Dear Readers, if you want a plant that will delight your local pollinators, you can’t go far wrong with a catmint of some kind, and I have just planted some in one of my front garden containers. Plants in the Nepeta genus are named after the ancient Etruscan city of Nepete, which is thought to be where catmint originated – it can be found on the west coast of Italy, just above the ‘knee’ of the booted leg that the country so strongly resembles. The town is also the location of the castle that used to house Lucrezia Borgia, and very fine it looks too, though a bit draughty. You can get married here if that appeals.

‘Our’ catmint comes from the Caucasus, northern Turkey and Iran. It is popular with gardeners (such as me) because this species is low-growing – some of the others can be positively rambunctious, but this one looks, on the face of it at least, fairly well-behaved. One popular cultivar is known as ‘Walker’s Low’, which is presumably a reference to its size rather than its effect on any passersby.

Catmint is a member of the deadnettle family (Lamiaceae), and as with all of these plants the flowers are surprisingly complex when viewed close-up, almost like little orchids.

Anyone who has tried to grow any of the catmint family (of which there are over 250 species) knows that they have a very peculiar effect on some domestic cats. This is thought to be due to a chemical in the leaves called nepetalactone. The chemical is also a very effective insecticide, especially against mosquitoes, and it’s thought that the way that some cats positively throw themselves into the plant might provide a protective effect against all sorts of biting insects. Furthermore, a second compound in catmint, iridodial,  is thought to attract lacewings, whose larvae feed on aphids and mites.

In the photos below, a cat is getting high as a kite on dried catmint/catnip.

It isn’t just domestic cats who react this way to catmint – leopards, cougars, lynx and servals all react in a similar fashion. However, not all cats react in this way, and it’s thought that there’s a genetic component to the attraction. In a similar way, about 10 per cent of human beings can’t smell the flowers of the freesia plant (and very sorry I feel for them too).

If your cat doesn’t react to catmint, however, s/he might react to valerian (the proper one Valerian officinalis, not the red flower that’s all over my garden), silver vine (Actinidia polygama) or  the wood of the Tatarian honeysuckle (Lonicera tartarica) should you happen to stumble across any. Cat people will do more or less anything to make their cats happy, so it’s good to know that there are alternatives to boring old Nepeta racemosa.

Interestingly, catmint has been used medicinally to treat anxiety and restlessness in children, and also for flatulence and indigestion. In Mrs Grieve’s Herbal, she is very insistent that the plant is not boiled when a decoction is made, as this destroys the volatile oils that form the active ingredient. The herb was also used to treat headaches and hysteria, and seems to have had a general calming effect. It was also believed that rats hated the plant (maybe because of all those mad cats sitting in the middle of it).

Mrs Grieve also shares a little rhyme about the plant:

‘If you set it, the cats will eat it,

If you sow it, the cats don’t know it.’

And she believes that this is because the cats only react to bruised plants, which is more likely when the catmint has been handled and possibly damaged. I fear for my poor transplanted cat mint, but let’s see.

And finally, here is something by Lu You, a Chinese poet from 1182 who gets a cat to keep the rats from eating his books. As we all discover, sometimes it’s not a question of us owning a cat, more a case of the cat owning us. You can read the whole article here, but here’s a taste…

Poem for my Cat 1 by Lu You (1183, aged 58)

I got a little kitty with a bag of salt

To protect the countless books in my study.

It’s just a shame my family is poor and my wages are low

So it has no rug to lie on or fish to eat

His admiration for his cat soon grows, however….

Rats Kept Ruining my Books so I got a Cat and Within Days the Rats were Vanquished by Lu You

Conscription has left the house empty

Only my cat keeps me company

It’s so soft to touch and warm to hold in bed

So brave and capable that it has ousted the rat’s nest

As valiant as the soldier slaying enemies on the battlefield

I cannot give it much fish to eat but it doesn’t mind

Nor does it waste time catching butterflies amongst the flowers. 

His fondness also increases.

I got a Cat from a nearby Village that I’m Calling ‘Snowy’ by Lu You (1191, aged 66)

It looks like a tiger and can climb trees

It acts as if a horse but can’t pull carts

Even though it has vanquished the rat’s nest

It has no demand for fish as meals

Every so often it gets drunk off catnip

Every night it warms the rug

It must have been my child in a past life

Reincarnated to keep me company in my old age. 

