Dear Readers, it’s been really cold this week so the frogs  stopped their libidinous activities and spent most of their time torpid on the bottom of the pond. But today has dawned sunny and fairly mild, and the frogs have responded by coming to the surface and singing (you can just see this one’s white throat, which inflates when he sings and is a clear visual signal that he’s an available male).

The males are everywhere, but there’s no frogspawn yet – I’m guessing the water has to reach an optimum temperature before the females will release their eggs. There’s lots of time yet!

And in other news, the pond skaters are back too. No doubt they’ll be waiting for some frogspawn or tiny tadpoles for their lunch, but they’ll have to be patient.

 

And in other news, the garden is absolutely full of small birds – chaffinches, goldfinches, blue tits, starlings, and four blackbirds who seem to have made an uneasy truce by dividing the garden down the middle.

I was going to record the song of the starling for you all, but every time I started a blooming plane went over. Who remembers those days at the start of the first lockdown when there was barely a contrail in the sky? In the time that I was trying to capture this bird ticking and whistling away, four planes went over my house with barely twenty seconds between. Meantime, my poor husband who has been so careful about getting Covid went to the pub for a leaving event last week, and has now tested positive for Covid. He’s ok – it seems to manifest as a bad cold and cough, and he’s triple vaccinated – but according to our rules in the UK it would be quite legal for him to go into work and give Covid to everybody else. Of course he won’t, because he has the option not to, but there’s now no legal protection for someone who works in a shop or as a cab driver or in any of the service industries to say that they aren’t working because they have Covid – their employer can simply order them into work regardless. Meantime, the cases for the over 55s are rocketing. Don’t let anyone tell you that it’s over and that we can all just get back to ‘normal’, because it’s clear that we can’t, and what is a minor inconvenience for my husband (and probably me when I get it, though I’m clear so far) can mean hospitalisation or worse for someone with a compromised immune system, or simply someone who is elderly or unwell.

Harrumph! Forgive the rant, please. I don’t know about anyone else, but the terrible things that are going on in Ukraine, climate change and the pandemic are enough to raise anyone’s anxiety levels through the roof. I donate to Ukraine charities, I work for a climate change organisation and yet it never feels like enough. But today I made myself sit in the garden and watch the birds and the frogs for half an hour, because I don’t think it serves anyone if I become mired in despair. Look after yourselves, readers. That hoary old cliche about putting your oxygen mask on first applies as much as it ever did.

 

Dear Readers, I was  crunching my way through the first volume of William Feaver’s biography of Lucian Freud (all 600-odd pages of it), when I read this quote by Cedric Morris, founder of an art school that Freud went to as a young man. Mainly a painter of flowers and landscapes, Morris had what Feaver describes as a ‘waspish glee’ in crushing any idea that he liked painting plants because they were ‘pretty’:

“The aspect of belles et jolie fleures, or charming, gay, lovely, etc., mean no more to me than such  qualities do in natural reaction to life in general: it is the attributes of grimness, ruthlessness, lust and arrogance that I find and, above all, the absence of fear in their kingdom”. 

He goes on to describe some what is involved in producing a floral portrait:

“Be he able to express the blowzey (sic) fugitiveness of the poppy as could Jan van Huysum, the slightly sinister quality of fritillarias as Breughel the Elder, or the downright evil of some arums, the elegance, pride and delicacy of irises, the strident quality of delphiniums, the vulgarity of some double peonies, chrysanthemums, roses and most dahlias…..all this and much more the flower painter has to do”.

Well, Readers, I found this all very interesting. Whenever we look at a plant we clearly see it through the filter of our times and experiences, and it takes a tremendous strength of will to just see a flower as it is. Everything in the natural world labours under the weight of our expectations and projections, from the sly fox to the innocent lamb, the peaceful dove to the noble lion. It takes a special kind of worldview to see a rose as ‘vulgar’, or a delphinium as ‘strident’.

And, with our stop-motion cameras we can now observe the way that plants do battle in order to beat their competitors and access scarce resources such as light or nutrients, and also how they cooperate with one another – if you are able to access David Attenborough’s series ‘Green Planet’ I heartily recommend it. The denizens of the plant kingdom clearly have a much broader range of behaviours than we ever knew. However, to describe a plant as perfectly adapted to its environment as an arum as ‘evil’ seems to be taking anthropomorphism rather too far, even when it’s as midnight black as the one below.

