Monthly Archives: February 2024

2018 – Bugwoman on Location – News from Milborne St Andrew

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Dear Readers, I had been doing occasional posts from Milborne St Andrew in Dorset, where my parents were living, for a couple of years, but this post really marked a turning point, though I didn’t know it at the time. By October 2018 both Mum and Dad were in a care home in Dorchester, and on 18th December 2018 Mum died. This post reminds me of what a solace nature was then, and still is today. 

Dear Readers, last week I reported that my Dad had been in hospital for over a fortnight while I was on holiday. This week I rushed down to Milborne St Andrew, and Dad was at home.

The good news is that his ‘chest infection’ (actually pneumonia) is much better.

The bad news is that Dad isn’t really clear who anyone is, can’t find his way around the house, and thinks that his home is a new place that closely resembles where he used to live.

Sample conversation:

Dad: ‘That tree looks exactly the same as the one that was outside the old house’.

Mum: ‘What old house?’

Dad: silence

Mum: ‘This is the house we’ve lived in for 16 years, love. It’s the same tree’.

Dad: ‘If you say so’.

We call out the GP, who does a memory test on Dad. Dad does much better than we expect, but still badly enough to be referred to the Memory Clinic for a diagnosis. The doctor thinks that it’s not ‘classic’ dementia but a form of confusion brought on by the effect of not getting enough oxygen to the brain over a long period of time (because of the COPD) exacerbated by his recent pneumonia. COPD is the gift that just keeps on giving, and one lesser known effect is brain damage.

The doctor doesn’t think it’s going to get any better. The unstated conclusion that I’ve come to is that it will probably get worse. There might be peaks and troughs, and Dad might gradually come to feel more confident and relaxed in his own surroundings, so I’m not catastrophising, but it’s clear that things will need to change.

The doctor thinks that the options are residential care or a live-in carer. Mum doesn’t want either, but isn’t physically strong enough to cope with Dad if he needs help getting dressed or going to the toilet. Mum and Dad have always said that they want to be together in their own home if at all possible. So we’re going to investigate the live-in carer option. We are lucky that, as a family, we can scrape together the resources to even start to consider this.

I spend ten minutes in the garden, watching the bees riding the lavender as if each sprig was a bucking bronco.

We are lucky that Dad is such a stoical man – he takes each explanation of what’s going on with a surprised and suspicious scepticism, but is happy to sit in his recliner and take things as they come.  He is eating next to nothing, but can be tempted with creme caramel or anything with custard. There are long periods in the day when Mum and Dad are both snoozing peacefully away and I can get on with cooking and organising, or sitting in the garden with my camera. So often nature comes to the rescue. I am watching the bees and butterflies on  the buddleia when it occurs to me that one of these things is not like the others.

Hoverfly, possibly Eristalis pertinax

I think that this might be a drone fly, a type of hoverfly that looks superficially like a honeybee and probably gets some protection as a result. The eyes give it away, though – that line between them is indicative of a fly, not a bee. And for just a few minutes I’m immersed in something that isn’t care rotas or sorting out medication.

And then there’s a call from the living room and it’s back to that other real world, the one where people I love get sick and confused and cantankerous and infuriating.

I am stressed beyond anything I’ve known previously – I feel myself floating above some situations as if it’s not me at all. The first time I actually spoke the ‘Dementia’ word out loud I ended up crying all over the shop assistant in my local greengrocer. And yet, I also feel my heart opening. As I left on Friday I looked at Dad, with his hair all over the place like Sid Vicious, and felt such an overwhelming tenderness for him that all I could do was kiss him on the top of his head and tell him how much I loved him.

‘Love you n’all’ he said.

And I know that, whatever happens, he always will.

 

 

 

 

 

2017 – Twenty-Six Ways of Looking at a Rainy Day

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Dear Readers, I had so much fun with this piece. One of the delights of writing the blog has been that, much like owning a dog, it forces me to stop and (preferably) go outside at least once per day. See what you think. 

Dear Readers, I had great plans for the blog today, but the deluge started. As I sat in Costa Coffee and looked out at grey skies and slick pavements, I felt a bit down and hopeless. But then, I started to notice the effect that the rain had on everything, and so, with apologies to Wallace Stevens and his poem ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’, I’ve found 26 ways of looking at a rainy day.

1.Grey skies and rain make all the colours look brighter. The reds of the buses and the yellow of the AA van are almost startling. The traffic cones that Affinity Water have put along our road (lead water pipes have been discovered, oh joy) positively pop with brightness.

2. Raindrops form a constantly changing geometric pattern of interlacing circles and bubbles and tiny explosions.

3. Rain really highlights the terrain, the slopes and ridges and the long down-hill towards the tube station

4. The rain also highlights the places where vehicles have parked on the pavement, breaking the paving stones and creating the ideal home for miniature ponds and lakes.

5.People walk faster, but give one another little smiles and eye-rolls. ‘British summer, eh’. You can never go wrong with the weather. A month and a bit ago, we were all moaning about the heat. Today, I have the heating on. In August.

6.You can hear the shape of things by listening to the rain. I remember a radio programme where a chap who was blind said that he loved the rain, because he could ‘see’ the shape of the bushes and trees in the garden. I shall have to try that out, but I love the sounds of tyres in the rain, and the rain on the roof and the windowlights. In Cherry Tree Wood, you could hear the raindrops hitting the leaves.