But soon the cat learns which side its bread is buttered on, and I fear that this will sound all too familiar.

Poem for Pink-Nose by Lu You (1193, aged 68)

Night after night you used to massacre rats

Guarding the grain store so ferociously

So why do you now act as if you live within palace walls, 

Eating fish every day and sleeping in my bed?

Some things, it seems, never change.

Photo Credits

Photo One by By Kurt Stüber [1] – caliban.mpiz-koeln.mpg.de/mavica/index.html part of http://www.biolib.de, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5140

Photo Two By Croberto68 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14662571

Photo Three by Alex Hauner, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

Photo Four by By Montrealais – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=957230

Photo Five by By dave_7 from Lethbridge, Canada – Tartarian Honeysuckle Flowers, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34583615

Photo Six by Photo by David J. Stang, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

 

Dear Readers, you might remember a post a few weeks back when I was asking for everybody’s opinion on whether my new containers should retain their water reservoir or not, and very helpful it was too! In the end, I decided to take the reservoirs out – they seemed to take up quite a lot of the inside of the containers, and so I thought it might be better not to risk the whole thing getting waterlogged and/or frozen. I’ve kept the ‘bits’ that you need to put in the reservoir, though, so if it all goes pear-shaped it won’t be too much work to empty the containers and fit them. Let’s hope not, though….

In Container Number One, I have planted some sedum and some catmint. I put the plants out in their box while I was waiting for the containers to arrive, and looked out of the kitchen window to see an enormous cat plonked down on top of the catmint, so let’s see how long it survives. The cat managed to break one of the sedum stems, so let’s see how that does. I was half expecting all the mammals in the area to use the container as a toilet, but maybe there’s enough planting to deter them.Only time will tell.

The other container has some asters and some Bowle’s Mauve perennial wallflower, the latter chosen for its ridiculously long flowering period and most-favoured status with all sorts of bees.

I am finding the way that the volume of (peat-free) compost is slightly deforming the shape of the containers both amusing and a little alarming. Let’s see what happens.

I will be popping in some bulbs too, probably some grape hyacinths because the squirrels don’t seem to like them that much, plus some of the Sicilian Honey Garlic that I love so much, and maybe some squill. Bulbs do pretty well in the back garden too, but it’s less sunny so they take their time.

I also tidied up the green alkanet – when it goes brown it is absolutely covered in little crystalline prickles. They don’t sting, but they are very annoying. Why I was doing this without gloves on I can only put down to sheer laziness.

In other news, the windowboxes are still going strong – the honeybees are all over the marjoram, although the candytuft is past its best now. Those delosperma really were a bargain.

My Achillea is also doing well – the candy-pink flowers mature to shades of mauve and lilac, and it just keeps flowering. It’s a big favourite with hoverflies, and I seem to be getting a lot of these chaps at the moment. I think this is Syritta pipiens, a rather ferocious little hoverfly with enormous ‘thighs’. The males face off against one another like stags, pushing one another backwards and forwards until one of them gives up. The lives of these insects are every bit as complicated and interesting as those of the big charismatic mammals that we all love so much.

Speaking of which, there are orb web spiders all over the garden at the moment – one had spun a web between the newly-planted asters and the wall within a couple of hours of me finishing off the containers yesterday. And so it’s no surprise that every so often, a pollinator will be  caught. This spider is feasting on a honeybee that was probably visiting the marjoram in the window box above. Still, that’s nature for you, and the bee will provide the spider with enough sustenance to last for a good few days. Many bees are coming to the end of their lives now, so it’s at least a more useful end than just crashing to the pavement.

Dear Readers, after our bagel and coffee we leave Woodberry Wetlands nature reservoir and walk alongside the edge of the West Reservoir on the edge of Stoke Newington. There is a sailing club here, and today the air was full of the sounds of small children screaming with terror/excitement, and the muffled cursing of couples who’d misheard one another and were now stuck in the reeds. Ah joy, I well remember family holidays which had a boat-related component and how much fun they were. The filter house still stands and looks very impressive with the sun shining through its windows. Apparently it houses a café and you can still see some of the filtration equipment.

But what is that strange castle-like thing in the middle of the first photo?

