Little Egret (Egretta garzetta) photographed in Venice…

Dear Readers, I was sitting in my garden, gazing at the sky absent-mindedly when I saw a white bird flying overhead.

‘Little egret’, I said to my husband. And I got to thinking about how amazing that would have been when I was growing up, and how commonly these birds are seen now –  the species was considered to be a national rarity when 3 popped up at Staines Reservoir in 1985. They didn’t breed until 1996. These days, you can see them all over the south of England and Ireland – about a thousand pairs breed each year, usually alongside grey herons, and there are an estimated 12,000 in the UK during the winter.

How can you identify a Little Egret? They are white with a black bill and the most attractive yellow feet, which have a decidedly ‘jazz hands’ feel about them. And what a fantastic photo the one below is, from Peter Hassett at Milton Keynes Natural History Society

Photograph by Peter Hassett, taken at Harrold Odell Country Park, 2019

Last year, there was a lot of excitement over at Walthamstow Wetlands when a Great White Egret arrived. This is a larger bird (about the size of a grey heron) with a yellow beak and no jazz hands! It is currently a much rarer visitor, but just as climate change seems to have encouraged the Little Egret northwards, so might it make life easier here for its larger cousin. Currently about 10 pairs breed in the UK every year, with a larger number visiting in the winter (72 in 2019).

Great White Egret (Ardea alba) (right) and Little Egret (left) Photo by P.L. Tandon at https://www.flickr.com/photos/13070711@N03/47060352071

And finally, here’s the bird that’s currently the rarest of all, though for how long only time will tell. The Cattle Egret (Bubulcus ibis) will be familiar to anyone who has spent time watching the herds of zebra or buffalo in southern Africa. Cattle Egrets first bred in the UK in 2008, but breeding wasn’t confirmed again until 2017. Since then, there have been about 20 known breeding pairs, but the birds can pop up anywhere in the UK during the winter. With their orange bills and copper-coloured ‘Mohicans’, and their habit of hanging out with cattle rather than lurking in the water, these birds should be fairly easy to identify, at least if you have a clear view. Outside the breeding season, the copper ‘flush’ is less noticeable, but note the short neck and thick bill with a black tip.

Cattle Egret in breeding plumage (Photo by By su neko – Cattle Egret, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3797259)

So, although we are losing birds (as evidenced by my Red List series), it’s sometimes good to remind ourselves that other birds are finding our conditions to their liking. Newish wetland reserves, like those at Woodberry and Walthamstow, are attracting an interesting range of water birds. It will be interesting to see who turns up in the future – there are currently occasional Glossy Ibis, an established population of Spoonbill in North Norfolk, and, very rarely, Purple Heron. It’s well worth popping  out to a lake or reservoir, preferably with binoculars in hand, to see what’s about. You might be surprised! And if you’ve noticed anything unusual, do share!

Purple Heron (Ardea purpurea) Photo by By Shantanu Kuveskar – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=94996249

False Acacia (Robinia pseudoacacia)

Dear Readers, I noticed several of these trees today at the entrance to Walthamstow Wetlands, and I was struck by their creamy floral perfume, and the decidedly bean-like appearance of the flowers. Otherwise known as the Black Locust, the False Acacia is indeed a member of the Fabaceae or bean family. It is a plant native to coastal regions of the north-eastern USA, but has been part of the UK’s flora since the 17th century – the first mention of the plant is in a catalogue from Tradescant’s garden from 1634. Although the tree has become something of a pest in southern Europe and parts of North America, in the UK it seems to cause no obvious problems (at least according to Stace and Crawley’s ‘Alien Plants’). I do note that the RHS categorise the tree as a ‘thug’, however, which probably means that it should be planted and watched with care.

