Dear Readers, I have always been interested in the edges of things, the places where one landscape bleeds into another, and so this morning I took a walk along the edge of Muswell Hill Playing Fields. Before the lockdown this would have been full of people playing football, walking their dogs, flying kites and picnicking, but today there was a handful of pooches illicitly chasing the crows, a couple of runners and us, puffing along on our daily exercise. The Fields are bordered on one side by the cemetery and on another by the woods, so there is a fair variety of things to look at.

Look at this sapling horse chestnut, for example. I love the way that the leaves unfurl and turn into loose shuttlecocks. When the tree is older there will be those ‘candle’ flowers that look so exotic close up, with their long stamen and carmine centres. According to my Collins Tree Guide, the middle of the flower starts off yellow and goes red after pollination. Sadly, by about July the tree’s leaves are likely to already be turning crisp and brown, having been mined by a tiny moth caterpillar. If the tree is particularly unlucky, it may also suffer from horse chestnut leaf blotch fungus. Such diseases weaken a tree, but don’t usually kill it. There was some evidence that blue tits were learning to eat the moth caterpillars, so let’s keep our fingers crossed that some ecological balance is soon reached.

There are lots of ash trees in the cemetery, many of them self-seeded, but this one has ‘escaped’ onto the edge of the fields. I love the way that the buds of ash look like the sooty-black hooves of tiny deer. I have learned so much about my local environment through writing this blog, and through the people that I’ve gotten to know through it: a friend mentioned the hoof comparison and it stuck, so that I can now instantly recognise an ash when I see one. We learn through metaphor, through making the connections between what we already know, and what we are trying to understand. I love that sense that we are able to constantly enlarge our mental territory, just by pushing on through the undergrowth.

This plant has always puzzled me. It grows in swathes along the edge of the playing fields, in shades from butter-yellow to palest cream. It is definitely a brassica, but which one? My suspicion is either oilseed rape (Brassica napus) or wild turnip (Brassica rapa). Both have waxy green foliage, and the leaves ‘hug’ the stems, but in rape the buds are higher than the flowers on the flowerhead, producing a ‘domed’ effect. In wild turnip, the flowers overtop the buds, leaving a little dimple.  Goodness only knows what’s going on with these – I shall have to have a proper look next time I’m there. Whichever they are, they are going strong and seem to be increasing.

I remember as a child being enchanted by the fields of acid-yellow oilseed rape when we went for a drive in the country. How beautiful they looked against the green trees and the blue sky! However, when they moved to the country, Mum hated the stuff because she always said that it had a strong smell. I have to say that I never noticed, but then Mum always was sensitive to these things. Has anyone else noticed?

It certainly makes a pretty picture alongside the cow parsley.

Now, unless I’m mistaken this little tree is a crack willow (Salix fragilis) – the shiny green foliage and the very long fruits seem indicative to me. This tree grows elsewhere in the damp places in the wood, and so I’m not surprised to see it here. What an elegant plant it is! Left alone it can grow to about 20 metres tall, but its sideshoots often break (hence the name ‘crack’ willow). Fortunately, the broken twigs can take root easily and, as the plant often grows alongside water, this forms a handy way of colonising the whole river bank. The catkins are very popular with bees, who collect the pollen for their developing broods.

I think of elder as the quintessential ‘edge’ plant, growing in hedgerows and in the places where woods thin out to meet open ground. There is an elder right at the very entrance of Coldfall Wood, and I think it might be at the very limit of its tolerance for shade. I love those big, open clusters of white flowers, beloved by hoverflies and, more recently, by those with a taste for elderflower cordial, which has become Quite the Thing here in the UK. If the flowers are left along you will end up with heavy dangling bunches of elderberries, which are full of vitamin C. I suspect that elder kept our elders healthy for many millenia.

And finally, at the start of May, the May (or hawthorn) blossom is out in abundance, spreading its slightly sickly sweet vaguely fishy smell out on the warm air. Hawthorn is another plant which gives multiple gifts – it supports a whole range of invertebrates, the blue tits in my garden have been plundering my hawthorn for caterpillars, and in the autumn the blackbirds will be gobbling up the haws.

And finally, here among the Japanese knotweed is a dock that is in absolutely pristine condition. Later in the year it will look blotched and tatty – so many insects and fungi feed on it that it inevitably looks like something the cat dragged in. And yet, at the moment, I think it looks rather magnificent. My guess is that it’s broad-leaved dock (Rumex obtusifolius) because the leaves are only very slightly wavy at the edges (unlike the inventively-named curled dock (Rumex crispus) which has something of the Mobius strip about its foliage. However, I will have to wait for the summer to be sure. If it sends up great spikes of rusty-red branched flowers, I was right. Anything else, and it’s back to the drawing board (or to Harrap’s Wild Flowers in this case).

And so we head home as one of us has a nine a.m. team call (and one of us is free to write their blog). On the way, I notice the crows, who are socially distanced and are pecking for earthworms – it was very wet yesterday so their lives have been made a bit easier. i watch as an over-excited young dog tries to catch a crow, who only flies up at the very last minute, before settling down again just far enough away for the dog to keep a vestige of hope in its little canine heart. So many animals like to tease dogs that it seems a bit unfair – I’ve seen squirrels taunting them, crows chasing a greyhound and once, in India, some Hanuman langurs jumping down from a tree, slapping a poor sleeping hound and bouncing back into the branches before the dog could even look round. What is that about, I wonder? Dogs are so intelligent but they also have a kind of innocent naivete that other intelligent creatures seem to take as carte blanche to be hooligans.