Believe it or not, this used to house the reservoir pumping station. The Victorians did love a folly, and many of their industrial buildings, from train stations to water works, look more like cathedrals or castles than anything more mundane. And after all, what could be more important than clean water, or enabling people to get from place to place safely and comfortably? We take so many things for granted that were novel for the Victorians. Current revelations about the inefficiency of our water companies, and the mismanagement of our railways are reminding us of what happens when things aren’t right.

But as usual I digress. These days this impressive ‘castle’ houses some rather fine climbing walls, and last time we did this walk we ended up having a cup of tea and a sandwich and watching the youngsters scuttling up the walls at great speed while we gawped in amazement. There is a rather nice video showing the goings-on here.

Then it’s onto the main road for 200 metres, before turning into Clissold Park. On the way we pass this magnificent carved lion, which surely previously marked the edge of some grand estate.

Clissold  Park itself used to be the estate of Jonathan Hoare, a Quaker, philanthropist and anti-slavery campaigner. There are two lakes, named Runtzmere and Beckmere after John Runtz and Joseph Beck who persuaded the Metropolitan Water Board to buy the estate in 1887 and to use it for the public good. This heron was definitely enjoying the resource!

There are some truly astonishing trees in Clissold Park – just look at this plane tree.

And then there is this tree, which is a bladder senna (Colutea arborescens). You might remember that I saw it growing alongside the railway track at Black Horse Road, but it seems to be a popular street tree in Stoke Newington, much to my surprise. It is very striking, but clearly someone has a taste for it. Correction – this is actually a Koelreuteria paniculata (Golden Rain Tree), I got carried away at the sight of the bladders!

From here you also get a view of the magnificent St Mary’s Church, completed in 1858 and designed in  Gothic Revival style by George Gilbert Scott. The church is thought to be based on the design for Salisbury Cathedral, and is Grade II listed. Apparently the preacher in the church that used to stand on the site was so popular that it was decided to build a bigger church, but the funds had to be raised piecemeal, and so that magnificent steeple wasn’t added until 1890. I suspect very strongly that the tree standing next to it has been judiciously pruned so as not to obscure the view.

Hiding around the corner, however, and looking rather sorry for itself is the Old Church, which dates back to 1563, and is apparently the only Elizabethan church left in London. The graveyard contains members of the Wilberforce family, who were heavily involved in the anti-slavery movement. It is now an arts and community centre. We were unable to get inside, but it’s good to know that it is still being used for the good of local people.

Stoke Newington was a centre for dissenters and nonconformist groups, particularly the Quakers, who moved to the village in the 18th and 19th centuries. Amongst the notable residents were Daniel Defoe, Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stewart Mill and Thomas Paine, and Benjamin Franklin, David Hume and William Wilberforce were regular visitors. Until recently it was something of a hub for alternative thinkers of all stripes, but property prices are having an effect on who can afford to live here – for a long time Stoke Newington was far enough from the tube for people to think twice about buying a house, but now that so many people are working from home it’s anybody’s game.

The town hall at Stoke Newington is also listed Grade II – it was completed in 1937, and is built in a rather strange mixture of styles to my eyes, from 1930s Modernist plus some Doric columns. It apparently has a sprung dance floor made from Canadian maple which is surely something of an asset. The building was painted in camouflage paint during the Second World War, and a sign by the front door indicates that this is still visible, though sadly not to me.

And across the road is yet another golden rain tree, and very fine it is too.

By now we are flagging a little, poor old things that we are, so we are less than happy to see that the entrance to Abney Park Cemetery on Church Street is not accessible and we have to walk around the corner and negotiate a mass of building work. Once inside, though, the place is absolutely magical. There are no new graves here, and the London Borough of Hackney is managing it both as a refuge for wildlife, and as a historical site with the graves of many famous people including William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army. I think that Abney Park will deserve a visit all of its own at some point – it was set out as an arboretum, and has a beautiful and desolate chapel in the centre, which had stained glass windows reflecting the cemetery’s rosarium, which had over 1000 varieties of rose. The chapel has been vandalised over the years and is now considered ‘at risk’, though the council are hoping to raise the money to restore it.

For now, here are just a few photos to give you an idea of the place. I’ll definitely be back.