7.Rain brings up all the smells – there is a word, ‘petrichor’ for earth after rain.  And I wish I could share the smell of these roses with you.

8. The rain brings out all the colours of the bark on the plane trees on the High Road, and the ornamental trees on the County Roads.

9. The rain paints the trees and houses, making it clear exactly where it falls.

10. The rain emphasises out the muscularity of the trunks of the hornbeam trees.

11. I love that some people ignore the rain, and go running anyway. In fact, when I used to run I loved the wet days most of all, the splashing through puddles and the splat of my footsteps, and the fact that I got soaking wet but was going to have a shower anyway.

12. In Taxi Driver, Robert De Niro talks about the way that the rain ‘washes all the scum off the streets’. He was talking metaphorically, but it does clean our streets up for sure. Look at how clean and new the nettles look after their bath.

13. I love that you can sometimes get a perfect reflection in a raindrop.

14. Reflections on a wet pavement are a whole other area of interest. Each car has its own upside-down double attached to its wheels. The awning at Tony’s Continental (the best greengrocer on the High Street in my opinion) looks even more splendid when reflected on wet paving stones.

15. The reflection of traffic lights on a wet surface blurs them romantically.

17. Where do the insects hide during the rain? A big raindrop can knock a butterfly off course or disrupt the busyness of a bee. As the rain (briefly) eased, all kinds of insects reappeared.

17.The rain doesn’t put the birds off, that’s for sure – the starlings bathe, and the crows are still looking for chips in the gutter outside the Kentucky Fried Chicken. I should tell them that their dietary habits are cannibalistic, but I doubt that they’d listen.

18.Some people have wonderful rainwear, like the lady completely encased in a yellow poncho who just popped into Costa Coffee. Practical and bright.

19.You see more grown-ups in Wellington Boots, and that’s not a bad thing. It always makes me think of the seaside.

20.Generally, people drive more slowly and carefully, as if suddenly aware that they are piloting a ton of metal through a world filled with creatures made of flesh and bone.

21 .My water butts will be full, ready for this ‘drought’ that we’re supposed to be having.

22. Leaves are both waterproof, and designed for rain to run off and fall where it’s needed, the soil beneath the plant.

23. The rain brings out the snails. And I have a great fondness for snails, in spite of their bad behaviour.

24. Walking in the rain when you don’t have to feels a bit anarchistic, but (whisper it) it can be fun. Children know this, we seem to have forgotten it. Best save any puddle-jumping for a quiet spot, though. I get enough funny looks as it is.

25. People walk closer together, sharing umbrellas, holding one another’s arms. We could all do with walking a bit closer together.

26. Tomorrow is meant to be dry and sunny. Let’s make the most of the rain while it’s here.

2016 – Flâneuse-ing on the County Roads

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Dear Readers, after two years of finding things to write about for the blog I had discovered that all I had to do was take myself off for a walk around the County Roads here in East Finchley and there would always be something to see. I would invariably come back with a spring in my step and a conversation to report. I think this was the first of many such adventures. 

Dear Readers, for many years I have been intrigued by the idea of the Flâneur. This was a 19th century French character, invariably male, who would wander around a city wearing a top-hat and carrying a cane, and was described as a ‘connoisseur of the street’. He would get into all kinds of adventures and encounters, and would have a thoroughly interesting time. However for women, it was somewhat different.  In her new book ‘Flâneuse – the (Feminine) Art of Walking in Cities’, Lauren Elkin records how women doing exactly the same thing as the Flâneur could be subject to harassment and suspicion, and were sometimes accosted or even arrested. Nonetheless, I strolled forth intrepidly (though without top-hat and cane) to explore the County Roads here in East Finchley.

The County Roads are a set of six roads, built at the turn of the twentieth century, and they are all named after old English counties: Lincoln, Leicester, Huntingdon, Bedford, Hertford and Durham. They are a jumble of different Victorian/Edwardian styles, and vary from the ornate to the simple, from the grand to the (relatively) humble. What they all have, however, are front gardens, and for a naturalist like myself, that’s good enough. Who knows what I might see? I was especially intrigued to see how the pollinators were getting on, and what was attracting their interest.

My first step was right outside my front door, to admire my giant buddleia. It is true that it needs yet another prune, but I’m reluctant to get rid of those enormous racemes of flowers just yet. Plus, the more I hack at it, the larger it grows. Yesterday afternoon, it largely attracted honeybees.

IMG_7353Onwards! I head down to the High Road and, as if for the first time, notice what a strange shape the London Plane trees are after their pollarding. Each one appears to be trying to accommodate the buildings around it. Apart from the peculiar topiary effect, however, they are looking very healthy at the moment, though we could do with some rain – my water butt has run dry for the first time since we installed it five years ago. Every night the clouds gather and then dissipate away over Muswell Hill. Who knows what we have done to anger the gods.IMG_7362IMG_7385If bumblebees could vote with their many little hooked feet, I’m sure they would put their crosses down for lavender. The County Roads are very obliging in this respect, and there is a fine patch at All Saint’s Church on Durham Road, while many individual houses have handsome stands of the plant.

IMG_7373IMG_7374Although modern roses are not a favourite, the ones that are closer to the wild type attact some attention.