And yet. There is clearly a relationship between human beings and plants that it’s difficult to deny, at least from the human side. I was deeply sad when this lime tree fell in the recent storms – it had been a source of solace to me during Mum and Dad’s last years, and it always cheered me up. When I stood under its branches and listened to the drowsy humming of the bees feeding on its flowers, I felt cocooned and protected. I strongly suspect that the fondness was all in one direction, but there was no doubting that this tree was an individual. There are increasing calls for animals such as dolphins and apes to be granted ‘personhood’. I wonder if there will ever be an equivalent ‘personhood’ for plants, especially trees? It would be one way to protect them as every council in the country seems hell bent on cutting them down.

And is it impossible that plants have a relationship with us? On one level the answer is clearly yes, it’s impossible – plants don’t have brains, or nerves, or any of the other prerequisites for emotions. But as we learn more and more about the ‘wood-wide web’ (the way that trees can communicate with one another via the complex network of fungi that link them underground), I do wonder if plants have a much wider range of ‘feelings’ than we give them credit for. I also have friends who spend enough time with individual plants to start to ‘know’ them in a way that most of us don’t.

And in a way, whether a two-way relationship between us and plants exists is not really the question here. I believe that spending time with a particular landscape, or with particular plants, deepens our relationship with them. Drawing or painting a plant is another way to get to  know them. We start to notice, and to care, and it starts to feel personal. What we’re looking at is no longer ‘just’ a patch of brambles or a hornbeam tree, but something much more individual, with its own quirks and ways of growing and reacting to its environment. This noticing is the beginning of a deepening love and care for what’s right outside our door. And in spite of what Morris says at the beginning about how a plant painter needs to look at his or her subject, I can’t help thinking that what shines through in his iris paintings is nothing short of pure affection for his favourite plants.

There is an interesting article about Cedric Morris as a plantsman and painter here.

Photo Credits

Photo One by Opioła Jerzy, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons

Photo Two by By [https://www.flickr.com/people/15845498@N00 Se�n A. O’Hara] from Berkeley, CA, USA  Arum palaestinum Uploaded by berichard, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10628149

Photo Three from https://gardenmuseum.org.uk/exhibitions/coming-soon-cedric-morris-artist-plantsman/

Dear Readers, in the spring time it’s so easy to get carried away by the bulbs and the blossom that I fail to notice the new growth on some of the shrubs and trees around me. And so, on a bright but cold day, I was suddenly brought up short by the shiny, perfect crimson growth on this Photinia. The ‘Red Robin’ variant is the one most often seen, but my RHS magazine this week points out a couple of other varieties too.

This one is known as ‘Pink Marble’ or ‘Cassini’ – the bright red leaves are streaked with vivid pink, turning to white as the leaves mature.

And this one is known as ‘Crunchy’ – the leaves are serrated and emerge copper-brown, turning to chestnut and then green. This is derived from a different Photinia species from the usual Photinia x fraseri cross – Photinia serratifolia is otherwise known as the Chinese or Taiwanese Hawthorn, and has those very spiky, rather striking leaves.

Photinias are members of the rose family, and their name derives from the Greek for ‘shiny’. The wild plant comes from the warm, temperate parts of Asia, from the Himalayas east to Japan, and south to India and Thailand. There are about 60 species of Photinias, all of them shrubs or small trees. In addition to their very attractive spring foliage, a happy Photinia will reward the gardener with a mass of white flowers in the summer, followed by berries which are very popular with thrushes, starlings and waxwings, and which may stay on the plant right through the winter (hence the alternative name ‘Christmas Berry’).

The leaves of some species contain cyanide, but this doesn’t stop them being munched upon by the caterpillars of the Common Emerald, Feathered Thorn and Setaceous Hebrew Character moths. This last moth is so named because it was thought that it had the Hebrew Character ‘Nun’ on its wings( נ). I note that some species of Photinia are mentioned as herbal remedies, for everything from worms to piles, but I must confess that I find the cyanide thing a bit disconcerting. I note that at least one website also mentions that the plant is considered to be ‘excessively aphrodisiac’, so don’t say I didn’t warn you.

