Dear Readers, we had pretty much perfect weather for our photography walk in Coldfall Wood on Sunday – what a pleasure it was to just wander along and get our eyes in. Here’s a selection of my photos, to whet your appetite for a spring walk…
Norway Maple flowers
Green alkanet…
Windflowers (Wood anemones)
Forget-me-nots
Hybrid bluebells…
Parakeet and catkins
Photo By Zephyris at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6453552
A series following the 72 British mini-seasons of Nature’s Calendar by Kiera Chapman, Lulah Ellender, Rowan Jaines and Rebecca Warren.
Dear Readers, a week or so ago we had a massive hailstorm here in East Finchley – I was amazed at the sound of the hail on the windows, and just as it was finishing, our post man knocked on the door with a parcel. He was wearing shorts, as he does every day regardless of the weather, and he is also bald, so I asked him how he’d gotten on.
“The hailstones were bouncing off my head!” he said, “And I couldn’t resist it – I had to taste one”.
“What did it taste like?” I asked, impressed with his spirit of scientific inquiry.
“Very clean water!” he said.
But what are hailstones? I realised that I wasn’t sure, and so I turned to Nature’s Calendar to see what Lulah Ellender had to say about the phenomenon. Hailstones are not frozen rain, but are frozen water droplets formed in the updrafts of thunderstorms. They are bounced about, gathering more and more ice, until they become too heavy to stay airborne and come crashing to the earth. A swathe of up to a hundred miles wide can be battered by them.
They are also very variable in size – the ones that I saw recently were about the size of a petit pois, but the largest recorded hailstone was about the size of a football. They usually fall to earth at between twenty and fifty miles per hour, but the largest can attain a velocity of over a hundred miles per hour.
And while the postman was unhurt by being caught in the middle of a hailstone, sadly this isn’t always the case: cricketball-sized hailstones killed 246 people in a storm in Moradabad, India in 1888, while a storm in Bangladesh in 1986 killed 40 people and injured 400.
Even at UK levels, hailstones can sting and bite, and who knows what changes are coming as our climate warms? But for now, our postman can go about his business without needing a tin hat.
And see what you think of this poem by Kay Ryan. I think it captures the surprise and violence of a hailstorm very nicely.
Hailstorm
by Kay Ryan
Like a storm
of hornets, the
little white planets
layer and relayer
as they whip around
in their high orbits,
getting more and
more dense before
they crash against
our crust. A maelstrom
of ferocious little
fists and punches,
so hard to believe
once it’s past.
And then, usually, sunshine, and if you’re lucky, a rainbow…
Dear Readers, foster cat Jolene has had a bit of a mixed week. First up, when I was out on Thursday she managed to break into the container with her dry food in it, and ate about three days’ worth. She also took the lid off of the butter dish, and seems to have found that not so much to her liking as there were blobs all over the floor.
We also had some folk over to decide if they wanted to adopt her, but the lady announced that she didn’t want a cat that might bring in mice (Jolene doesn’t have the strongest prey drive of any cat I’ve ever met, but she is still, well, a cat), plus the gentleman said he was allergic to cats, which does somewhat beg the question. So that was a strong no.
On the other hand, today a lovely couple popped round with their little boy – Jolene decided that this tiny human was absolutely fascinating, and the parents are extremely responsible people who will ensure there’s no cat/tiny human conflict, so Jolene will soon be off to her new home. I’m always a little sad when a kittie moves on, but I also have that lovely feeling of ‘job done’ which is so pleasing.
I suspect Jolene might also be getting a new name, to prevent her being an ear worm every time her owner calls her in for dinner. But in case you’ve never heard the song in question, here it is….
Dear Readers, I first visited Myddelton House Gardens last year with my friend L, so I jumped at the chance for a return visit with my friend S on Wednesday. We were nearly six weeks later than on my last visit, and it was wonderful to see all the spring flowers. And the birds were in full song – have a listen to this song thrush (plus lots of other birds) below…
Incidentally, when I just played this recording while putting the blog together, Jolene my foster cat was very intrigued…
Anyhow, back to Myddelton House! I wrote a lot about the history of the place in my last post, so this visit was really about just enjoying the flowers. First up, the Bird of Paradise flowers in the conservatory are extraordinary this year. They really do look like crested cranes….
