Common Lime (Tilia x europaea)

Dear Readers, I was dashing down to an appointment this morning when I realised that I was a few minutes early. So, I took a detour down Lincoln Road, one of the ‘County Roads’ of East Finchley just to waste a bit of time. And then suddenly, I looked at the tree next to me, with its heart-shaped leaves, and realised that, unlike the varied planting on my road, this is basically an avenue of limes.

All the other roads around here are awash with cherries and pears and maples, but not Lincoln, which is limes more or less from end to end, with a few smaller trees of different species which must have been brought in to replace the original planting.

To be honest, many of them are looking a little unkempt – they were very popular in Victorian times because they are easy to reproduce from suckers, and most of these trees were positively shaggy. Later they became unpopular because aphids love them, and rain down their honeydew onto any vehicles parked underneath (this was the point at which London Planes started to be planted instead). But I love the sweet, floral scent of the flowers, as you may remember.

Although most of the much bigger trees on the High Road are London Planes, there is one remaining lime tree at the bottom of Lincoln Road, maybe planted at the same time as the ones that are actually on the street. This one, though, has been allowed to grow much bigger. I will get a photo next time I’m not in so much of a rush.

You can have a look for your local street trees if you live in London here, and here’s a screenshot of Lincoln Road. All the green blobs are limes, except for two hornbeams, but as they’re all the same shade of green you’ll have to trust me.

So, I have walked down Lincoln Road many a time, and this is the first time that I’ve ever noticed that its trees are very different from the other roads. It just makes me wonder what else I’ve missed.

Giant Echium (Echium pininana) (Photo by Ann Bronkhorst)

Dear Readers, I have seldom been so excited upon receiving a photo from a friend. This plant is growing out of a gap in the paving next to my friend’s garage, but it  will hopefully grow into one of the most spectacular members of the Borage family.

Giant Echium in flower (Photo One)

What an astonishing plant it is! I have spotted it before, at Inner Temple Gardens and at Kew Gardens, and the flowers are always absolutely abuzz with bees. The flower spike can grow up to 13 feet tall, but if you look at it closely you’ll see the close resemblance to our native Viper’s Bugloss.

In the first year, the plant grows a rosette of leaves (as seen in my friend’s photograph), followed by a trunk up to 8 feet tall. In its second or third year, the plant grows that flower spike, which can extend by up to 2 cms a day. After this, the plant is likely to die, but not after producing more than 20,000 seeds. My friend tells me that someone had an Echium in their front garden just down the road, so her plant is probably one of its ‘children’.

Echium flowers (Photo Two)

No wonder the bees like it so much – the nectar is over 26% sugar. Butterflies and moths are also attracted to the flowers. In the wild, Giant Echium is endemic to the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands, where it forms part of the laurel forest habitat – this is critically endangered as agriculture takes over. However, there are more examples of the plant outside its native range than in it – it is clearly now growing in the wild here in East Finchley, and it is such a striking plant that I’m sure it will be carried into gardens all over the world. In their book Alien Plants, Clive Stace and Michael Crawley speculated that the plant would probably only become naturalised in the warmer parts of the country, but I wonder – the RHS recommend protecting it from frost, but it can get pretty chilly in the Canaries so I wonder if it is hardier than we give it credit for. There are certainly reports of the plant growing in sheltered spots in North Wales, Yorkshire and the Midlands, and the seedlings seem to be able to overwinter, so quite possibly evolution and climate change will combine to produce a plant that can survive in many parts of the UK. I suspect that it will need protection from the wind though, I could well see such a stately plant coming a cropper in my front garden. Let me know if you’ve seen any examples of the plant, and how they seem to be doing? I am most intrigued.

A Giant Echium in what looks like a London front garden (Photo Three)

The species name ‘pinanana’ means ‘pine-like’, and I can kind of see a resemblance. In the plant above, the flowers are opening from the bottom of the inflorescence and working their way upwards, rather like a sparkler.

I liked this article, which describes some of the other Echiums that are available. All of them like free-draining soil, and it seems as if it’s the damp that’s the real problem rather than the cold.

Goodness, I am very inclined to give them a bash, even if it’s only in a pot. However, all Echiums have to be handled carefully, because their coarse hairs can cause skin irritation, and should you be tempted to have an Echium sandwich I would resist, as they are toxic and cause liver damage. Also don’t let your thoroughbred have a nibble, as they are particularly poisonous for horses.

And here, to my astonishment, is a poem (I didn’t expect to find one actually called ‘Echium pinanana’, but here it is!) This is by Julian Bishop, and you can find more poems by him, and by some other splendid poets, on the Wildfire Words website here. Have a look at the poem ‘Better Things’ by Elizabeth Woodgate too, as a marmalade maker myself I enjoyed it very much.