False Acacia flowers (Photo By H. Zell – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11016434)

The flowers are beloved by bees – in France the honey that’s produced is highly prized and sold as ‘miel d’acacia‘. Interestingly, the flowering season for a particular tree is only about ten days, which makes me even happier that I caught the Walthamstow Wetland trees in their full glory. In some parts of Europe, a kind of floral ‘jam’ is made from the flowers, but as the leaves and bark of the tree are toxic, this needs to be made with considerable care. The flowers are also sometimes deep-fried as beignets or as tempura, and even the seedpods are sometimes eaten.

Robinia pseudoacacia ‘Frisia’ (Photo By © User:Colin / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16920751

False Acacia is often planted as a street tree, in particular the ‘Frisia’ cultivar seen above, which has lovely yellow foliage. However, in ‘London’s Street Trees’, Paul Wood describes how the tree often ‘drops’ branches, sometimes with no warning, which makes it rather less than popular than it would otherwise be.

The tree is a pioneer species, quickly growing on disturbed soil, which has made it a popular choice for planting  to reduce soil erosion – its vigorous root system helps to stabilise the soil, and, being a ‘bean’, it has nitrogen-fixing nodules that help to improve the soil.

False Acacia timber (Photo By Androstachys – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12077121)

In its native North America, False Acacia has a long history of being used for ship-building – it was used to make the ‘trunnels’ (a new word, hooray!) which is what the wooden pegs that hold the ship together are called. It was also used in marquetry, garden furniture, flooring and panelling. It is extremely rot-resistant, and can last for over 100 years in soil.

The living tree can last for a long time, too: the oldest tree in Paris is a False Acacia, planted in 1601 by its namesake Jean Robiner from a seed that he found in the Appalachian mountains. It can be found in the Square René Viviani. Propped up as it is, it still looks like a happy and healthy tree, in spite of having its upper branches blown off by a shell during World War I.

False Acacia in the Square Rene Viviani in Paris (Photo By Tangopaso – Self-photographed, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10384009)

And here’s a poem by Kathleen Raine, describing the urban and natural environments and how they interconnect in a way that I find irresistible. See what you think.

Dear Readers, there are many things that can  be discombobulating, but jet lag is right up there in the list of possible causes. What day/time is it again? What am I supposed to be doing?

Well, right up there with the list of things that I should be doing is revising for my Open University exam – it’s on Wednesday 4th June, so not very far into the future. But when I open my notes they might as well be in Sanskrit – my mind seems rather thinner than it should be, and all I can do is yawn. Never mind. I take myself outside for a walk around the garden, and notice the seedheads on the clematis. I’ve always loved them – my Mum used to call them ‘little hairdos’ but I’d never noticed that, actually, they go through a variety of stages. In the photo above, the one on the left is decidedly poodle-esque, while the one on the right has a more Afghan hound-ish look. Apparently, the  ‘tails’ of the seeds become fluffier as the seeds ripen, to allow the seed to travel further when it’s released, so the Afghan Hound is younger than  the Poodle. Also, one should also cut the seed heads off to encourage flowering. A bit too late, in  this case!

If the seeds have not been fertilised, there will be no little seedpod attached to the tail, so I will have to have a closer look. It’s very tempting to plant a few seeds, but they are unlikely to come ‘true’ (this clematis is one of the spring-flowering ones, not the ubiquitous ‘Freckles’  but something similar), and also they can take up to three years to germinate.

As I wander around, I note that the pond level has gone down by a good six inches in sunny weather, and keep my fingers crossed that one of the forecast thunderstorms dumps its water in East Finchley. Everything is a bit dry and breathless and on the verge of wilting. Including me! Time for a cup of tea, I think, and a bit of acceptance that the brain is not firing on all cylinders today, and I might just as well go and do something useful that doesn’t involve learning the insulin signalling pathway. Sometimes, giving up is not the worst thing in the world.

Incidentally, ‘discombobulate’ comes originally from the early 19th century in the USA – it’s a humorous word apparently based on ‘discomfit’ or ‘discompose’. And there is no antonym, i.e. ‘combobulate’. So now we know.