Incidentally, when I was growing up I was taught that crows were anti-social creatures, hanging out in pairs. If I saw a lot of black crows together, they were undoubtedly rooks. However, I think it’s different in the cities, where there is abundant food – I regularly see a dozen crows bathing in the stream in the woods for example, and I pass a park in Hackney where there are hundreds of crows. There is a scientific study going begging on urban corvids, I’m sure. What have you noticed? I wonder if this is just a London thing, or if, like many animals, crows in cities lose their territoriality. And I further wonder if, with food being scarcer during the lockdown, things will change.

Dear Readers, what a day! I have been beset by brain-fog, and have been chasing an amount of 36 euros round and round my financial statements until I feel like throwing my laptop out of the window. I don’t think people talk enough about how being recently bereaved takes about a hundred points off your IQ, makes you completely incapable of concentrating on anything for more than thirty seconds, and completely wrecks your short-term memory. And then, I had an 8 o’clock call so I didn’t get out for my brisk walk (extremely bad planning on my part). Finally, every time I look up it has been pouring with rain. But nonetheless, here I am, still. And I wanted to share some of my very favourite books with you, because my library is full of well-thumbed, much-loved favourites and also because I might do this regularly, if anyone is interested. There’s so much out there that’s it’s sometimes difficult to know what to buy, so let me do a little filtering for you first.

My favourite guide to what I see in the garden is Richard Lewington’s Guide to Garden Wildlife. This is the second edition, and I am still holding onto the first one. Many fieldguides are just too overwhelming, but I think this is a great book both for those who already know a lot of the creatures that they see, and for complete beginners. The illustrations are utterly beguiling. Richard Lewington, who also wrote the text, has done the paintings for most of the book, but his brother Ian Lewington does the birds. This is a real labour of love, and I especially like the detail and care that has been brought to the illustrations of insects, who are often not depicted in all their beauty.

It’s not just about the illustrations though – I often turn to this book when I’m writing the blog, because each entry has at least one fact that I didn’t know. Plus, the illustrations show male and female of a species alongside examples of typical behaviour.

If I knew someone who was just getting interested in their garden wildlife, this is the book that I would buy them as a present.

Now, a more London-centric book, but one that I think has something of interest for all you dendrophiles out there. Paul Wood’s ‘London’s Street Trees – A Field Guide to the Urban Forest’ is packed full of stories about urban trees, different species, and features such as ‘what does a London Tree Officer do all day’ and ‘what does the future hold for London’s planes (as in tree rather than airplane). Furthermore, it contains four guided walks, one of which kept this blog occupied for a whole two weeks The Street Trees of Archway Part One and The Street Trees of Archway Part Two. The first thing I shall do when this lockdown finally ends and I can loiter without attracting opprobrium is go on another tree walk, and I am in luck, because the book is being reprinted with more trees and additional walks in May.

I remember that when I was visiting my Mum in Whittington Hospital in 2016, I was often intrigued by some huge trees planted on the other side of the road. They looked familiar, but strange at the same time. On my street tree walk I revisited the site and discovered that one of them was the tallest lacebark elm in the UK. So many street trees go unremarked, and Paul Wood is here to bring them back to our attention. I know that during the lockdown many people have been paying attention to their immediate surroundings in a way that they never have before, and I know that trees can bring so much pleasure at any time of year. This is a great book for getting to know your local planting. There is something about being able to put a name to a tree that is very satisfying, and shows a kind of respect. Not all trees are the same, just as not all people are the same, and it’s good to recognise the fact.

And finally, this one.

In some ways this is a very strange book indeed. Each page shows a gathering of a particular species, in all its variations: adult, juvenile, male, female, flying, perching. The illustrations are a kind of collage of photos of the species, making it look as if Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’ was happening with every kind of flying animal. And yet, I love it! Have a look at the pages on pigeons, for example.

Having seen this, could you ever get a stock dove and a woodpigeon muddled up again? Richard Crossley even has a woodpigeon in the picture of the stock doves so you can tell the difference. Both species are flying about so you can tell the difference when they’re on the wing, and the woodpigeon has a handy juvenile just in case you’ve not come across one before. The whole thing is a bit mad, but it works for me. It’s not a straightforward field guide (and I’d love to know what you birders out there think of it), and it’s certainly not for purists, but it has that ineffable spirit of fun and a sense of abundance that I find very appealing.

I like the rather disgruntled- looking juvenile heron, and that the cattle egrets are pecking around behind a herd of what look like Guernsey cows to me. There is even a purple heron at the top of the left hand page, just in case you get really lucky. I think that having photos of the birds in the landscape adds something too – having lots of pictures gives a sense of the ‘jizz’ of the bird in a way that just a single, beautifully executed portrait doesn’t. The only problem is that it makes me yearn to go out to the RSPB reserve at Rainham, or Woodberry Wetlands with my binoculars. Never mind. Like everyone else, I’ll have to pay extra special attention to my poor neglected local birds. Who knows what we might turn up?