And so we make our weary way to the bus stop, for lo! there is a train strike today. And so we get the 106 to Finsbury Park and then the W7 to Muswell Hill and then the 102 to East Finchley,  admiring the fine houses with their ornate plaster and brick work that line the streets. It’s been a great walk, and I can’t wait to get stuck into the next leg next week, when we’ll be going from Stoke Newington east towards Hackney Wick.

Dear Readers, as you might remember a fortnight ago I started my peregrination around the Capital Ring, London’s 78 mile footpath that meanders around the Capital through Transport for London’s Zones 2 and 3. As it was in the low  temperature-wise last Saturday we skipped it like the no-hopers that we clearly are, but this week we retraced our steps to Finsbury Park and headed east. First up was the Traveller’s Joy/Old Man’s Beard along the path. This is the UK’s only native clematis, and I loved the way that it showed all the stages of its growth, from bud to full-blown seedhead.

Then it was off through Finsbury Park itself. This is a surprisingly large park, and as I reported last time it was established in 1862, to replace the pleasure gardens that were in the area before. A fairground was setting up in the distance as we walked past, and the park is host to music festivals and all kinds of community events during the year. This time there was no sign of the random drummer, but there was a hip-hop dancing class led by a very enthusiastic chap in his fifties. It appeared that I was a smidge too early for the Latino Life festival which is being held this weekend, and it only costs a pound too.

There is a small flower garden, known as Mackenzie Gardens, which is named for Alexander Mackenzie. He landscaped the original park back in the late nineteenth century, and was also involved in the design of the Victoria Embankment and Southwark Park. The flowerbeds are being restored to their original colours.

Like many urban parks, Finsbury Park felt pretty safe with an edge of what my Canadian friends describe as ‘sketchiness’. Unfamiliar ground is always slightly more alarming than places that you know – I’m sure people who are unfamiliar with my beloved Coldfall Wood might find it a bit eerie and dark. Still people seem to be relaxed, there are lots of play areas for children of all ages, and on a sunny day it feels as if everyone is just out to enjoy themselves and chill out.

 

On the way out of the park, I saw this poor tree with the most extraordinary damage to its trunk – it’s obviously an old wound, and from the way that it zigzags down the trunk I wondered if it was a lightning strike.

And yet, the amazing thing is that the tree is in full leaf and looks to be doing very well in spite of its injury. I love the resilience of these amazing plants.

Then we leave Finsbury Park and cross Green Lanes (named because this rather daunting A Road was once a tangle of meandering tracks that led to local village greens, hence the plural). At this point, the Capital Ring joins the New River Path. The New River isn’t a river, and it isn’t new – it is an artificial water course, finished in 1613 and designed to bring fresh water from Ware in Hertfordshire to the burgeoning city of London. It was designed by a Welsh engineer, Sir Hugh Myddleton, and over its 40 mile course it drops just 2 inches every mile, so that the water flows along due to gravity. These days the water doesn’t go any further than the reservoirs at Stoke Newington, apparently (though I do wonder where the water that flows through the Islington leg of the New River comes from in that case). But honestly, on a lovely summer’s day I wonder if there is a more peaceful spot in the whole of London.

As we wander along, the air is filled with the cries of almost fully-grown cootlets (a word that I just made up). How pathetic they sound, and how glad their parents will be to see the back of them! I’m sure that the one below is well able to fend for his or herself at this point. I love the water droplets on his/her back, showing just how water-resistant their plumage is.

This mother duck seems to have just a single duckling, and both parties were travelling at great speed.

This flotilla of mute swans glided past, partially concealed by the reeds, and they were so quiet that I didn’t notice them until they’d nearly gone.

As we journey on, the other side of the New River becomes rather more industrial. What is OCC, for example?

Well, my friends, it is the Oriental Carpet Centre. I can find out nothing about it except that in one Google review, someone mentions that it has really violent security guards. Maybe check the opening hours before visiting.

After crossing the Seven Sisters Road, we walk alongside the New River and beside the Woodberry Estate, once the largest council housing complex in Britain but now a mixture of public and private housing. I’ve written before about how a new bright and shiny estate is being built here, and how the residents of the old estate have largely been written out of the picture, as usually happens. The Guardian did a series of interviews with people involved in the project and it makes for a very interesting read. When I look at the faces and hear the accents, it takes me back to growing up in the East End of London sixty years ago. These are my people, and it feels as if we’re becoming an endangered species. But then, London has always changed, always morphed into something new. Who knows what will come next? Certainly the young moorhens and mallards on the other side of the New River have no idea, and neither do I.