The sun shone brightly for our last morning in Toronto, as it so often does – it’s as if the place wants to make us even more reluctant to leave than we already are. And I must admit that my heart increasingly belongs to London and Toronto in equal measure. While London bears the weight of history, Toronto has the brashness of a relatively new place, which changes every time we visit, sometimes for the better, sometimes not. Take the CN Tower, for example. Finished in 1976, it was at 1815 feet the tallest free-standing tower in the world until 2007 when the Burj Khalifa took the record. It soldiered on as the world’s tallest tower until 2009 when the Canton Tower overtook it. Today, it’s the tenth tallest tower in the world, and the tallest free-standing structure on land in the Western Hemisphere. Which might seem something of a comedown, but this is an iconic landmark that seems to pop up wherever you are in Toronto, in much the same way as the Post Office Tower seems to peer from the most surprising alleyways in London.

Our last morning in Toronto is always a bit tricky to navigate, but on a glorious morning it was wonderful to walk alongside the Lake, hearing the red-winged blackbirds calling, and positively tripping over the sparrows. What a delight it is to hear them everywhere, to see them disappearing into the smallest crevices in old buildings and new skyscrapers alike. There were even some chirruping in the atrium below. I think this is the most beautiful internal space in Toronto.

This is the Allen Lambert Galleria in Brookfield Place – it was designed by architect Santiago Calatrava, who seems to specialise in buildings and bridges that seem to defy gravity. Certainly this is a light and airy space with something of the cathedral about it. And inside, there’s a fine piece of ‘facadism’, with the front wall of the bank that used to stand on this street preserved as if pinned in a case of butterflies.

And so we head home, though I always feel melancholy leaving the friends and family here. It’s strange to feel so attached to a place thousands of miles away from where I live, but then I have been coming to Toronto for 25 years, so I suppose it was going to work its way under my skin at some point. This time, we’ve celebrated my mother-in-law’s 97th birthday, and said goodbye to her 95 year-old sister. I’m both glad to be heading home to London, and sad to be leaving.

Pond pre-duckweed removal…. 

Dear Readers, well here we are, back in East Finchley. Gosh, has it been dry! Some of the plant containers were positively dusty, and the duckweed had taken advantage of us not doing a regular skimming and has taken over the whole pond.

What was a delight, though, was to see the whitebeam….

…and the hawthorn coming back to life. it will take them a few seasons to recover properly, but I have made both trees a promise that I’ll give them a much less drastic trim more frequently, so that they never need something so drastic again.

My wildflower seeds are popping up, and I see rather a lot of garlic mustard, which is no bad thing – the orange-tip and brimstone butterflies love it, and it’s even edible. Plus, it springs up and then dies back, so there won’t always be so much of it.

Garlic mustard (Jack-by-the-hedge)

And the Lamium orvala (balm-leaved deadnettle) is doing very well this year, and is taking advantage of the sunnier conditions now that it isn’t so overshadowed. The bumblebees love it!

We seem to have a lot of white Herb Robert…

and, of course, green alkanet, though a little less than last year.

John started to remove some of the duckweed, and spotted this little guy… I love the way that they swim with their legs by their sides, like some kind of sea monster.

And there are some adult frogs left…

…and lots of tadpoles, which get tangled up with the duckweed and have to be gently flicked back into the pond.

So we removed about two thirds of the duckweed, to make sure there was still a bit of shade. No doubt it will be back to complete cover once we turn our backs.

And blimey, it’s very warm, even in our north-facing garden. There are lots of holly blue butterflies, quite a few small red damselflies, and the first fledgling starlings. Ah spring. what a wonderful season.

Butterscotch Budino (Photo by Carl Black athttps://www.flickr.com/photos/mentalize/13574138793)

Dear Readers, poet Martha Silano died last week. She was a friend of a friend, and a friend bought me a book of her poems, which I loved. Martha died of ALS, otherwise known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, and had lost both her parents in the space of a few months in 2020. But look what she’s left us!. May her memory be a blessing. Holding her in my heart.