Echium Pininana by Julian Bishop

Imagine a plant structurally aligned to the Eiffel Tower
scaled down to the proportions of herbaceous border
thrusting its way heavenwards with unstoppable desire
in spring. Each whorl of leaves, arranged like a propellor
circling the hirsute stem, bristles with stubble-like fur
nettling the unguarded finger with stings. Afterwards
you spend hours extracting each one with tweezers.

The highest highlight of this monster Viper’s Bugloss:
its pinky-cum-blue funnelled blooms: catnip for bees
assuming its fleshy rosettes pull through a late frost.
In Cornwall and the Scillies they grow like chickweeds,
but rarer than hen’s teeth in Tenerife due to habitat loss.
Last year in London I grew a crop from some eBay seeds
and every garden visitor was convinced they were trees.

Photo Credits

Photo One by By Derek Harper, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13490883

Photo Two frank wouters, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Photo Three by Tim Waters at https://www.flickr.com/photos/tim-waters/4983356877/

Ruby-crowned Kinglet (Carthylia calendula)(Photo One)

Dear Readers, the first British record of any new bird species is always a cause for much excitement, but the tale of Britain’s first Ruby-crowned Kinglet has the added frisson of a moral dilemma, taking place as it does in November 2020,during the Covid-19 pandemic. The account below is taken from the ever-excellent British Birds magazine, which I highly recommend.

Firstly though, what on earth is a Ruby-crowned Kinglet? As you might be able to tell from the photo, a kinglet is very closely related to the goldcrests that we see in the UK, and is also a tiny bird. However, the Ruby-crowned Kinglet lives in North America, spending the summers as far north as Canada, and the winters as far south as Mexico. The males have the rather fetching red crest that you can see in the photo above, but females and juveniles do not, and the crest is often hidden in the surrounding feathers.

Ruby-crowned Kinglet flashing his crest (Photo Two)

So, the first British Ruby-crowned Kinglet turned up  on Barra in the Outer Hebrides during near-gale force winds. Barra is, to put it mildly, a wind-swept island, and, as Bruce Taylor, who discovered the bird, describes a small area of alder and willow woodland near the Old Manse which serves as a haven for migrants. Taylor and his wife Kathy are keen birdwatchers, and get out at first light nearly every day to see what might have appeared. On this occasion, Taylor spotted what he thought was a goldcrest, except that it seemed ‘wrong’ – people who watch any animals regularly get a sense for how they behave, and seem to develop a sixth sense for something that isn’t quite right. Fortunately, the bird came close enough for Taylor to realise what he was seeing, and to get not only some photographs (essential for proving the species) but even some video. Taylor was so overwhelmed by his discovery that he had to sit down on the grass for a few minutes, and I can empathise – I get excited enough with the sight of a new-to-me species in the garden, let alone seeing a new-to-Britain species.

But now there was a dilemma for Taylor. Normally, news like this would be broadcast far and wide, and the site would be inundated with eager birders from all over Britain and beyond. But, as Taylor puts it,

“The Covid pandemic was getting worse and Barra’s residents, with our limited medical facilities, were particularly vulnerable. The last thing we needed was a large influx of visitors from around Britain potentially spreading the virus to what was a relatively isolated community. While we’d always released rare bird news as soon as possible in the past, this time we followed the only responsible course of action and withheld the news for the welfare of our community”.

And so poor Taylor, with the find of a lifetime under his belt, had to wait until he was sure that the bird had gone to release the news. When he did so, with some trepidation, everyone supported his very sensible decision. Then it turned out that the bird hadn’t gone at all, but was hiding in the undergrowth! Taylor had another few anxious days, and he describes how he had to remember to refer to the bird in the past tense in case anyone ‘clocked’ that it was still around and jumped on a ferry to see it. Finally, the poor bird seems to have finally ‘left’.

As with many of these stories, the kinglet was probably blown off course during its migration in North America – birds are often picked up during storms and deposited hundreds, even thousands of miles away from their destinations. The chance of them getting ‘home’ is practically non-existent, unless some helpful human pops them onto a plane. Who knows whether it succumbed to the Hebridean weather or moved on to somewhere where it wasn’t recognised as a rare species? Whatever the end of this particular bird, climate change with its more extreme weather events is likely to provide the UK with more unusual visitors.

The tale of Bruce Taylor and the Ruby-crowned Kinglet illustrates that, as British Birds magazine says, ‘some things are bigger than birding’. Taylor’s decision to protect his community from Covid, rather than enjoying the kudos of sharing the bird as he would have done in happier times, shows how important it is to be able to see the bigger picture, something which some people forget when they have a life-long passion. It also shows the value of paying attention regularly to a ‘patch’, whether it be the blustery western coast of Barra or a small suburban back garden. You never know what you might find!