We cross Lordship Road and walk alongside the East Reservoir, now part of the Woodberry Wetlands Nature Reserve. Look at these rather fancy apartment blocks!

Some of the old machinery and buildings that were used to control the flow of water into and out of the reservoir still remain.

And how about this rather fine view south? The blooming Shard seems to photobomb every photo looking south.

And of course this wouldn’t be a Bugwoman blog without one of our insect friends, so here is a particularly fine hoverfly – I think Volucella inanis rather than the hornet-mimic hoverflies that I’ve been commenting on for weeks. This is a female (as you can tell by the yellow ‘gap’ between the eyes). What a spectacular critter she is, and this species is pushing north at a rate of knots, so you’ll probably spot her soon. As with the closely-related hornet-mimic hoverfly, the larvae of this species live in wasp nests, but unlike those of the hornet-mimic, who largely live on detritus and are a generally good thing for the wasps, these cheeky larvae actually eat the wasp grubs, and are specially flattened so that they can wriggle into the cells which protect them.

Anyway, by now we’re getting hungry (it must be a full two hours since we’ve eaten anything, poor things that we are) and so we detour into the café of the Wetlands Centre, where I have what is possibly the best smoked salmon and cream cheese bagel with pickled cucumber that I’ve ever had in my life. Swallows are skimming the water, I think I spot a yellow wagtail, and an emperor dragonfly is patrolling the weeds. What a splendid walk the Capital Ring is! I had forgotten how much green space there is in London, and how lucky us Londoners are. And so, I will leave you for today with a few photos of the lovely new flats that have sprung up next to the reservoir, unaffordable though they are by most of the people who used to live in the Council Houses with this magnificent view.

Dear Readers, we have finally had some rain over the past few days, and everything in the garden seems to have uttered a sigh of relief. We opened the front door midway through the first downpour to find several frogs hopping around – I have a suspicion that they’ve been waiting for some dampness to disperse. Certainly the pond is a lot quieter now than it was.

I still think that the hawthorn is outdoing itself, though, I have never seen it so heavy with berries. No wonder the area under the trees is bone dry, they must be using all the moisture for themselves, and who can blame them? I have terrible trouble finding something that will thrive under them after the spring bulbs are finished though. I suspect that some more soil improvement is key, but let me know if you’ve planted anything in a very dry shady area that works for you from mid-summer onwards. Gardening is such a lot of trial and error!

So, what else is in flower? Well the hemp agrimony – one plant is now just covered in rather untidy brown seeds, but the other two plants, which are in shadier spots, are still going well. The great willowherb is in full flower, and very pretty it is too.

My sedum (sorry, hylotelephium, old habits die hard) is coming into flower – what a bonus it is in late summer when everything else is going over! Bees and hoverflies seem to love it.

And how about this rather handsome fly? This is Xylota segnis, a hoverfly, although it spent more time leaping from leaf to leaf than flying. Apparently it doesn’t visit flowers and spends most of its time sitting around or scuttling across leaves collecting honeydew. Look at those massive compound eyes! Clearly this is a creature that it would be difficult to swat, should you be unkind enough to want to do so.

The fly would be very happy on my buddleia which is still dripping honeydew and has attracted a small army of flies and wasps. Every time I think about cutting it back it throws out some more flowers and all the butterflies, so I don’t have the heart.

So, how are you all doing, Readers? Has the drought played havoc with your courgettes? Have your runner beans keeled over? Let me know your news, good and bad.

 

Dear Readers, one great thing about the hemp agrimony around my pond is that it not only attracts masses of hoverflies, bees and butterflies, but that it’s also at a convenient height for me to get a good look. And so it was that this tiny bee, only 7 mm long, suddenly came to my attention. I had thought that it was a hoverfly, but close up it’s clearly not – it has those almond-shaped eyes that bees have, rather than the big round compound eyes of flies. Plus, it was gathering pollen at an astonishing rate, although as this is a male it must have been for his own consumption.

