Dear Readers, by the time you read this I will have been on the first part of the  Living Well, Dying Well Foundation course – I consider myself very lucky to have been advised, mentored and supported by the people at the care home where Mum and Dad passed away, and I’ve had a strong feeling that I’d like to be able to do something similar for others who are dying, or whose loved ones are dying.

I always thought that, as a society,  we don’t talk enough about death – Mum was always up for a conversation about it, which was so useful when we came to her last days and had to decide what kind of care she would like, and what she wanted for her funeral. Dad was more of a ‘put your fingers in your ears and go la-la-la’ kind of person, and so when he was dying I had to decide what he would have wanted – clearly not an ideal situation, but somehow we muddled through, even though it was at the beginning of the Covid pandemic.

What my parents had done right was a) to have Powers of Attorney and wills in place, b) to have let me have access to all their financial details, so that I didn’t have to worry about where their bank accounts/insurance policies/savings accounts were, and c) to give me the phone numbers and email addresses for all their close friends and family. Such little things in one  way, but so important in others. I’m very aware that I’m not yet in the same situation – I do have a will, but the POAs that I’ve been trying to draft for my husband and I are somehow stalled at the solicitor (long story) so I need to summon up the energy to chase them up and finalise them.

But what seems so important  about the whole dying process is to know, in advance, what the  person involved values, what they need in order to allow them to pass peacefully, what their priorities are. I know that I would love some contact with nature, even if it’s just birdsong through a window, or the sight of a tree waving in the breeze. But for everyone it will be different, and I think our imagination sometimes fails when we’re under extreme  stress. How much better it is to think about it, and to talk about it, before things become a crisis, while we’re calm and the end of our days seems a long way away.

Anyhow, I am hoping that after 5 days of training, I will be in a better position to think about dying, and to know if I want to go to formally become what’s called a Death Doula – someone who helps others during the dying process, whether with emotional support, advocacy, or practical things. And although I won’t be able to write about the experiences of others on the course (because naturally these things are confidential), I will keep you posted about my thoughts once the course is over and I’ve processed what I’ve experienced. It will be an interesting and challenging few days, for sure.

Photo by Eugene Beckes https://www.flickr.com/photos/61210501@N04/6012925289/

Wedding Poem

By Ross Gay
for Keith and Jen

Friends I am here to modestly report
seeing in an orchard
in my town
a goldfinch kissing
a sunflower
again and again
dangling upside down
by its tiny claws
steadying itself by snapping open
like an old-timey fan
its wings
again and again,
until, swooning, it tumbled off
and swooped back to the very same perch,
where the sunflower curled its giant
swirling of seeds
around the bird and leaned back
to admire the soft wind
nudging the bird’s plumage,
and friends I could see
the points on the flower’s stately crown
soften and curl inward
as it almost indiscernibly lifted
the food of its body
to the bird’s nuzzling mouth
whose fervor
I could hear from
oh 20 or 30 feet away
and see from the tiny hulls
that sailed from their
good racket,
which good racket, I have to say
was making me blush,
and rock up on my tippy-toes,
and just barely purse my lips
with what I realize now
was being, simply, glad,
which such love,
if we let it,
makes us feel.

Stalked Jellyfish Depastrum cyathiforme (Illustration by marine biologist Philip Henry Gosse)

Aaargh! I accidentally posted this yesterday, so here it is again today…

Dear Readers, with species going extinct almost before we can put a name to them, it is such a pleasure to announce that a stalked jellyfish, thought to be extinct worldwide for the past 50 years, was rediscovered by amateur naturalist Neil Roberts back in 2023. The last time the jellyfish had been seen anywhere was in France in 1976, and the animal was last spotted in the UK on Lundy Island  in 1954.

Roberts was rockpooling in South Uist when he spotted what he describes as ‘a stalked jellyfish that I didn’t recognise’. He popped his newly-purchased camera into the water with ‘some trepidation’ (quite understandable) and took a few photos. These proved to be the first-ever photos taken of this particular species of stalked jellyfish. Jellyfish expert David Fenwick went back to the site this year, and found the species again, so it appears that there’s an established population in the Outer Hebrides.

What are stalked jellyfish, though? I must admit that I’d never heard of them. Like sea anemones, these jellyfish attach themselves to rock via a sucker, and then catch small crustaceans via the stinging cells in their short tentacles. This particular species is less than 5 cm tall, and has been described as ‘looking like a thistle’. You can see some of the photos taken in 2023 and 2025 here. The UK is a hotspot for stalked jellyfish (again, who knew?), and another species, the St John’s Jellyfish, is found only in the UK and Ireland.  In all, we host 10 out of the 50 known species of stalked jellyfish.