King Penguin

Dear Readers, the Platinum Jubilee celebrations have been going on all over this weekend, so I thought  that for our quiz this week we could look at some animals that have royal or aristocratic connotations in their names, like the King Penguin above.  Just to make it a little bit easier I’ve put the initials under each photo.

All answers in the comments by 5 p.m. UK time on Saturday 11th June please, and the answers will be published on Sunday 12th June. I will disappear your answers as soon as I see them and yes, I will be checking my spam folder as well this time, as several of your responses ended up in there last week.

Onwards!

1) K

2) PE

3) M

4) KV

5) DOB

6) QOS

7) EM

8) K BOP

9) PP

10) R-C K

Silver Wattle/Mimosa (Acacia dealbata)

Dear Readers, this week only Fran and Bobby Freelove had a bash at the quiz, but they did get 6 out of 6, so well done Fran and Bobby! I am not surprised that no one else had a go following the fiasco with the spam folder that I only discovered yesterday, but let’s start all over again tomorrow, when the quiz might have a little bit (but only a little bit) of a royal theme….

A) 5) Halesia carolina (Carolina Silverbell)

B) 2) Prunus fruticosa var Globosa (European Dwarf Cherry – Globe form)

C) 4) Ligustrum japonicum (Japanese Privet)

D) 6) Lagestromia indica (Red) (Crepe Myrtle)

E) 1) Amelanchior arborea var Robin Hill (Serviceberry/Shadbush)

F) 3) Cercis siliquastrum (Judas Tree)

Photo Credits

Photo A by Paul Cooper at https://www.flickr.com/photos/29261037@N02/8857566599

Photo B from https://www.hillier.co.uk/trees/our-trees/prunus-fruticosa-globosum/

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

Photo D by By Antony-22 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59514549

Photo E from https://majestictrees.co.uk/tree-shrub/234-amelanchier-arborea-robin-hill

Photo F by By Bouba at French Wikipedia – photo by Bouba, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1658073

Dear Readers, for some reason known entirely to itself, for the past few weeks WordPress has been putting the majority of comments on the blog directly into Spam, including answers to the Rocks quiz (sorry Rosalind and Mike), and some lovely thoughts on many of the blogs. I have now approved them all, and many thanks to Bonnie who alerted me that there was a problem. I was beginning to think nobody liked the blog anymore, so it’s a great relief! And I promise to check my Spam folder in future. Usually it’s just full of adverts for Viagra :-). 

Dear Readers, the cemetery was very, very quiet today, and all the lovelier for it. I love the way that the sun filters through the leaves, and the wren’s song explodes from the undergrowth. We had not walked along this particular path before, and I was very moved by this statue of a child in his dungarees, holding a little ball. This is John Derek Herd, who died aged 25 months in 1932. The heartache reaches out from all those decades ago. My grandmother lost two little boys, one after the other, during the 1930s, one from diptheria, the other from scarlet fever, and she mourned them for the rest of her life. I imagine that the parents of John Derek did the same.

At some point the statue was broken, but someone has put him back together again with a great deal of love and care.

Now, he stands like a little wood spirit, waiting to throw his ball for the foxes or to feed the robins who are singing in the trees. Because in spite of the death here, it is also a place that’s full of life.

I have been admiring the hogweed again, and testing my husband’s patience to the limit, because every flowerhead seems to have a new species of pollinator. There are some handsome bumblebees….

But how about this splendid great pied hoverfly (Volucella pellucens)? There were lots of them about today. These magnificent hoverflies live for a whole 35 days, and the males are very territorial – the one in the photo was very cross when another hoverfly of the same species landed on ‘his’ flower.

This is a well-studied species, with a most interesting life cycle. The females lay their eggs in the nests of wasps – the wasps seem to ignore them, so maybe that black and white colouration does the trick. The larvae largely eat detritus, gobbling up dead workers and larvae, but also eating the larvae of other species that inhabit the nest, so maybe the grubs are overall beneficial to the wasps. My hoverfly book suggests that hogweed is not the hoverfly lure that it used to be, possibly because the drier conditions in the south of England mean that the plant doesn’t produce as much nectar as it used to. Nonetheless there was a good selection of insects of all kinds on the hogweed in the cemetery today.

Two great pied hoverflies….

A variety of little beetles and flies…

Out in the sun again, someone had planted up a lovely mixture of Californian poppies and Phacelia which was proving very popular with the bees, and which looked lovely against the black headstone. Proof, if any was needed, that a couple of packets of seeds thrown down in a sunny spot can bring plentiful rewards.

And just in case we thought there was still plenty of summer to go, I noticed the first signs of the leaf miners on the horse chestnut leaves. These, plus a variety of fungi, bring the leafy season to an abrupt end for many of these trees. I predict that they will be falling before July is out. Blue tits are starting to peck at the brown bits, in the hope of getting a tasty bug, so fingers crossed that more of the birds will get this very helpful habit. And in the meantime, the conkers are already developing, like small green medieval maces. So far the horse chestnuts haven’t succumbed to their new parasites. Let’s hope that the trend continues.