IMG_7371On another note, the bollard on the corner of Leicester Road is still not fixed (or maybe was fixed and got walloped again). Is there a gremlin here that attracts collisions?

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Lesser-spotted bollard

Alongside some very splendid cultivated sweet peas, there are some stands of a wild cousin, Broad-leaved Everlasting Peas (Lathyrus latifolius), and very pretty it is too.

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Broad-leaved everlasting pea (Lathyrus latifolius)

I stop to congratulate a man who is two-thirds of the way up a ladder, re-painting some of his plasterwork cornice. He nearly falls off with shock, but recovers himself to say how much he loves these old buildings and the little details that make them different from one another. I couldn’t agree more.

Someone is having much more luck with Nepeta (Cat Mint) than I did. I planted mine in a pot, and came downstairs to find that I had apparently grown a cat, though it just turned out to be some stoned feline who had crushed it in his frenzy, and who gazed at me with a demented expression.

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Honeybee on catmint (Nepeta).

It's no good trying to look innocent.

Evil cat-mint destroyer in pot.

Evil cat-mint destroyer

It’s no good trying to look innocent, though you are a very fine cat indeed.

I stopped to view a particularly wildlife-friendly garden that met with full Bugwoman approval. It had verbena and nicotiana (for the moths), some sedum just ready to come into flower, an interesting yellow vetch and all manner of other delights. I stopped to photograph it when, dear reader, I was finally accosted, by a lovely lady with a bunch of lavender from her allotment in her hand. She asked me if I was Bugwoman, and so of course I could not demur. Then another lovely lady approached, and I was introduced to her too. My cover was blown! Maybe I should create a Bugwoman costume, perhaps with dangly antennae and wings, though it might be difficult to handle the camera with extra legs.

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Sedum – a great plant for autumn pollinators

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Verbena bonariensis and nicotiana, amongst other pollinator-friendly delights

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Honeybee on Verbena boniarensis, a great bee and butterfly plant

Now, East Finchley readers, have you noticed our magnificent pigeons? We have our fair share of the normal blue-grey birds, and very fine they are too. But we have more than our share of birds which are partially white, and also ones that have a pinky-grey colouration, which is known as ‘red’ in the trade, I think. Huntingdon Road has its own resident pair of red birds, which I fear is due to the Kentucky Fried Chicken on the corner, and concomitant rubbish which is strewn at that end of the street (in spite of the litter bin). (Don’t get me started).

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A red pigeon about to indulge in KFC chips

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One of many pied pigeons in East Finchley

As I loop up towards the corner of Bedford and Durham Road, I stop to look at the fennel growing in one of the gardens. All of the umbellifers (plants with flat, multi-flowered blooms like Cow Parsley and Hog Weed) are pollinated by insects smaller than bumblebees: all kinds of flies, wasps, honeybees and beetles. It is thought that flies, in particular, are not so skilled at pollination, and don’t have the ability to cope with the complicated flowers that bumblebees do, so they tend to prefer single flowers, and lots of them.

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Little and Large….

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Ichneumon wasp on fennel

And some surprisingly complicated flowers can be ‘cracked’ by bumblebees, who really are the brains of the pollinator world. It’s been shown that, given sufficient incentive, they can tell the difference between human faces, so a passion flower is easy-peasy.

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Bumblebee on passionflower

As I make my last turn around the County Roads, the sound of cawing alerts me to the fact that the crow family have reproduced successfully again. Earlier, one of the parent birds was trying to persuade a fledgling to come down and eat a suspiciously new-looking slice of bread that they had filched. By the time I returned, the adult was watching as the youngster pecked about in the gutter of a nearby house, looking for food.

Parent crow

Parent crow

Fledgling

Fledgling

Dear Readers, I had a very fine walk around the County Roads, and I wasn’t arrested once. Even in a built-up area there is lots to see and enjoy. I would like to leave you with a brief clip of the bees feeding on a particularly lovely patch of lavender, where the heat of the sun was bringing up the scent, and the lazy droning of the insects (only partially obliterated by a plane heading home to Heathrow) made me wish that I had brought a deckchair with me. I hope that you enjoy it as much as I did. There is so much more ‘nature’ in a city than people often think.

 

2015 – A Work in Progress

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Me aged about four with my nan.

Me aged about four with my nan.

Dear Readers, this is my ‘Year Two’ post, from 2015. I think this is the first time that I wrote in any detail about my garden, and it’s interesting to me to see how it’s changed – the evergreen clematis has gone, and it occurs to me that I could plant something similar to gussy-up my lilac when it’s gone over. And I think I need some more Bowle’s Mauve, I’d forgotten how useful it is. Everyone was so helpful with their comments and suggestions following this post, and it gave me more confidence to write about the personal. 

Dear Readers, I grew up in Stratford, in East London. Five of us crammed into a two-bedroom house with an outside toilet, no bathroom, and a pocket handkerchief-sized garden. And yet, it was that little garden which first triggered my interest in insects. I spent hours digging in the dirt with spoons that I’d smuggled from the cutlery drawer. I reared woolly bear caterpillars in a plastic box, tried to create woodlouse habitats under concrete slabs and marked the backs of passing ants with watercolours from my paintbox. I was a permanently messy child, with scuffed knees and dirty fingernails, in spite of the attempts by my mum and nan to keep me more or less lady-like. In a way, I was a pioneer of wildlife gardening before the term had even been invented, because the more invertebrates there were in the garden, the better I liked it. Once, I rescued some milky, sticky eggs that I found and put them into the damp course under the living room window. When we were suddenly inundated by enormous yellow slugs a few weeks later, I kept very quiet.