St John’s Jellyfish (Calvadosia cruxmelitensis ) Photo by David Fenwick Snr from https://www.marlin.ac.uk/species/detail/14

It appears that, like so many creatures, stalked jellyfish are particularly sensitive to water quality in general, and nutrient run-off in particular. With the waters around the far north of Scotland being some of the cleanest in the UK this may explain why these little creatures are hanging on in the Outer Hebrides, though it would be interesting to know if they’ve survived in other places but have just gone unnoticed. Their survival highlights the importance of Marine Conservation Areas, and also the importance of the amateur naturalist, who notices something unusual and takes the time and trouble to take a photo of it. One person’s curiosity, and attention to even the smallest ‘blobs of jelly’ in a rockpool, have given us all a bit of a lift. It will be interesting to know if more of this species now turn up in other locations, now that we know that looking for them isn’t a lost cause.

Highlands Giant Acrophylla stick insect (Acrophylla alta) Photo By Ross coupland – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=171201338

Goodness, Readers, clearly Bug Woman needs to head to Australia to check out the invertebrates, because this chunky stick insect is thought to be the heaviest insect in the country, weighing in at 44 grams, about as much as a golf ball. It can grow to about 40 cms long, and even has wings, though it’s thought that these are probably used to help the insect glide downwards rather than do anything more spectacular. Which is probably just as well, as being clunked on the head by a massive stick insect is probably one of the more colourful ways to get concussion.

You may wonder how such a huge insect has evaded scientists until this year, but the Highlands Giant Acrophylla is extremely well camouflaged, as you can see, and also lives in the Wet Rainforests of Queensland, described by New Scientist as ‘a true wilderness’ (and long may it remain so). Also, the insect is a canopy dweller, hanging around up to 60 metres above the ground, and it also lives only at altitudes above 900 metres. Scientists currently have no way of knowing how rare or common the insect is, because it’s so hard to survey the region.

This stick insect does remind me of one that I found in Cameroon though…I still have no idea of the species, but the finding of the Australian stick insect has made me want to find out more about this creature. iNaturalist has a stick insect group, so maybe I’ll wander over there….

Startling as they are, it’s worth remembering that stick insects are all harmless plant eaters, just trying to pass themselves off as leaves or sticks in the hope of being left alone. And furthermore (she says in a whisper) there are three wild stick insect species in the UK, in frost-free parts of Cornwall, Devon and Dorset. All of them are species from New Zealand, and are thought to have arrived as eggs in imported tree ferns – stick insects simply drop their eggs rather than laying them with any thought or consideration, slatterns that they are, and the eggs hid away in the crevices of the plants until they hatched and tiny stick insects emerged.

Once here, they set about making themselves at home and, as females are parthenogenic (can lay fertile eggs without needing a male) the populations have increased to a reasonable size, though there is no indication that they have caused any problems to plants. It was thought that all the insects in the UK were female, but then a lone male was discovered in 2018. Some of these populations have been here a very long time: the Prickly Stick Insect was discovered in Tresco Abbey Gardens in Cornwall in 1909, and the Smooth Stick insect in 1949, while the final arrival, the Unarmed Stick Insect (a name which begs a number of questions) was first seen, in Truro, in 1979. So it appears that Cornwall is the stick insect capital of the UK. Whether the insects will wander further as the climate warms is anybody’s guess.

Personally, I’m awaiting the arrival of the Praying Mantis, and possibly the Ant Lion. It’s only a matter of time….

Unarmed Stick Insect (Acanthoxyla inermis) Photo by By jacog – https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/35254511, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=78595029

Western Gull (Larus occidentalis)

Dear Readers, this has been a good week for news about animals, and I shall be sharing a few stories over the next few days. However, to kick off with, here’s a story that reaffirms what I always thought about gulls – they are a lot smarter than we think.

Back in 2018, researcher Scott Shaffer was working with Western Gulls on a rocky outcrop close to San Francisco. Western Gulls are very similar to our Herring Gulls, with, it appears, a similar eye for opportunity. The gulls were being fitted with GPS trackers, so that the scientist could monitor their feeding behaviour. Imagine his surprise when the data recorded that one particular female Western Gull had travelled at 60 miles per hour along a highway to a rubbish facility 80 miles away. Western Gulls can normally fly at about 20 miles per hour.

Detail from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-california-gull-hitched-a-ride-on-a-garbage-truck-and-took-an-80-mile-journey-to-a-compost-facility-then-it-happened-again-180986979/

Furthermore, a few days later the same gull made the same trip again.

Shaffer’s theory about what happened is  as follows. The gull was probably feeding on the food scraps contained in an 18 wheeler garbage truck, when she was inadvertently trapped beneath the netting that the workers throw over the back of the vehicle to stop the rubbish falling out. Off she went to gull heaven – a composting and recycling facility. She flew back home, and then, two days later, she voluntarily perched on another garbage truck and rode it all the way back to the composting facility.