In his book ‘London’s Street Trees’, Paul Wood mentions that Photinia, though normally seen as shrubs, are becoming more popular as small street trees, and indeed I found some when I was doing my Archway Street Tree Walk back in 2017. I think they make rather pleasant additions to the landscape, and no doubt the birds will be delighted.

I imagine the autumn colour will be quite something as well.

And now readers, a poem. I thought that finding a poem that specifically mentioned Photinia would be something of a struggle, but I had reckoned without the Society of Classical Poets. They are on a mission to preserve the attributes of metre and rhyme in poetry and while I recognise that poets are a varied lot, and that finding a definition of poetry that works for everyone is almost impossible, I applaud their zest and enthusiasm. I rather like a poem that rhymes and has that satisfying sense of rhythm – such poems seem to stay in the head for longer, and are certainly easier to learn. And so here is my Photinia-related poem by David Watt, a poet from Canberra, Australia. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Hedge Theory by David Watt

The hedge plants are trimmed by a gardener with shears
As they have been, like clockwork, for twenty-five years.
Yet they push out new shoots in continuing hope
Of extending their reach through the fence on the slope;

Protruding through uprights, with glossy new tips,
Their ruby leaves follow, like sensuous lips;
Curved in the middle and quivering so
From the gentlest of breeze, as it moves down the row.

When the gardener arrives, I expect the hedge moans:
“Can’t you see that we’re covering ironwork bones?
Softening edges gives purpose for hedges,
And Nature gives pleasure wherever her edge is.

“Borders are fitting for nations and states,
The banks of a river, or dinnerware plates;
But not for Photinia branches and stems,
Or sweet-smelling flowers in white diadems.

“The feature we share, let us not be mistaken,
Is to never give up though our dreams are forsaken—
When time and again every effort is met
By failure to further our reach past regret.
In fact, we have assets that few would suspect:
An underground network, and time to reflect

“On theory developed from close observation,
A lifetime of fieldwork, and growing frustration;
Which holds that our gardener grows brittle with age,
And little by little, he’s reaching the stage
Where lifting a cutter may shatter a limb—
Soon he will discover the joke is on him!”

Photo Credits

Photo One by By Lamiot – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4352407

Photo Two by By Hectonichus – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17370251

Photo Three By Please report references to olei@despammed.com. – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1186278

Dear Readers, it’s been a while since I wrote about slugs, our slimy molluscan ‘friends’, and so with perfect synchronicity I came across two articles with differing points of view this week. The first was in my New Scientist, where American slug expert Rory McDonnell was revealing some very interesting research on how to deter slugs in vegetable gardens and farms. While slugs that are native to a country have largely evolved to become part of the ecosystem and play an important role in breaking down decaying and dead vegetation, other species can become invasive and damaging, and climate change is also affecting the balance of invertebrates worldwide.

McDonnell points out that the number one go-to solution for slug and snail damage across the world is the use of slug pellets, which usually contain metaldehyde. This is poisonous to pets, but also to hedgehogs, song thrushes, frogs and the many other creatures that eat slugs, including some insect predators such as ground beetles. Metaldehyde pellets will be banned in the UK from early this year, though they are still legal in the US. Iron phosphate is approved as an organic solution, but there’s evidence that it could be toxic to earthworms.

Nematodes seem to be a better solution – the  species used are native to Europe and seem to target slugs and snails very specifically. McDonnell has found the same nematode species in California and Oregon,  but wants to be very sure that the nematodes only kill the pest species of slugs and snails, which has always been my worry about using them here in the UK – only 9 out of the 44 species of slug eat garden plants and some of them, such as the elegant leopard slug, actually eat other slugs. It would be a shame to blast all the molluscs in the garden when only a few are actually eating the lettuces.