As I grew up, I didn’t have much access to a garden. I was in student digs, and then in a variety of rented accommodation. Some people seemed able to create a floral paradise wherever they were, but not me. I was always on the move, always too easily distracted. A bout of serious depression in my thirties didn’t help. For a while, I had a few pots on a first floor balcony and got most of my access to nature from the community garden down the road.  And then, in my fifties, we moved into our house in East Finchley, and things started to change. For the first time, I could settle down, with a garden of my own. It felt safe, finally, to become a gardener.

My garden in May

My garden in May

When we moved in, our house had a very typical family garden – rectangular lawn, patio, shed. But I wanted so much to turn it into something that was friendlier for wildlife. We don’t have children, and so there was no need for somewhere to play football or badminton. We decided that, as this is the kind of thing that we would only do once, we would get someone to help us with the design of the garden, and with the heavy work of digging out a pond to replace all the grass. I figured that if the garden had ‘good bones’ it would be more difficult for me to mess it up. I am still a novice, trying things out, messing things up, forgetting to do things and doing them at the wrong time. But, thankfully, nature is very forgiving.

View of the left-hand side of the garden, with white lilac, hawthorn and whitebeam

View of the left-hand side of the garden, with white lilac, hawthorn and whitebeam

The plants on the left hand side of the photo above were already there when I moved in –  white-flowering lilac, hawthorn and  whitebeam. How lucky I am to have some mature trees! However, the garden is north-facing, and as the trees grow, the area underneath becomes increasingly shady. In particular, the lilac has turned into a monster, almost a small glade of trees in its own right. It has an evergreen, white clematis scrambling through it, which provides some sustenance for early Bumblebee queens, but I’m sure I could do more. Does anyone have any experience of renovating such an august shrub? I know that if I’m going to try to help it renew itself, it needs to be right after flowering, so I’d better get a move on.

The hawthorn is in full flower at the moment

The hawthorn is in full flower at the moment

The hawthorn is attracting a mass of insects and small birds, who spend best part of the day pecking through the flowers for caterpillars.

Bowles Mauve - perennial wallflower

Bowles Mauve – perennial wallflower

One of the plants that works hardest in the garden is the Bowles Mauve perennial wallflower. I put it in over three years ago. In all that time, there hasn’t been a day when there hasn’t been at least a few flowers on it. Bees of all kinds seem to love it, it needs no care, and my only fear is that at some point it will run out of steam. In the meantime, I appreciate its generosity every day when I look out of my kitchen window.

The pond.

The pond, complete with self-sown Greater Willow Herb

The pond is the single most interesting thing in the garden. Frogs lay their eggs in it, dragonflies and damselflies hover over it, water boatmen swim in it and everything drinks from it, from foxes to blackbirds to dunnocks to a wide range of neighbourhood cats. There is always something going on. It has reached a stage now where, provided we remove most of the leaves and excess water plants in the autumn, it is self-maintaining. If you have any space at all, even a balcony with room for a bucket, I would recommend putting in some water. You will be amazed what turns up.

Another picture of the pond. Can you tell I'm in love?

Another picture of the pond. Can you tell I’m in love?

I also have a lot of bird feeders – 2 for seed, 2 for suet, 2 for nyger, and a bird table that looks as if it was cobbled together by Heath Robinson. They’ve been very useful for attracting the birds into the garden, but I’m pleased to see that they spend a lot of time foraging for natural food in the trees and shrubs at this time of year.

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My Heath Robinson bird table.

My Heath Robinson bird table in front of the rampant lilac bush and the Bowles Mauve.

I’ve also managed to squeeze in a mixed hedge – yew, beech, hazel, hawthorn and spindle.I’ve been cutting this back in the autumn to encourage it to get thicker, but I think it will be a while before it gets thick enough for anybody to nest in it. Again, it does much better in the part of the garden where it is not under the whitebeam. The poor spindle is nearly always eaten half to death by aphids, particularly (you guessed it) in the darker part of the garden.

The hedge, looking back to the house.

The hedge, looking back to the house.

As you might expect, I am unfazed by weeds. I have a wide variety, from the usual nettles and dandelions to comfrey, Mexican fleabane, pendulous sedge, herb bennet, yellow corydalis, green alkanet, forget-me-knot, and elecampane. I have a huge stand of Greater Willowherb which is so good for the bees that I can’t help letting it get bigger every year. I have bramble and bindweed trying to find their way in from the back of the garden, and I do confess to encouraging these to curb their ambitions with a pair of secateurs. What intrigues me is that many of these plants can be found locally, in the wood or the cemetery, and I wonder how unique the mixture of ‘weeds’ is to any particular locality. Certainly, if something grows wild nearby, it is more likely to turn up. I have a view that, if not too ‘over-managed’, our gardens can become extensions of nearby habitat, rather than completely different ones. It makes sense to support the wildlife that is already living in an area, rather than asking it to adapt to a completely new set of plants.

I also have an eight-foot tall volunteer cherry tree, courtesy of the one next door. My garden is becoming a forest.

The 'volunteer' cherry tree.