Of course, there are still a lot of questions, because sadly we can’t ask the gull what she thought she was doing. However, my guess is that, having found the ‘pot of gold at the end of the rainbow’ when she originally rode a garbage truck by mistake, she was able to recognise the same kind of vehicle, and decided to see if this too would take her to a rich food source. Which it did.

I wonder if she’ll teach this behaviour to other gulls, and in particular to her children? It will be interesting to see if San Francisco garbage trucks become a kind of gull  bus service. I, for one, can’t wait to see what comes next. And how I’d love to have been in the lab when the data came in, showing that there were superspeed gulls out there. I imagine there was a lot of head scratching.

You can read the full story here.

Darwin’s Plant Carrier (Vasculum) from the Beagle

Dear Readers, on Thursday I popped to the British Library – I needed to renew my Readers’ Pass, following the massive cyberattack on the library last year, and I also wanted to see “Unearthed – The Power of Gardening” before it finishes on 10th August.

The Readers’ Pass must be one of the best bargains in London. All of those books and manuscripts (and sheet music) for free! No wonder there was a hefty queue. I always find the staff at the Library endlessly polite and patient, and there is also a rather fine new café which is always something of a draw.

New caff at the British Library

Anyhow, I was not just here for cake (a scurrilous rumour) and so off I went to the exhibition. As is usual at the British Library, there were many, many books, but also some things I didn’t expect, such as the vasculum that Charles Darwin had with him on the Beagle (vasculi were used to hold plant specimens). The exhibition had sections on medieval gardens, gardening for food, medicinal plants, community gardening, guerrilla gardening, plant collecting and colonialism, and gardening for pollinators, so when I came out my head was absolutely spinning. However, here are a few highlights.

The book above is the only known Anglo-Saxon herbal – it advises that chamomile is good for sore eyes (and indeed I’ve been known to use a cold chamomile teabag when my eyes have been playing up), but the plant on the left with a snake under it was known as ‘hart’s fern’, and was said to be good for snake bite.

This is the first known article on the poinsettia, that mainstay of Christmases everywhere….

Gertrude Jekyll’s gardening boots!

And above are Gertrude Jekyll’s gardening boots, looking suspiciously as if they may have been re-soled. I admire the hobnails, though.

The section on Gardens and Food had some splendid WWII posters…

…some photos of people from the UK’s many different communities working their allotments…

and this rather wonderful painting of the humble cabbage.

A Wardian case

The Victorians are responsible for introducing thousands of plant species to the UK, and many of them were carried here in Wardian cases, which acted as a kind of mini-greenhouse. In some cases, local people were recruited to help with the hunt for unusual and rare plants and were paid for their labour, but Sir John Sloane used to quiz slaves about the way in which various plants were used. Artists were taken on plant-hunting trips to illustrate the plants, and some of the illustrations are strikingly beautiful, such as the one of a rhododendron below. If the Victorians had known quite how invasive some species of rhododendron were going to turn out (not to mention Japanese knotweed, giant hogweed and Himalayan balsam) maybe they’d have thought twice.

Some of the most interesting sections,  though, were where people were reasserting their power through gardening, whether by taking over land and planting  allotments, or guerrilla gardening. One project that particularly stood out for me was The Pansy Project. Artist Paul Harfleet has been planting pansies at sites of homophobic abuse since 2005, and has written a book, Pansy Boy, about bullying, and being different, and how the love of the natural world and of beauty can help.

So, I left the exhibition with my head spinning. There are so many things to think about here – after all, gardening has meant so many things to so many people. But what really came across was the way that growing plants is so often a force for good, be it through providing food or medicine, bringing people together, or broadening peoples’ horizons. It’s well worth a look if you’re in London, but hurry – it finishes next week.

https://events.bl.uk/exhibitions/unearthed-the-power-of-gardening

Dear Readers, as I was walking along East Finchley High Road today, I was gently walloped on the head by a chunk of bark from one of our magnificent London Plane trees. And not for the first time! Marcel Proust wrote a whole series of novels based on the flavour of a madeleine that took him back to his childhood, but for me, a piece of bark took me back to 2018, another hot dry summer. This was when I first noticed that the Plane trees were shedding a lot of bark, so much so that some of them looked white, and the same thing is happening this year.

High Road Plane tree this year

It turns out that this is a known phenomenon. What happens is that the trunk of the tree, which conducts water to the leaves, actually shrinks during drought conditions, such as those in 2018 and potentially this year. This loosens the outer layer of bark, which then falls. London Planes lose bark regularly anyway (and this is thought to be a reaction to pollution, and a protection against fungi/parasites), but this is independent of the drought-induced bark shedding.