However, McDonnell does have a home-grown solution for attracting slugs and snails that he thinks will work world-wide – bread dough. McDonnell found that a mixture of yeast and flour, mixed with water and turned into dough balls, attracts more slugs and snails than anything else that they’ve tried, including slug pellets, beer, decomposing fruit and cat food. Once the hungry molluscs are gathered together, it’s relatively easy to dispose of them, if you are so inclined, or to re-home them if you have a handy bit of wasteland a good way away. Bear in mind that snails, in particular, can find their way home from up to half a mile away, so you might want to pop your molluscan migrants onto the panier of your bicycle and head off into the wilds. Also, as McDonnell notes that they collected 18,000 molluscs over 2 nights, you might need a big panier.

In other news, I note that the Royal Horticultural Society has decided to no longer designate any garden inhabitant as a ‘pest’. Hooray! Although more people complain about slugs and snails than any other animal, the RHS has (belatedly in my view) come to the conclusion that molluscs are an important part of the healthy garden ecosystem, and that, as with aphids and caterpillars, not only are they impossible to eliminate altogether but they attract lots of beneficial visitors such as ladybirds, birds and hedgehogs. The RHS’s advice to those who have slug and snail damage is:

• Grow plants on so that they are older and less tender – slugs do love a delicate seedling. Cloches are also seen as a useful deterrent.
• Slugs are excellent for compost heaps, so they could be collected at night and thrown into the compost. Whether they stay there is anybody’s guess. I suspect this could be combined very well with the bread dough technique.
• ‘Strategic planting’ – put the plants that the slugs love best close to the plants that you’re trying to preserve, in the hope that the slugs will be distracted by their favourite food.
• Dig a pond to encourage the frogs! I have never in my life actually seen one of my many, many frogs eat a slug but they are much more active at night, so maybe they mop them up when I’m in bed. Dig a pond anyway, they are such a source of delight.
• Encourage the birds! Song thrushes do love a snail, but I’m not sure what other snail specialists there are out there. Let me know if any of your garden birds have been spotted with a slug.
• And here’s one I hadn’t thought of – rake over the leaves in the autumn to expose any slug or snail eggs, so that the birds will eat them. In my experience most of the slug and snail eggs are laid on any open or torn bags of compost that I have, so it’s always worth looking at them too.

I know that for many of us trying to keep some kind of balance in the garden, so that it’s welcoming to all kinds of wild creatures without it being overwhelmed by any one kind, is a constant task. Any ecosystem is so finely tuned, and so susceptible to the vagaries of climate and the arrival of new species that it’s easy to just throw up our hands in despair. I do think, though, that given time things rebalance. I am reminded that two years ago my buddleia were so inundated with aphids that the honeydew rained down on the wheelies bins like glue. Last year, there were hundreds of ladybirds and hoverfly larvae – there were still too many aphids but there were less, and they lived for a shorter period of time before being eaten. Who knows what will happen this year? I have avoided the ‘scorched earth’ tactic of blasting everything with chemical sprays because I want that build-up of predators and that rebalancing, but I know that it comes at the expense of things looking as good as they should. But for me, the garden is home to a whole variety of animals, plants and fungi, and I want it to be a welcoming one. As spring gets going, let’s see what happens this year.

You can read the whole Rory McDonnell interview in New Scientist here – you might have to register, but it’s free.

The RHS article is here.

Photo Credits

Photo One By Michal Maňas – Own work, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7984616

Dear Readers, I often find feathers in the cemetery or in the woods, and wonder what bird they came from. It can be very difficult to identify them, but some are easier than others (including, hopefully, the little selection below). So, can you simply match the feathers to the species of bird? All the feathers in the photos come from birds that have been found dead from natural causes, and when I publish the answers I will also publish a very useful link to the website that they came from (but not before because that would be too easy :-))

You have until 5 p.m. on Friday 11th March to submit your answers in the comments (I’ll ‘disappear’ them as soon as I see them), and the answers will be published on Saturday 12th March.