And look at this twisty cactus? I think it’s a Spiral Cactus (Cereus forbesii), originally from Bolivia to Argentina.
There was a lot of white comfrey about, which was very popular with the hairy-footed flower bees, and also this unusual pale yellow variety. I am seriously thinking about getting some comfrey for the garden – I know I’ll never be rid of it, but it’s such a pollinator-friendly plant. This yellow one is Tuberous Comfrey (Symphytum tuberosum). It’s native to mainland Europe through to Turkey.
I was very taken by this periwinkle – I liked the dark purple colour. It’s Vinca herbacea, and comes originally from eastern Europe.
And just look at the newly renovated rockery – absolutely full of daffodils, hybrid bluebells, and scillla (and three-cornered leek).
Plus, the garden has some of the biggest Lesser Celandine that I’ve ever seen. I’m wondering if it’s a cultivar?
Plus it’s always nice to see some new plants – this is Annual Toadflax (Linaria maroccana) which, as the name suggests, comes originally from Morocco.
And this little guy is Yellow Monks-wort (Nonea lutea), originally from Russia and Ukraine, but found in the wild in the UK since 1956, and reputed to be spreading north.
So, what a lovely visit! And free too, apart from the cost of parking and a couple of cups of tea. Highly recommended.
https://www.visitleevalley.org.uk/myddelton-house-gardens
Dear Readers, I have a dear friend who has spent the last few years becoming completely immersed in ballet, and she has inspired me too – I haven’t seen Sleeping Beauty yet, but have Giselle, the Nutcracker and, most recently, Mary Queen of Scots by the Scottish National Ballet under my belt. I see the people on stage as the most superb athletes and artists – they make ballet look so easy that I sometimes forget how difficult it is. And what goes through the heads of the dancers? I love this poem by K.Iver, a non-binary trans poet from Mississippi. See what you think…
Sleeping Beauty
By K. Iver
You’ve never seen a lilac in Mississippi.
Backstage you wear lotion laced with
its chemical imitation. A ballet mistress
says relevé always as command: lift
onto the toe using only the heel.
Your ankle’s bewilderment
old as the horned owl gaze from
your mother hunched in the audience.
You enter the stage as Lilac Fairy
& fairies make critical things happen,
though underneath your tulle brushing
sleep over a kingdom, you’re a mouse
who gets eaten every night.
No audience wants to see that. Not
the barbed feathers tucked in your
mother’s cardigan. If you pretend
rescue is coming, it might.
Relevé meaning rise & also relief.
Lift your head along with the heel.
A boy your mother says is not a boy
follows your pirouettes from the balcony.
Already a wondering, rise to what.
The ballet can’t perform without
fairy tale. The stage is safe for magic,
or at least pretend. Almost everyone gets
a solo in Sleeping Beauty, so no surgeon’s
daughter has hidden your pointe shoes
in the dressing room couch. The boy
was careful not to bring flowers
but you can feel his eyes bending around
the shoulders, clavicle, and neck you forgot
existed. When these minutes end,
these minutes of spinning his eyes
in their own pirouette, the world
won’t allow you to leave in his red Bronco,
not anymore. Already, hope sounds like
the adult word for magic. Relevé
meaning how much choreographed
relief a kingdom tolerates. Already
you are learning the off-stage rules
about who gets rescued. Who throws
flowers, who catches them.
Dear Readers, I was visiting Cherry Tree Wood yesterday, for a chat with my pal Roger about pollinators, when he asked me if I’d noticed the snakeshead fritillaries. What snakeshead fritillaries? I asked. And to my delight, on the way out, I noticed literally hundreds of them, planted in a spot where a derelict pavilion used to be, and doing very nicely.