Bees in the Lasioglossum family might be more familiar to some of my overseas readers as ‘sweat bees’ – I certainly came across some tiny bees in Cameroon that were harmless but a bit of a nuisance. You couldn’t take a mouthful of food without getting a mouthful of bees which was very unpleasant for everyone concerned. However, this Common Furrow Bee (Lasioglossum calceatum) is a pure nectar and pollen feeder, and didn’t give me a second glance.

What is particularly striking about the males is that their abdomens look metallic, and in some they have these red and gold stripes. I’m fairly sure that I also saw some males who were black with gold stripes.  What handsome creatures they are! The females may nest together in aggregations, like solitary bees, usually in light soils, but they have also been observed in some areas as being ‘primitively eusocial’ – this means that there is some evidence of the development of workers and queens with distinct roles. The consensus is that in the north of the UK, where the flight season is a lot shorter, the bees tend to be solitary, probably because they don’t have time to rear workers and build up a nest.What ‘normally’ happens is that a single female will dig a long vertical tunnel with a tiny lateral chamber at the end, into which she will lay 4 to 7 eggs. She will then rush around feeding these larvae until they are old enough to take over the foraging, whereupon she will lay some more eggs that will develop into fertile females and males. Any resulting queens will overwinter as adults, ready to start breeding and pollinating again as early as the following March.

The Lasioglossum family contains over 1700 species worldwide (with about 30 species in the UK), and it’s fascinating to me that these creatures are showing such a wide variety of behaviours.

The males show a strong preference for flowers in the daisy family, so it’s not surprising to find one on this plant. Apparently the males sometimes ‘roost’ on flowerheads overnight – I shall have to have a look when the evenings draw in. The Common Furrow bee is one of the last of the solitary bees to cease flying in the autumn, with the last appearing as late as October.

We tend to think of bees as being large showy buzzy animals, but these little bees go about their business with a minimum of fuss, and if one ventured into your house I doubt if you would even notice. And yet, they are extremely active pollinators – the one in the photo didn’t stop flitting from one flower to another for the whole twenty minutes that I was watching. It really is the little critters that run the world.

 

Dear Readers, as I wander the dry and dusty streets of East Finchley there is one plant that I can usually hear from several metres away, as it is usually covered in bees, and that’s the abelia. There is one outside my friend A’s house which is actually more of a small tree at this point (and none the worse for it) and there is another, smaller shrub on Summerlee Avenue. Both of them have a delicious scent, to my nose midway between jasmine and honeysuckle, and the latter perfume is not surprising, as abelia are members of the honeysuckle family. The genus includes about 30 species and hybrids. Some are evergreen, and some are deciduous, but the plant occurs in two distinct ranges, with some coming from Mexico and Central America, and others coming from Asia (Japan west to the Himalayas). In both areas, the tropical species keep their leaves all year round, while those in temperate areas lose theirs.

My Gardening for Wildlife book (by Adrian Thomas) waxes lyrical about both the forms of abelia pictured above, but rates the Chinese abelia slightly higher because of its ‘pulling power’ for butterflies. Both are said to need a sheltered and sunny spot, and clearly they do well on London’s clay soil.

Abelia is named after Clarke Abel, a naturalist and surgeon who accompanied Lord Amherst on his diplomatic mission to China in 1816-17. While Lord Amherst was being diplomatic, Abel was collecting the seeds of the plant that would bear his name. Alas, on the trip home Abel’s ship was attacked by pirates and subsequently wrecked, so he lost all of his prized plants. Fortunately, he had left some abelia with a friend in Canton, and these were eventually returned to him in the UK.

Abel was also the first European to report the presence of orang-utans on Sumatra, and the animal also now bears his name.

And Abel was also the first European to report on the existence of the Tibetan antelope, or Chiru. This vanishingly-rare animal was driven almost to extinction because of its soft, warm underfur, which is woven into highly-prized shawls known as Shahtoosh in areas of Kashmir.

Medicinally, abelia has been used in India to treat blood in the urine – the seeds are boiled in buffalo milk and the resulting concoction is drunk daily for three days. The roots are thought to have anti-bacterial properties.

Although I can see no real evidence of abelia being edible, the flowers are certainly sold, vacuum-packed, for 8 euros, and can be used for salads, cocktails, desserts etc etc. The flowers are said to taste slightly of honey which is not surprising, considering how nectar-rich they are.