When I’m on the Bed

called death, I hope
to be thinking about
the texture of the bucatini
at Campiello, how they seated us
in the bar by the pizza cooks, but when we asked to sit elsewhere

they put us beside
a giant strangler fig
with fake orchids we thought were real.
Al dente, which I pronounced al Dante, in honor of my nephew,
in honor of the circles of hell, my heritage. When I’m on the bed called death

I hope I recall your smile that evening
when you learned budino means pudding,
a butterscotch pudding, which we more than managed
despite finishing our entrées. In la stanza della morte, shoving off
my mortal foil, may I be dreaming of butterscotch pudding, the feel of
my hand

on your back, recalling the call you made
from a mile down the beach to tell me there were no
yellow hilly hoop hoops, greater cheena reenas, or froo froostilts.
I walk back to the car while you call again, this time to tell me you found
a flock of dunlins and semipalmated sandpipers. There’s an actual flush toilet

at the parking lot! And potable water! And my love calls again,
this time to say he’s nearing the path to the parking lot. No, I don’t have
the keys to the car or a single coin, but I’ve got water, binoculars, and my phone,
a little notebook to write down the species—tricolored heron, royal tern, wood stork—
which I’ll add to my list of what to think about when I’m on my giant bucatini platter of a bed.

Is This My Last Ferry Trip?

Is this the last time I’ll admire the guys
in their neon-yellow slickers, guiding us
to our parking spots before we head up

two flights to the passenger deck,
to the cafeteria where a man in a black derby
and black suspenders nods and smiles

as he nibbles popcorn? In honor of this maybe
last trip to San Juan Island, the last time
I hear that somber wail of a horn,

I’m gonna go see if there’s anything I can eat,
and of course there is: Ivar’s clam chowder,
just what the nutritionist ordered:

extra cream, extra butter, tiny potatoes I easily swallow.
Two spoons: one for me, one for the man
otherwise known as my personal

representative. When the time comes, he will help me administer
the cocktail that kills, but until then it’s The Marvelous
Mrs. Maisel, his book about Vronsky and Anna,

my book about the journey to the Higgs boson,
while our daughter calls to remind us
to take pictures of things

she can draw—a sprig of rose hips, a clump of serviceberries.
A deer she nicknamed Chewy. Bellies full of chowder,
we almost forget one of us is dying.

The Zhong Hua Men Archway at the bottom of Gerrard Street East, Toronto

Dear Readers, we started our walk along Gerrard Street at the Zhong Hua Men Archway, celebrating the history of the Chinese people in Canada, and particularly the 17,000 workers who built the Transnational Railway (some of whom died in the process). It was fundraised for for years, and was finally built in 2009. There are two white marble lions on the other side (which like a twit I didn’t photograph), and these were donated by the People’s Republic of China. I really loved the plaque on the right, which shows a couple of well-fed pandas.

The Gerrard Street Chinatown is small (the main Chinatown in Toronto is probably now out in the suburbs in Markham) but there are still plenty of Chinese shops and restaurants, and the occasional cross-pollination – we saw an Italian hairdressers with the signs in English and Chinese, for example, and plenty of older Chinese people still live here.  The houses on the side streets are small but the whole area is gentrifying, so whether younger Chinese people will be able to stay remains to be seen.

Just a short walk away from Chinatown, we found one of the most interesting social housing projects I’ve ever come across. The Bain Co-op was built between 1913 and 1920, and was heavily influenced by the English Garden Suburb movement – the aim was to have a mixture of residential areas and green spaces. There are 260 apartments in total, and the main avenue is flanked by London Plane trees, something of a rarity in these parts.