Snakeshead fritillaries like it damp, so this is an ideal spot, and hopefully they’ll continue to multiply. Do have a look if you’re an East Finchleyite, or just visiting – they are amongst my favourite spring flowers (yes, I know you’re not supposed to have favourites), and will not be around for long.
Now, let’s have a look at my original post, from (gulp) 2016…
Snake’s Head Fritillary (Fritillaria meleagris)
Dear Readers, snake’s head fritillary is my favourite spring bulb. I am exceedingly fond of snakes, and so the strange scaly pattern on the purple flowers enthralls me. I love the elegance of the pure white flowers. I love the nodding heads, which only reveal their beauty if you turn them over.
However, it’s fair to say that the plant has an unfortunate reputation. One alternative name was ‘Leper Lily’, as the flowers are said to be the same shape as the bells that lepers had to carry to announce themselves. Vita Sackville-West called it ‘a sinister little flower, in the mournful colour of decay.’ As with many other flowers of a nodding habit, they were said to be hanging their heads in sorrow at Christ’s crucifixion.
Well, harrumph to all that. The fritillary family contains the only truly chequered flowers that I know (but do remind me of others if you can think of them!) Both parts of the Latin name for snake’s head fritillary (Fritillaria meleagris) refer to this feature: the Fritillaria part refers to either the Latin word for dice (fritillus) or (more likely to my mind) the word frittillo, which means a table for chess-playing (thanks to The Poison Garden website for this insight). This is also the root derivation for the name of the fritillary group of butterflies.
The Pearl-Bordered Fritillary (Boloria selene) (Photo Two – credit below)
The meleagris species name means ‘spotted like a guineafowl’.
Helmeted Guinea Fowl (Photo One – see credit below)
According to my Harraps Wild Flowers book, snake’s head fritillary were first recorded in the UK in 1578 (they are native to mainland Europe and Asia), but were not reported in the wild until 1736. However, there is a view that the plants are actually native, growing originally on the floodplains that extended from the Rhine and included the Thames before the opening up of the North Sea in about 5500 BC. They are now a plant of unimproved meadow which occasionally floods, a vanishingly rare habitat, and are considered to be Nationally Scarce. Richard Mabey, in ‘Flora Britannica’, mentions a few sites where the plants can be seen in quantity, including North Meadow in Cricklade,Wiltshire. He describes this meadow thus:
North Meadow (now a National Nature Reserve) is an ancient common, and what is known as Lammas Land. Its 44 acres are shut up for hay on 13 February each year until the hay harvest (apportioned by lot) some time in July. On old Lammas Day, 12 August, it become the common pasture of the Borough of Cricklade, and any resident of the town may put up to ten head of horses or cattle on it, or (after 12 September) 20 head of sheep. As far as is known, this system of land tenure has continued unchanged for more than 800 years, and the show at North Meadow may be the best evidence that the fritillary is a native species.’
The snake’s head fritillaries at North Meadow in Cricklade
Whatever their provenance, snake’s head fritillaries are certainly widely naturalised in many places, such as here in St Pancras and Islington cemetery, where they are outgrowing their original planting site and heading off in to the woods. I have some in my garden as well, where they don’t seem to mind the clay soil and the shade.
Although the snake’s head fritillary is such an exotic and enigmatic plant, it appears not to have been used medicinally – maybe its association with lepers was too strong for it to be considered useful. It is also poisonous, though there are no accounts of anybody tucking into a bulb and doing themselves a damage as there are with daffodils. However, the plant is celebrated as the County Plant of Oxfordshire (due to Magdalen College Meadow being an important snake’s head fritillary site), and also as the provincial plant of Uppland in Sweden. And furthermore, it is also celebrated by me. This most curious plant cheers me up whenever I look at it, in much the same way as I am delighted when a new house spider turns up or when I discover an unexpected caterpillar in the lettuce. I find its snakiness a refreshing change from all the wholesome bulbs that are bursting forth at this time of year, and it reminds me that something (or somebody) doesn’t have to be pretty to be beautiful.