I keep reading that Abelia is symbolic of equality in Mexico, but this is one of those Wikipedia statements that just goes round and round with no source material ever cited, so it would be interesting to find out how accurate it is. However, one thing that has become abundantly clear is that Abelia is a very popular girl’s name, and this has wreaked havoc with my attempts to find a poem that actually mentions the plant, rather than being written by an Abelia. But then, I found this, by Robin Davidson, a poet who teaches Creative Writing in Houston.  See what you think.

LISTEN
…………..for Tony

Where do we go from here, where will the light across the cornice
of our love lead us, you and I, after the carnal breath?
Amaryllis and orchid tree, abelia and hawthorne, bougainvillea trailing
thorns and blossoms. We have made a desert of stones flower
at a seventy-year-old house’s edge. How long will a dying voice
shake this soil? Our bodies in laughter, dance? When will these shoulders
be clouds instead, a shroud, a swaddling, to meet some lake of things
we’ve known by heart. At this window, I watch the western cerulean sky
become blood-rose, study this pause which is not yet night,
the constellations still invisible. A bright memory is on the horizon,
postponed but nearer. We are here, nestled now in the furniture of
a house that speaks, doubles our love. Listen.

Photo Credits

Photo One by David J. Stang, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Photo Two By A. Barra – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3995941

Photo Three by By Tbachner – first upload in de wikipedia on 20:19, 10. Feb 2006 by Tbachner, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=727180

Photo Four by By 6-A04-W96-K38-S41-V38 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39336592

Photo Five by David J. Stang, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Dear Readers, I cannot tell you how delighted I am to have finally had the chance to use ‘the lesser of two weevils’ as my post title. I have been waiting since 2014 when I started the blog to make a really terrible pun, and here it is. But what we have here is another example of bioremediation, where an alien organism (usually a plant) is combatted with another alien organism (in this case, a weevil) in the hope that the results won’t be worse than the initial problem.

The problem here is a water plant called floating pennywort (Hydrocotyle ranunculoides), which is native to North and South America. Unfortunately it became popular as a pond plant and promptly escaped, choking watercourses up and down the land and being a general pest. As invasive species are estimated to cost the UK along up to 1.7 billion GBP per year, it’s clearly worth thinking about creative ways of dealing with the problem, but all of us will remember the law of unintended consequences, such as the release of harlequin ladybirds, originally brought in to tackle aphids but ending up being predators of other ladybird species. Is it possible to stop this kind of thing happening again?

It’s clear that our weevil has been carefully selected.  In South America, the adult insect eats the leaves, but the larvae eat the stalks from the inside out. The weevils were first deployed in the UK last winter, and everyone seems want some, from Hertfordshire to Yorkshire. Plus, the Dutch have a similar problem with the plant and are also keen to get their hands on some weevils.

Any creatures that are being considered as biological controls are assessed in the UK by CABI (the Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International. Before the weevils are released, they were assessed on the ten or so plants that grow next to floating pennywort, to make sure that they wouldn’t eat them. They were then tested on another 70 possible target plants that are found in the UK. Amongst the tests was the ‘no-choice’ test, where the poor long-suffering weevils are only presented with a single species of plant, and will basically starve if they don’t eat it. This sounds rather like my cat being presented with a different variety of cat food – I am fairly sure that she would starve rather than eat something inferior. Fortunately, I don’t put her to the test.

Once the weevils were considered to be very floating-pennywort-specific in their tastes, a licence was granted by the UK government, which allows for releases over the nest three years.

The next question is, will the weevils establish themselves, or will it be a case of ‘ see no weevil”? You might remember (or possibly not) that some sap-sucking bugs were released in 2010 to help to clear up Japanese Knotweed, and we can all see how effective that was (ahem).

Maybe we’ve just been singularly unlucky here in the UK – worldwide, according to New Scientist, of the 468 organisms released in 90 countries, 71 per cent established themselves, and 55 per cent caused medium or heavy damage to the target species that they were meant to be controlling. Less than ten per cent of biological control organisms target species that they weren’t meant to, and it seems that, with tests like those outlined above, we’re getting better at making sure that only the plants that are meant to get eaten get eaten.

The folk at CABI will be cheerfully breeding and rearing weevils in their hundreds of thousands now that the licence has been given. Let’s wish them (people and insects) the best of luck!

You can read the full New Scientist article here