I loved what has been done here. Everyone has a small garden, and there are larger green areas where children can play. The Bain was designed by British architect Eden Smith, and it has a lot of things that more recent affordable housing developments do not: access to the street from all the apartments, cross-ventilation, indoor toilets,gas stoves and running water – all this over one hundred years ago. The noticeboards show a host of activities going on, and there is a real sense of community here. Plus, the rents really are affordable, there are loans available for people in short-term financial difficulty, and most of the people here get some form of benefits. It feels to me like a place where you can live with dignity even if you aren’t earning a lot, and surely that should be the aim of any civilised society.

Anyhow, eventually we tore ourselves away and marched along the road in the direction of Little India. On the way we passed this sign, which feels particularly Canadian to me for some reason. Where else could you find out about the temporary re-location of the temporary dog park, in both French and English?

Anyhow, soon the names of the shops lost their Chinese characters, and became South Asian instead. The Lahore Tikka House reminded me of the world-famous Lahore Kebab restaurant in London’s East End, though it’s bigger and fancier.

There are sari shops and shops selling Indian sweets, shops selling Indian cooking utensils and everywhere a delicious smell of spice.

But perhaps no where shows the mixing of cultures so much as some of the restaurants – the one below sells Chinese chow mein, Nepalese momos, and Vietnamese hot and sour soup, all on a road where most of the restaurants are selling South Asian food. Oh, and it had a halal sign on the door.

So, as we got the streetcar back to College station, I mused on the nature of Toronto’s multiculturalism. In the course of a single street you can encounter two distinct cultures, plus the very varied occupants of the Bain Coop, plus the gay community and the gentrifiers. And while it isn’t paradise, it generally seems to work. No wonder Canada has no intention of becoming the 51st state. Elbows up!

Dear Readers, today we took a walk along Gerrard Street East in Toronto. We started with a Chinese Arch, went through one of Toronto’s Chinatowns, wandered through a stereotype-busting social housing project, and ended up in Little India, and I will be talking more about all of that over the next few days. But first up, I wanted to share some of the front gardens and municipal areas that we walked through with you, because for once we were actually here at what feels like the peak of spring, and today was such perfect weather.

Although the front gardens are mostly very small, people certainly know how to make the best of them. The sheer range of tulips was astonishing.Presumably the squirrels are not as fond of them here as they are in my garden, where they’re hardly worth planting because the little furry critters dig them up.

Furthermore, the magnolias are in full flower, and here’s a yellow one that I’d never seen before…

Plus the more usual pink and white ones…

And there’s a yellow Acer next to a yellow Forsythia…

…and lots of violets…

We stopped off for a coffee and had a chat with a woman who was in the potash business, and who had the loveliest Old English Sheepdog (though she did describe him as a ‘carpet’ which was descriptive if not kind). And then we passed this church, which was the first church in North America to marry a same-sex couple, though the pastor wore a bullet-proof vest, just in case. This was back in 2001, and the church was also very active during the AIDs crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. It continues to advocate for the LGBTQ+ community and for refugees and asylum-seekers.

Tomorrow, let’s have a look at some of the other communities along Gerrard, and how the street changes as you toddle along it.

Dear Readers, there are some things that you expect when you visit Toronto. There is, shall we say, a certain degree of verticality.

And at this time of year, there are some very attractive spring flowers, particularly tulips which seem to be everywhere…

But wait, what is this I see?

Yes, it’s a herd of bronze cows, and why not?

The work is called ‘The Pasture’ and it’s by Canadian sculptor Joseph Fafard. it’s been here, outside the Toronto Dominion towers, since 1985, so goodness knows how come I haven’t noticed it before. I was really charmed by a small child wandering over and gently patting one of the cows. You can see his dad in the photo below.

Fafard was an interesting artist, with a great love of animals, cows in particular – they can be found all over Canada. I love the unexpectedness of them, and the reminder that, not too long ago, all of this glass and steel and concrete was fields, with cattle gently grazing.