Photo Credits
Photo One – By Bob – Picasa Web Albums, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12365512
Photo Two – By James Lindsey at Ecology of Commanster, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1680620
All other photos copyright Vivienne Palmer
A series following the 72 British mini-seasons of Nature’s Calendar by Kiera Chapman, Lulah Ellender, Rowan Jaines and Rebecca Warren.
Dear Readers, I seem to have been going on a lot about magnolias this year – here’s my most recent post, to give you a bit of background. But I’d never heard them being described as hallucinogenic before, so my curiosity was piqued.
In her piece in ‘Nature’s Calendar’, Rowan Jaines explains that the first Western record of the magnolia dates back to the time of Montezuma and the Aztecs, when Spanish naturalist Francisco Hernández de Toledo described many species, including Magnolia dealbata, the Cloudforest Magnolia. Hernández also quoted some Aztec poetry, which linked the brief flowering of the magnolia to the transience of life:
‘Listen, I say! On earth we’re known only briefly, like the magnolia. We only wither, O Friend!’
Cloudforest Magnolia (Magnolia dealbata) Photo By Stan Shebs, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=655799
Rowan Jaines describes how the petals on magnolia turn brown and fall at the slightest touch of cold or rain, and suggests that the ‘fragile and fleeting nature of the magnolia’s flowers lend them a phosphorescent quirk, flashes of brilliance’. I’m not sure quite what she means here, but a scientific paper from 1995 suggests that magnolia blossom fluoresces under ultraviolet light, as indeed it does – magnolia was originally pollinated by beetles, so this might be a way of attracting them.
Ashe’s Magnolia, showing stigma under UV light (Photo from https://www.facebook.com/magnoliasociety/posts/850378203782280/, photo by Jeff Talbert)
In fact, magnolia not only attracts beetles, it traps them – both male and female reproductive organs are present on the same tree, but like many plants who are monoecious, it wants to be pollinated by a different tree and to avoid pollinating itself except as a last resort. So, the beetles fly into the flower and are trapped overnight when the flower closes. By the following morning, the beetles are covered in pollen and eager to get going, so as soon as the flowers open they head off to pastures new.
Magnolia with a fine selection of beetles (Photo By Beatriz Moisset – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4824216)
As I’ve probably mentioned before, magnolias are beetle-pollinated because they evolved prior to bees and other social insects – magnolias were flowering during the Cretaceous, when dinosaurs roamed the earth. And what a picture that conjures up! Magnolia was once found right across Europe, Asia and Americas, but today the trees are only found in the southern US and southern China. For me, they are one of the fleeting beauties of spring.
Dear Readers, as I gaze out of my office window, I am often distracted by this very fine tree – it’s an Amelanchior or serviceberry, and in the spring sunshine yesterday it positively twinkled, in a way that it’s very hard to capture in a photo. Not only that, but it was also spectacular in autumn…
Amelanchior canadensis (Serviceberry) in autumn last year
At this time of year, the combination of the white flowers and the chocolate-coloured new leaves is really very pleasing.
I’ve given a more detailed account of this delightful tree here (and don’t miss the poem at the end) but I also wanted to share this little video of the Amelanchior yesterday, waving in the (freezing!) wind. Sometimes, it’s worth pausing to allow amazement to creep in…
Dear Readers, today was a cold, blustery but sunny day, and so we headed out to Trent Country Park, close to Cockfosters at the very end of the Piccadilly line. We’ve been here before, but last time there was a tremendous amount of building work going on on the site of the original country house, so we were curious to see how it had all turned out.
The entrance to Trent Park House
Trent Park itself dates back as far as the fourteenth century, when it was part of Enfield Chase, Henry IV’s hunting ground. More recently, the house was owned by Sir Phillip Sassoon, cousin of WWI poet Siegfried Sassoon, and the house was the scene of many extravagant parties, with guests including Sir Winston Churchill, artist Rex Whistler, and George Bernard Shaw. In WW2, it was turned into a holding place for captured German officers, with listening devices secreted about the house.