So, if you think that the feathers in Photo A belong to a ring-necked parakeet, your answer is 1) A)

Species

1. Ring-necked parakeet (Psittacula kramerii)
2. Magpie (Pica pica)
3. Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos)
4. Northern lapwing (Vanellus vanellus)
5. Woodcock (Scolopax rusticola)
6. Little egret (Egreta garzetta)
7. Barn owl (Tyto alba)
8. Sparrowhawk (Accipiter nisus)
9. Eurasian jay (Garrulus glandiarus)
10. Blue tit (Cyanistes caeruleus)
11. Robin (Erithacus rubecula)
12. Goldfinch (Carduelis carduelis)

 

Dear Readers, I was reading a very interesting article in my Royal Horticultural Society magazine this week, about the different amounts of nectar sugar that gardens produce. In a study of 59 urban gardens in Bristol, PhD student and research assistant Nick Tew found that there was a massive difference between the amounts of nectar sugar produced by the different plots, varying from a measly 2 grams in the least productive garden to a whopping 1.7 kg in the most productive. What interests me, though, is that there wasn’t a correlation between the size of the garden and the amount of nectar produced – many of the bigger gardens had large amounts of lawn, which isn’t useful as a nectar source (though longer, more diverse patches of grasses do have other uses).

Stephanie Bird, the RHS Plant Health Scientist, points out that, in comparison with gardens with a large proportion of lawn

“Smaller gardens packed with plants are more beneficial, and if you don’t have a garden, then containers and windowboxes will still make a difference”.Gardens in affluent areas did tend to produce more nectar sugar, and I wondered if this was because people had more money available for plants, and maybe more time to tend them, or to pay other people to look after them. Interestingly, trees, shrubs and climbers provided two-thirds of the nectar sugar, because they tend to pack more flowers into a small patch of ground.

Another thing to consider is the shape of the flowers in the garden. From July to October, apparently 80% of the flower nectar came from plants such as fuchsias and salvias, which are lovely for long-tongued pollinators, but which render the food unavailable to many other insects. The suggestion is to grow lots of single blooms or open flowers at this time of year – I’ve noticed how popular my asters and sedum are with a whole range of pollinators as we head into autumn, so this sounds sensible to me. Incidentally, sedum is no longer sedum, but is now hylotelephium. The new name apparently means ‘woodland distant lover’ – the plant was thought to be able to indicate when one’s affections were returned, though irritatingly I’m not sure how. On the other hand, I also read that ‘telephium’ referred to King Telephus, who suffered a spear wound that wouldn’t heal, and that was treated with this plant.

So, in a way this report is nothing new – I think we’ve been aware for while that the more plants we had in our gardens/containers/ windowboxes the better, especially if coupled with a longer flowering period and a good array of flower types (not including double flowers which are too complicated for the pollinators to access, and which often don’t provide any food value). But what gives me a spur to action is the headline that you don’t need to have a massive garden to make a difference. It’s also a good illustration of the way that having lots of gardens all providing slightly different things at different times is ideal for flying insects, because it means that there’s always something to eat. Urban gardens in particular provide a patchwork of habitats, plants and flowering times in a very small space. This is all very encouraging, and inspires me to up my flowering game even more this year. Let’s see how we get on!

You can read about Nick Tew’s research here.

 

 

Dear Readers, I’m not quite sure why I love frogs so much, but there’s something about those little faces peering up from the water weed that always cheers me up, especially on a rainy day. Look at this one, as happy as a frog could possibly be in his personal water garden! And if you listen carefully, you can hear them singing – the male frogs have snow-white throats, as if to emphasise their vocal power.

They seem to be mostly males at the moment – there are a few smug couples who have already paired up, and there was a bit of a mating tussle going on yesterday with about five frogs all tangling with one another. I always feel a bit sorry for the first females who appear, as they are rather too popular for their own good. There is still not a jot of frogspawn, but I’m ever hopeful.

I love the way that sometimes the frogs just hang in the water like little astronauts. And look at those beautiful eyes! Could they be any more splendid?

And in other news, I saw a Great Tit emerging from the nest box that we put up at the end of last year. Fingers crossed for some babies! The pair of them have been hanging around in the garden a lot over the past few weeks. I think the site is pretty safe from cats, but not, sadly, from magpies or woodpeckers. I hope that nobody predatory notices what’s going on.

And finally, the blackbird wars in the garden seem to have eased, and one pair seems to have claimed the whole place as their territory. It’s so wonderful to hear the male singing in the morning.