The ‘volunteer’ cherry tree.

Of course, not everything in the garden is rosy. Especially the poor Rosa rugosa which I planted underneath the whitebeam in a moment of madness. It reaches out with its poor attenuated stems for the sunlight and produces, oh, maybe three flowers a year. If I was a bit more confident about it surviving, I would move it, but now is obviously not the time.

One of the few flowers on my poor rose bush

One of the few flowers on my poor rose bush

I am so lucky to have a garden again, and believe me, I am grateful every day that I have a chance to enjoy it. . There is always something going on, some new creature appearing or an unidentified plant popping up. But every garden is a work in progress. If you are also lucky enough to have a garden, what things have you tried that have helped your local wildlife? Do you have any advice on north-facing gardens, or working with heavy clay soil? If you don’t have a garden, have you tried containers, or guerilla gardening? Or what have you observed in your local park? I would love to know what your number one plant for pollinators is, for example, or if you’ve had any success with bug-hotels or nestboxes. I truly believe that observant gardeners and dog-walkers and runners and allotment-holders have a deep pool of knowledge that should be tapped for the benefit of our wildlife, and that we have so much to learn from one another.

Blackbird in the rain ...

Blackbird in the rain …

 

2014 – Bug Woman Is Ten Years Old!

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Dear Readers, ten years ago, on 15th February 2014, I summoned up my courage and clicked on the ‘Publish’ button on my first ever blog post. What a lot has happened since! I’m now an elderly orphan, having lost Mum in 2018 and Dad in 2020, but I’m also a youthful retiree, having given up work in September last year. We’ve been through a pandemic, Brexit has happened, we’ve had five prime ministers, the US has had Trump, the wheels are falling off the wagon all over the rest of the world, climate change continues apace, and some days I just want to switch off the wifi and retreat into a good book. 

And yet. 

I meet so many people who are interested in the natural world and concerned about what’s going on in their local communities, and who are doing whatever they can to right wrongs and to do their bit. I see people doing their best with their resources, be they time or money or energy or all three, to make things better. A friend recently told me about an interview with Carl Safina, an American conservationist and writer, who was asked, in hushed tones, whether he was optimistic or pessimistic about the state of the environment.

“That’s a question for people sitting in the bleachers”, he said. “I just want to know that I’m in the game”.

And amen to that. If I’ve learned one thing from writing this blog for the past ten years, it’s that action, however small, is the cure for despair. 

And so, for the next ten days, I’m going to reprint my favourite post from each of the last ten years. Here’s my first ever post. And thanks, eternally, to The Gentle Author, who’s blog course gave me the courage to launch. Have a look at the Spitalfields Life blog. It is a wonder. 

2014

When I got off the tube train at East Finchley Station this afternoon, I noticed a small, hunched shape on the platform. As I bent over for a closer look, I realised that it was a bumblebee, lying motionless on her back. As everybody else piled past on their way home, I wondered what to do. I couldn’t bear to think of people treading on her. What if she was still alive? So I picked her up and rested her in the palm of my hand. She looked substantial, but her weight barely registered. And then she moved, one of her legs groping into the air as if looking for something, anything to cling on to.

My bumblebee is a Queen, who has come out of hibernation too early because the weather has been so unseasonably mild. She has been unable to find any flowers to feed from, and has used up her last energy searching the desert of the station platforms for something to eat.

I cradle her in my hand all the way home. Once there, I put her onto a plate, and position her so that she can drink from a spoon filled with sugar-water, the closest substitute for nectar that I can make. I watch as her leg twitches, but gradually the movement becomes weaker. I fear that there is no hope for her.

The bee will not be the only creature to die – she has some ‘hangers-on’. I count four mites crawling through her fur, each the size and shape of a flaxseed. That’s a heavy burden for an insect to be flying around with. The mites live in bumblebee nests, and will attach themselves to the young queens, like this one. When an infested bumblebee lands on a flower, some of the mites will get off and wait for another bee to latch onto, as if changing buses. However, without the bee the mites won’t survive either.

Looking at the bumblebee closely, in a way that she would never allow if she was healthy, is both a privilege and a kind of impertinence. I notice, as I never did before, that her wings are like smoked glass, the ridged veins standing out and catching the light from my angle-poise lamp.  Her eyes are black, like twin coals in her alien face. She has little hooks on the end of each leg, rather than feet. There are bands of dirty yellow fur behind her wings but just behind her head there is the faintest shadow of gold, only discernible from a very particular angle.

As I watch, she is curling up, her antennae covering her face, her legs crumpled under her. I will leave her for a while, but I am sure that she is dead.

The other casualties, apart from the bee herself and her little team of parasites, are the eggs that she carries. She will have mated once last summer, when she first emerged from the nest as a fresh young queen. I imagine her flying to meet the male bees at the top of the lime trees where they leave their pheromones, a kind of sexual perfume, so that she can find them. Inside her will be the first of her fertilised eggs that, if things had been different, would have hatched into the first workers to support her nest. From this one female up to four hundred and fifty bumblebees would have been born, going on to pollinate countless thousands of plants. When any creature dies, however humble, however common, there is a ripple effect that spreads much wider than that little death.

