading of the foot to and fro on a road it knows.
May is lilac here in New England,
May is a thrush singing “Sun up!” on a tip-top ash tree,
May is white clouds behind pine-trees
Puffed out and marching upon a blue sky.
May is a green as no other,
May is much sun through small leaves,
May is soft earth,
And apple-blossoms,
And windows open to a South Wind.
May is full light wind of lilac
From Canada to Narragansett Bay.

Lilacs,
False blue,
White,
Purple,
Color of lilac.
Heart-leaves of lilac all over New England,
Roots of lilac under all the soil of New England,
Lilac in me because I am New England,
Because my roots are in it,
Because my leaves are of it,
Because my flowers are for it,
Because it is my country
And I speak to it of itself
And sing of it with my own voice
Since certainly it is mine.

 

Well Readers, here we are, home again in East Finchley, and as per usual everything has been growing wildly in our absence.

The green alkanet and the red campion have taken over the bench, plus the birds have clearly been sitting in the whitebeam and doing that thing that birds do…

The wildflower turf that we planted last year is full of interesting plants, including ribwort plantain and sorrel and more red campion…

The yellow flag and the bog bean are coming into flower…

…as is the garlic mustard/Jack-by-the-hedge…

Plus, we have a shed which mysteriously appeared while we were in Canada…

And also, the dahlias are finally coming up in the planters, with various degrees of enthusiasm…

But this is what has me most delighted (and slightly worried, truth be told) – the Great Tits who were inspecting the sparrow nesting box before we left have obviously reproduced, if you listen to the recording below. It’s very close to our back door, so we’re doing our best to be quiet and to leave them to it – the adult birds visit regularly, so fingers crossed for a happy outcome. Have a listen to the frantic chirruping!