Tulip Tree (Liriodendron tulipifera)

Dear Readers, having noticed that there was a tulip tree in the cemetery at the weekend, it seems only fair to give them some attention. These really are stunning trees, and not at all suitable as a street tree, as they grow to a massive size. There are two species of tulip tree, one (Liriodendron tulipifera) from North America and the other, Liriodendron chinense, originating in Vietnam and China as the name suggests. The petals on the flowers of the Asian tree do not have the orange tinge that you can see in the tree above.

I have encountered tulip trees during my perambulations before. You might remember the one below, found in Inner Temple Gardens last year (a lovely spot that is well worth a visit if you’re in London).

Tulip Tree

And then there was this one in St Paul’s Churchyard which had variegated leaves.

St Paul’s tulip tree

Tulip trees are extremely ancient – they are in the Magnolia family (these trees originated before social bees did, and so were originally largely pollinated by beetles). Fossil tulip trees have been found in Europe, but the species was probably wiped out here during the glacial phases, leaving them only in North America and Asia. In the Appalachians there are a number of enormous tulip trees, including one in the Smoky Mountains National Reserve which, at over 190 feet tall, is the largest non-coniferous tree in North America. It must be quite something to see this tree growing wild – as with many of the specimen trees that are grown in UK I find it hard to visualise a whole forest of them.

Flowers of the Chinese Tulip Tree (Liriodendron chinense) – note the green flowers (Photo One)

The tulip tree has also been known as yellow poplar, tulip poplar (in spite of it being no relation to the poplars) and canoe wood – as the name suggests, Native Americans and early settlers built canoes from the tree. Although not being the hardest of the hardwoods, it has been used for flooring and for building houses and barns, its resistance to termites making it particularly popular where these critters wreak havoc.

Tulip Tree Timber (Photo Two)

Medicinally, the bark of the tulip tree was boiled up to make a treatment for malaria and typhoid, which was very prevalent then in the areas where the tree grows.  There was a belief that if you dreamed you were bitten by a snake, you needed to apply tulip tree to the ‘wound site’, otherwise it could turn into arthritis, and a decoction of the bark was indeed used to treat ‘real’ joint complaints. The flowers were turned into an ointment to soothe the skin, particularly for burns. For more information on how thoroughly the tulip tree was interlaced with the area in which it grew, have a look at this fascinating blogpost on Blood and Spicebush.

The flowers are said to be so sweet and nectar-filled that you can drink directly from the blossom, though looking at the height of some of these trees you would need to be very intrepid indeed. The root is sometimes used to give a lemon flavour to spruce beer, a Canadian beverage made from, you guessed it, the young leaves of the spruce tree.

The inner bark was shredded and put between layers of clothing by Native Americans if they were caught out in sub-zero temperatures, a very useful thing to know. The bark was also used to make cordage for baskets.

One way to identify a tulip tree if it doesn’t have any flowers is by those distinctive leaves. Apparently the story goes that when Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden, Eve was so miffed that she pulled the central lobe out of the leaf of a tulip tree that she was passing. Ever since, the leaves have grown without it.

Tulip Tree with missing lobe! (Photo Three)

And finally, a poem. I am sure that anyone with substantial trees in a small garden will feel the sting of this. See what you think…

One Tree
Philip Metres

They wanted to tear down the tulip tree, our neighbors, last year. It throws a shadow over their vegetable patch, the only tree in our backyard. We said no. Now they’ve hired someone to chainsaw an arm—the crux on our side of the fence—and my wife, in tousled hair and morning sweat, marches to stop the carnage, mid-limb. It reminds her of her childhood home, a shady place to hide. She recites her litany of no, returns. Minutes later, the neighbors emerge. The worker points to our unblinded window. I want to say, it’s not me, slide out of view behind a wall of cupboards, ominous breakfast table, steam of tea, our two young daughters now alone. I want no trouble. Must I fight for my wife’s desire for yellow blooms when my neighbors’ tomatoes will stunt and blight in shade? Always the same story: two people, one tree, not enough land or light or love. Like the baby brought to Solomon, someone must give. Dear neighbor, it’s not me. Bloom-shadowed, light-deprived, they lower the chainsaw again.

Photo Credits

Photo One by By I, KENPEI, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6744192

Photo Two by By Romeyn Beck Hough(Life time: 1924) – Original publication: US, self-publishedImmediate source: https://publicdomainreview.org/collections/the-american-woods/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=54472319

Photo Three by By Bruce Marlin – Own work: http://www.cirrusimage.com/tree_tulip.htm, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3371959