Lovebirds and ‘Beakiation’

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Rosy-faced Lovebirds (Agapornis roseicollis) Photo By Charles J. Sharp – Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography.co.uk, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67958540

Dear Readers, as today is Valentine’s Day I thought I’d feature a bird that is associated with all things romantic – the lovebird. This is actually a tiny parrot, and in the wild lives in south-western Africa, from Angola through Namibia and down into South Africa. However, it is also a popular pet, being smaller and less noisy than many other species, and in the US there are feral populations in Phoenix, Arizona, and in parts of Hawaii.

In spite of their adorable pair-bonding behaviours (looking into one another’s eyes, sleeping face to face, grooming one another etc etc) they can also be very aggressive, and pairs don’t always get along. Personally I’d be leaving them in Africa where they can choose their own partners, rather than condemning them to life with someone they don’t get along with, like a Victorian trapped in a loveless marriage, but there we go.

However, the point of today’s post is not actually to discuss the love life of the lovebird, but to consider how it gets around in the trees. In her article in New Scientist this week, Chen Ly looks at the work of scientist Edwin Dickinson at the New York Institute of Technology. Dickinson has been examining how lovebirds move, and how they deal with novel situations, and has found that they use a technique described as ‘beakiation’ – when presented with a horizontal bar attached to the ceiling, they grabbed it with their beaks and pivoted their whole bodies around their heads – you can see a video here. I must admit that I’m not sure how unusual this looks to me, but it could be I haven’t been paying attention. Help me out here, parrot-watchers/owners!

Wild rosy-faced lovebirds in Namibia (Photo By Charles J. Sharp – Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography.co.uk, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67958546)

And so, if you celebrate Valentine’s Day, I hope you have a lovely time. I am remembering my first Valentine’s Day with my boyfriend (now husband). We went to a local Italian restaurant, had a wonderful meal, and at the end of it discovered that it didn’t take credit cards, so I ended up paying. Oh well. Personally, I’ve found restaurants on Valentine’s Day are about the most unromantic spots that you could possibly choose, with twice as many tables as usual, double the price and rather too many starry-eyed couples sitting practically on top of one another for any chance of whispering sweet nothings, but there we go. These days it’s more likely to be pasta and an episode of ‘Grand Designs’, and none the worse for it in my opinion.

 

An Early Spring Walk on the County Roads

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Crocuses!

Dear Readers, I managed to persuade my husband to come out for a quick walk around the block at lunchtime – he’s still working full-time, and will sometimes sit hunched over his computer for ten hours at a stretch. But today was bright, and sunny, and not too cold, and so we went for a quick trot around East Finchley’s County Roads, just to see what was happening.

Well, first up it appears that putting gravel into my plant pots deterred the squirrels enough for at least some of them to survive. I can only plant them in my south-facing front garden, because at the back it’s too cold and shady. When they’re happy, though, they burst forth with open arms. Now all I need is a big fat bee to come and enjoy them.

More front-garden crocuses (or possibly crocii?)

Off we go to see what else is happening. Just up the road the winter jasmine is coming into bloom – this is a very fine example, which runs almost up to the gutter of the house. There are just a few flowers at the moment…

Winter-flowering jasmine

…but  in a few weeks it will look like this:

And then there’s the flowering quince, of which there are several examples on the County Roads. I love the way that the flowers come before the leaves.

The hedge on the corner is full of privet berries – none of the birds seem to like them much, but maybe it’s because they’re black, and birds are much more attracted to red.

Privet berries

This lovely magnolia on Durham Road will be so beautiful in a week or so – I  must remember to pop back. It always amazes me to think that magnolias are some of our very oldest plants, and were originally pollinated by beetles because social insects hadn’t evolved yet.

Magnolia buds waiting to pop

Across the road there’s this plaque – it’s cool that it says ‘AD’ (so at least we know it’s not 2,024 years old) but I wonder what happened to the year? 

And as we walk down Hertford Road we find a mahonia in full bloom. The smell is fantastic, like lemon and rose with a bit of honey thrown in. Again, all we need is a nice fat bee.

There are some polyanthus about…

and somebody has made a nice green roof for their wheelie bins, covered in a miniature forest of sedum…

And then, right at the end of the road there’s the mimosa, looking just about as fabulous as any plant has the right to look.

And so, I recommend getting outside every day, even if it’s just for a quarter of an hour. You never know what you might spot!

An Old Friend, and a Walk Around LSE (London School of Economics)

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Dear Readers, after our trip to the glass exhibition yesterday we went in search of coffee and a sandwich, and en route I looked up at the spire which sits behind the Royal Courts of Justice. And there, just a blob until I put my camera on maximum zoom, was a peregrine falcon. Those of you with long memories might remember when I did a street tree walk around here, and spotted not one but two peregrines who’d been nesting here, plus a fledgling. I even managed to get a shot of a food drop, where a parent bird drops food to teach the youngster how to hunt.

Food drop!

Mother, father and fledgling

I was so pleased to see that at least one peregrine is still here, and hopefully they’ll breed successfully again. Peregrines are increasingly hunting not just pigeons but our little green parakeet friends, and they also hunt at night when buildings are floodlit, as they often are in London. I am always impressed by the adaptability of animals to an urban setting.