More recently still, the House became a series of educational establishments, with Middlesex University being in situ until 2012. In 2015 the whole estate was sold to Berkeley Estates and, as you’ll see further down this post, it has now been turned into a variety of houses and flats. Campaigners did manage to insist that a historical museum, showing some of the history of the estate, was included, and ‘Trent Park House of Secrets’ is due to open later this year.
The Country Park has been open since 1973, and features lakes, a café, a children’s play area called ‘Go Ape’ and, most enticingly for me, a wildlife rescue centre. Guess where I made a bee-line for? Though en route we passed through a very fine avenue (limes I think), and spotted the biggest bunch of mistletoe I’d ever seen in North London.
The Wildlife Rescue centre was founded in 1985 by June and Barry Smitherman, who work with other local charities and the police to rehabilitate and, where possible, release injured wild animals. Where this isn’t possible, they aim to find good long term homes for the animals in local specialist sanctuaries. They do, however, also have a range of animals in the park itself, a mixture of wild birds and mammals who have long term injuries and can’t be released, and some domestic animals who need a home. You can see a selection of creatures below…
Muntjac deer – one of two abandoned babies brought into the sanctuary. As invasive species, they can’t be released into the wild, and will spend the rest of their lives in the park.
Some very fine goats….
The poor heron below (Becky) was battered with a broom by someone irritated by her habit of eating the fish in a koi pond. She can no longer fly, but seemed very interested in the people passing by, maybe hoping that they had a spare sardine in their pockets.
So, it was good to see people who are caring for wildlife, who are working with other experts, and who, judging by the people taking their children around to see their favourite animals, are well entrenched in the local community. Everyone was being very quiet and respectful, and were teaching their children to do the same, which was lovely to see.
So then we headed off to the new housing estate. And what a spectacular show of daffodils there was, probably the best I’ve ever seen. Wordsworth would have been very happy…
But most spectacular of all was this magnificent oak, which must be a survivor from the original estate. What a venerable tree!
So in spite of the freezing wind, this was a great walk, a chance to wear my walking boots (the cosiest footwear that I possess) and to get a few steps in (11,198 to be exact). Trent Country Park is well worth a visit if you’re in North London, or passing through. And I can also recommend the raisin cookies in the café.
Northern Tamandua (Tamandua mexicana)
Dear Readers, it’s not unheard of for animals to defecate or urinate in particular spots – rhinos and hyenas both use ‘middens’ as toilets, and these sites are thought to be both territorial markers and places where members of the same species can assess things like the health and sexual status of their neighbours. But in Costa Rica, ecologist Jeremy Quiros Navarro has discovered a site 30 metres up in the canopy of the rainforest that is used by at least 17 different species of mammal – “It was crazy,” he says. “It is almost the total number of canopy mammals that you can find in the cloud forest.”
Margay ( a type of wild cat), howler and capuchin monkeys, porcupines, tamanduas, coatis and opossums all used the same spot, which was in a particular species of strangler fig (Ficus tuerckheimii ). This vine wraps around a tree, gradually killing it and leaving a kind of exoskeleton. At canopy height, though, it forms a platform, described by Quiros Navarro as being ‘like an upturned hand’.
Ficus tuerckheimii at Monteverde
Since this initial discovery, other ‘public toilets’ have been discovered in Honduras and Borneo, all of them in this particular kind of strangler fig. Whether the plant gains anything from all this varied ‘fertiliser’ is anybody’s guess. At any rate, even sloths, who were previously thought to descend to the earth to defecate, seem to favour this high-rise alternative. And who wouldn’t? It’s bad enough having to get up to go to the toilet, without having to climb down 30 metres’ worth of tree.
The tree canopies of rainforests are some of the most under-studied regions on earth. Who knows what else will be discovered?
The New Scientist article is here.
The original article is here.