A study in Mainz was conducted during the drought of 2018, to see if the location of 349 London Plane trees affected the amount of bark loss. The trees were measured for location, the impermeability of the soil round about, and various other measures. It was expected that the most urban trees would have the worst bark loss, but this turned out not to be so – trees were affected not so much by the lack of water, as by the temperature. This is an uncomfortable finding, because it suggests that no amount of watering/improving soil permability will improve the outcome for the trees – climate change and increasing temperature is the main cause of the bark loss, and it appears to be this that causes the shrinkage in the trunk, rather than the lack of water on its own.

Bark loss on its own won’t kill a London Plane, but it is an indicator of stress. This might make the tree more vulnerable to fungi, viruses or insects like the Plane Lace Bug.

Whenever I walk under the Plane trees en route to East Finchley Station, I am always so grateful to them for the shade that they provide. You can feel the drop in temperature as you enter their shadow. Let’s hope that their famous resilience to urban stressors will be great enough to encompass even the challenge of our increasingly long, hot summers.

London Plane tree in Temple Gardens, probably planted in 1770

Wood Thrush (Photo by 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=130686357)

I think this poem sums up the arc of living with depression better than any that I’ve ever read. See what you think.

Having It out with Melancholy

Jane Kenyon 1947 – 1995

If many remedies are prescribed
for an illness, you may be certain
that the illness has no cure.
—A. P. CHEKHOV
The Cherry Orchard

1 FROM THE NURSERY
When I was born, you waited
behind a pile of linen in the nursery,
and when we were alone, you lay down
on top of me, pressing
the bile of desolation into every pore.
And from that day on
everything under the sun and moon
made me sad—even the yellow
wooden beads that slid and spun
along a spindle on my crib.
You taught me to exist without gratitude.
You ruined my manners toward God:
“We’re here simply to wait for death;
the pleasures of earth are overrated.”
I only appeared to belong to my mother,
to live among blocks and cotton undershirts
with snaps; among red tin lunch boxes
and report cards in ugly brown slipcases.
I was already yours—the anti-urge,
the mutilator of souls.

2 BOTTLES
Elavil, Ludiomil, Doxepin,
Norpramin, Prozac, Lithium, Xanax,
Wellbutrin, Parnate, Nardil, Zoloft.
The coated ones smell sweet or have
no smell; the powdery ones smell
like the chemistry lab at school
that made me hold my breath.

3 SUGGESTION FROM A FRIEND
You wouldn’t be so depressed
if you really believed in God.

4 OFTEN
Often I go to bed as soon after dinner
as seems adult
(I mean I try to wait for dark)
in order to push away
from the massive pain in sleep’s
frail wicker coracle.

5 ONCE THERE WAS LIGHT
Once, in my early thirties, I saw
that I was a speck of light in the great
river of light that undulates through time.
I was floating with the whole
human family. We were all colors—those
who are living now, those who have died,
those who are not yet born. For a few
moments I floated, completely calm,
and I no longer hated having to exist.
Like a crow who smells hot blood
you came flying to pull me out
of the glowing stream.
“I’ll hold you up. I never let my dear
ones drown!” After that, I wept for days.

6 IN AND OUT
The dog searches until he finds me
upstairs, lies down with a clatter
of elbows, puts his head on my foot.
Sometimes the sound of his breathing
saves my life—in and out, in
and out; a pause, a long sigh. . . .

7 PARDON
A piece of burned meat
wears my clothes, speaks
in my voice, dispatches obligations
haltingly, or not at all.
It is tired of trying
to be stouthearted, tired
beyond measure.
We move on to the monoamine
oxidase inhibitors. Day and night
I feel as if I had drunk six cups
of coffee, but the pain stops
abruptly. With the wonder
and bitterness of someone pardoned
for a crime she did not commit
I come back to marriage and friends,
to pink fringed hollyhocks; come back
to my desk, books, and chair.

8 CREDO
Pharmaceutical wonders are at work
but I believe only in this moment
of well-being. Unholy ghost,
you are certain to come again.
Coarse, mean, you’ll put your feet
on the coffee table, lean back,
and turn me into someone who can’t
take the trouble to speak; someone
who can’t sleep, or who does nothing
but sleep; can’t read, or call
for an appointment for help.
There is nothing I can do
against your coming.
When I awake, I am still with thee.

9 WOOD THRUSH
High on Nardil and June light
I wake at four,
waiting greedily for the first
note of the wood thrush. Easeful air
presses through the screen
with the wild, complex song
of the bird, and I am overcome
by ordinary contentment.
What hurt me so terribly
all my life until this moment?
How I love the small, swiftly
beating heart of the bird
singing in the great maples;
its bright, unequivocal eye.