Anyhow, we then went for a walk around the London School of Economics – my husband  studied here for a year, but there has been a lot of building, and new buildings popping up. First up there was this remarkable….well, I’m not sure what to call it, but it was above the door of the Old Building. It’s made of very fine wire mesh, and is called ‘Final Sale’, so I guess I can see what all the climbing up the shelves is about. The piece is by Russian artists Andrey Blokhin and Georgy Kuznetsov. As this is the School of Economics I guess it’s appropriate.

Above it is the coat of arms of the LSE – the motto, ‘Rerum cognoscere causas’, means ‘to know the causes of things’, and the critter is a beaver, viewed as a hard-working animal. However, in 1922 William Beveridge, then Head of the School, mischievously remarked that this reputation could have been overstated:

“The beaver is also reputed to be industrious, though one writer at least has been found to assert that this reputation is undeserved; ‘that for five long months in winter the beaver does nothing but sleep and eat and keep warm’ that ‘summer-time for him is just one long holiday when the beavers are as jolly as grigs with never a thought of work from morning to night,’ and that in fact, he never works at all except in September and October when his dam must be built and when the Final Examination of the University are held.”

Around the corner from the Old Building there is now an open space (one could almost call it a piazza if it wasn’t for the drizzle), and  on the corner of the Clements Building there’s a mural called ‘Spectra’ by Tod Hanson. It’s based on Booth’s Victorian poverty map of the area, with the square that we’re standing in depicted by a red square. Lincoln’s Inn Fields is the green space at the top, and the Thames winds in and out in blue. However, the  colours don’t actually reflect the colours of Booth’s map (it was used to designate different areas of London according to their poverty levels, with black being ‘Lowest class. Vicious, semi-criminal’ and dark blue being ‘Very poor, casual. Chronic want’. I wonder if the artwork has missed a trick? While there probably isn’t ‘chronic want’ in the immediate vicinity amongst those who are homed, there are plenty of homeless people. The design resembles a pie-chart (very appropriate for economists).

And just across the road is ‘The World Turned Upside Down’ by Mark Wallinger. It is indeed just a globe turned upside down. It does enable us to pay more attention to the countries of the global south, but I wonder if it would have been even more interesting if it had used the Peter Projection which shows the actual relative sizes of the countries (though I’m not sure if this would work on a globe as I think this is what causes the distortion of the countries in the first place). (Head explodes).

‘The World Turned Upside Down’ by Mark Wallinger

Now, the whole reason for coming to the LSE was to visit what used to be their splendid bookshop, but it never returned after Covid. However! Right opposite The Old Curiosity Shop  is a lovely, bijou bookshop called The Gilded Acorn. It has an astonishing array of books, both new and second-hand, and we both staggered out with some new things to read, even though my bedside book pile resembles the Leaning Tower of Pisa. I got Katherine Rundell’s ‘The Golden Mole’, which I’ve been meaning to get for ages, and which describes a whole host of interesting creatures, and Rebecca Solnit’s ‘A Field Guide to Getting Lost’, which is full of things to ponder on. More on this later, I’m sure!

The man who runs the shop is very helpful, and I can only imagine that things are tough. If you value bookshops, this is definitely one to pop into if you’re in the vicinity. There is nothing like actually holding a book in your hand and paging through it, feeling its heft and breathing in that new book (or old book) smell.

https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/TheGildedAcorn

Anyhow, by now the drizzle has turned into proper precipitation so we decide to head towards Charing Cross to get the Northern Line home. But goodness, there’s been some shenanigans going on on The Strand. How lovely that it’s pedestrianised! I daresay that the taxi drivers aren’t as chuffed as all that, but there’s lots of seating, some planting, trees have a bit more room to breathe and you can just wander into Somerset House as the mood takes you. St Mary le Strand church looks very relieved.

 

‘The Glass Heart’ Exhibition at Two Temple Place

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‘Judge and Jury’ (2023) by Chris Day

 

Dear Readers, Two Temple Place is a new-to-me venue for free exhibitions close to Temple Station in London. The building itself is a Gothic masterpiece commissioned by William Waldorf Astor in the 1890s, at which point he was the richest man in the world. It was designed as the London pied-a-terre for the reclusive magnate, and contained the largest strong room in Europe, while Astor had his rooms upstairs.In 1999 the building was acquired by Richard ‘Tigger’ Hoare, who founded the Bulldog charity in 1983 as a ‘charity to support charities’, giving millions of pounds to small charities who might otherwise be in trouble or unable to fulfill their plans. Hoare died in 2020, but gave the building to the Bulldog Trust, to put on free exhibitions and events for the public, and in particular to showcase publicly-owned collections, and to give experience to curators who are early in their careers. I notice that they have some lovely events – Stained glass collage for families, fantasy nature sculptures for families, a stained glass walking tour, and lots more besides, and many of them are ‘pay what you can’.

Anyhow, the exhibition for this year is ‘The Glass Heart’, and it showcases some very unusual pieces by glass artists who might not otherwise get exposure in such a central and increasingly well-known venue -we first visited back in 2016, to see an exhibition about Egyptian mummies and death preservation techniques, and the place was deserted (perhaps not surprisingly :-)) , but as you’ll see from the photos t’was not so today.

I’ve just centred on a few pieces that I particularly liked here, but I’d encourage you to visit – I suspect that during the week (and outside of half-term, which is this week in the UK) it would be a lot more relaxed. The exhibition is on until 21st April, and the museum is open from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. except on Mondays (closed all day), Sunday when it’s closed at 4.30 p.m., and Wednesday when it’s open until 9 p.m.

First up is the piece in the first photo, ‘Judge and Jury’. I like it because it’s both colourful and worrying – the way that the glass is constrained, bulging out from its copper-piping shackles, reminded me of prisoners trussed up on their way to who knows where. When I learned that Day is mixed-race, and had spent time researching the treatment of black people in the UK and the US, the piece suddenly made a lot of specific sense.

 

And then there’s this, by Pinkie Maclure, called ‘The Soil’. It took me a while to notice something fairly obvious about the image, so taken was I by the colours and the leaves and the organisms at the bottom of the work. Plus this looks like it should be hanging in a church somewhere. It’s actually pretty subversive….

….because the image is of a female gardener, urinating in order to replenish the soil. I love the beatific expression, and the gardening gloves. It’s especially fun juxtaposed with the stained glass that actually forms part of Two Temple Place.

One of the windows of Two Temple Place that are always ‘in situ’.

Then there’s the work below, that I honestly thought was made of wood, but no, it’s all glass. This is ‘Toxic Apparatus’ by James Maskrey.

‘Toxic Apparatus’ by James Maskrey (2023)

It’s based on Blast Beach in Sunderland, which was an industrial dumping ground, and the Teeside skyline. The patina on the glass reminds me of the stained beakers and pipettes from my O-Level Chemistry class. What a versatile material glass is! It sometimes feels as if you can do anything with it.

Oh look! A glass dining chair. Not an ordinary chair, however, but one hot-sculpted from uranium glass. I found myself wondering if it would glow in the dark. The artist, Elliot Walker, imagines household items after a potential nuclear disaster.

And then, how about this? At first glance it looks like the standard stained glass from a pub, but look closer…

These pieces were commissioned for the Red Lion pub in West Bromwich, to celebrate the Desi pubs of the West Country – these failing or derelict pubs have been given a new lease of life by Asian landlords from the Punjab who arrived in the Black Country in the 1950s and have saved these local landmarks for the wider community.

 

And finally, I liked this piece, by Monster Chetwynd, renowned for her reworkings of moments from cultural history. In this glass piece, she’s taken on the arrival of St Bede at the monastery. Bede was only seven when he arrived at the monastery of Monkwearworth to be educated by the abbot at the time, Benedict Biscop. It’s a bit on the clumsy side compared to some of the other work at the exhibition, but there’s something very lovable about it. I imagine that the photo below shows the young Bede with the abbot, who appears to be carrying a very small whale, though I suppose it could be a marrow. In the second photo you can see the glass kitchen garden

 

Who or what this is I have no idea, but if you know something about the life of St Bede and have some understanding of what’s going on, do share. I’m wondering if it’s the Bede’s mother or father, bereft at the loss of their child, but it could equally well be a blond Elvis Presley.

Anyhow, I love the exuberance and the sense of play, even if I’m confused. I’m often confused.

So, if you are in the vicinity of Temple station and fancy a look at some very interesting glass (and a very interesting building) I really recommend popping into this exhibition. And they have a café and a bookshop.

And the Glass Hearts thing? Here it is…

Peter Layton, Founder of London Glassblowing,  ‘Matters of the Heart’ (2004)

And here it is in action, accompanied by the usual hubbub of a London exhibition. Enjoy!

 

 

 

 

 

Nature’s Calendar 9th – 13th February – Birdsong Builds

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Great Tit (Parus major)

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

Dear Readers, have you heard it yet? That call of tee-cher, tee-cher from the highest branch of a shrub, signalling that a great tit is starting to declare his territory? Interestingly, the birds seem to have a different intonation according to where they are in the world. Here’s a Belgian bird…(from Wallonia)

Here’s a Spanish one (from close to Santiago de Compostela)

Here’s a French one (from Nantes in the Loire Valley)

And here’s one from the UK

In her piece in ‘Nature’s Calendar’, Lulah Ellender points out that spring starts a lot earlier than we expect, if we have our ears open. Lots of other birds are starting to sing too. There are song thrushes in Coldfall Wood, and in St Pancras and Islington Cemetery (apologies for the wobbly camera, it might be best to watch this with your eyes closed if you’re prone to sea sickness)

And the robins, who’ve been singing all year, suddenly have a new bounce in their step…

Everyone else will be starting to sing too. There’s the fluting of blackbirds, usually from a television aerial or the very top of a tree. This early on, Ellender points out that it will be the younger males, searching for a territory or defending one that they already have against other young whipper-snappers. The established males don’t bother singing until March.

The more high-pitched song of the dunnock – this mousey, discreet little bird can be found sitting high on a branch, singing its head off from mid February onwards…

And if you listen carefully, you can definitely hear blue tits. This recording starts off with one of their rather cross-sounding alarm calls, followed by their reedy, metallic song.

It’s much too early for most species to start nest-building (though there is a lot of confusion about in the natural world, as we know), but in some species the loudness and complexity of the song is an indication of the health and vigour of the male bird, and gives the females a chance to check them out before things really get going later in the year. Males sing less once they actually have a mate and a territory (though many still sing to announce that they’re still alive, and their territory is still occupied). But what all this activity signals is that spring is on the way, hard to believe for some folk in the North of England who are expecting a shedload of snow this week, but true nonetheless.

Song Thrush singing in East Finchley