Author Archives: Bug Woman

Wednesday Weed – Yew Revisited

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Dear Readers, it’s always fun to visit an old friend, so I jumped at the chance to go with my human friend L to visit the Totteridge Yew, the oldest tree in London (at approximately 2000 years old). I’ve written about in detail below, but my trip today was in particular to look at an interesting gall that seems to have developed since I last visited.

If you look closely at the photograph above, you’ll see what look like green dahlias growing at the end of some of the branches, in amongst the perfectly normal red ‘fruit’ (known as arils). These ‘dahlias’ are caused by a tiny midge, known as the Yew Artichoke gall fly (Taxomyia taxi). In year one, the midge lays an egg on the bud of the tree, which develops into a bright orange larva, which then lives in the gall for two whole years before emerging as an adult fly. Like all galls, the ‘artichoke’ is a result of chemical signals secreted by the insect, which ‘persuade’ the yew to produce the protective structure. When the fly leaves, the galls go brown – you can see one or two in the photo above.

In spite of the pretty heavy infestation, the Totteridge Yew is overall looking extremely healthy – the galls are unsightly, but don’t appear to do permanent damage to the tree. And in its two thousand years, I imagine that the tree has had to contend with much worse threats. It’s certainly covered in

And so, here is a piece that I wrote about the tree back in 2014. Has it really been ten years since I was last here? Goodness, how the time goes….and if you read down to the end, you’ll see that my basic manifesto hasn’t changed.

The Totteridge Yew

The Totteridge Yew (Taxus baccata)

I have always felt a little melancholy at New Year. Maybe it’s because I’m an introvert, and I no longer drink alcohol, both of which make me uneasy in situations of forced jollity and large crowds. Or maybe it’s because January feels more like a time for staying in bed, preferably with an excellent novel and a bowl of syrup pudding and custard, than a time for taking up jogging and eating kale. I feel a little out of step with the current need to be happy and shiny and full of vim on all occasions, and it’s difficult to escape a sneaking suspicion that I am some kind of alien as I watch the end-of-year shenanigans unfold.

So to give myself some perspective I went to see the oldest living thing in London with my long-suffering husband, John. This magnificent Yew tree lives in St Andrew’s churchyard in Totteridge, a twenty-minute bus ride from East Finchley. It has seen at least two thousand New Year’s days come and go, and is still full of fresh growth and vigor. To ensure its health, a team from Kew Gardens visited some thirty years ago and did a little judicious pruning and shoring up of the centre of the plant, which invariably becomes hollow as the plant ages.  The trunk is over twenty-six feet in circumference, and the wood is remarkable. In some places, it looks almost as if it is encrusted with sea creatures.

IMG_0935In others, there are little interstices which form homes for spiders and other invertebrates.

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Yew is often found in churchyards. In some cases, it was deliberately planted to provide wood for longbows, but in this and many other cases, the tree long predates the church (there has been some kind of ecclesiastical building here since about 1250). It is very likely that the church was built on a site that was already sacred to the people of the area, and that the tree, then a stripling of just over a thousand years old, would have been locally important as a site for ritual and for meetings. Later, it was a site for the gathering of the Hundred, the medieval equivalent of the Magistrate’s court. In 1722, a baby was found under the tree, and was named ‘Henry Totteridge’ and made a ward of the parish.

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Part of the reason for the longevity of Yew is that it is very slow-growing, and some scientists believe that the trees could reach ages of four to five thousand years. The Totteridge Yew is one of ten trees in the UK that date back to before the tenth century. Yew is very resistant to the fungal diseases which can cause the death of other trees by infecting the spot where a branch has dropped off. The tree can also regenerate from cut surfaces and from the base of the trunk even when it is of advanced years.

Yew berry (By Didier Descouens (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)

Yew berry (By Didier Descouens (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)

Yew has a long association with pagan rites and beliefs, perhaps because, like Holly, it is evergreen, long-lived and bears berries. The oldest wooden artifact ever found in Europe, a 450,000 year-old spearhead found in Clacton-on-Sea, is made of Yew.   All parts of the Yew are poisonous, except for the red flesh on the berry. A chief of the ancient Celtic tribe the Eburones (the ancient word for Yew was Eburos) killed himself by ingesting a toxin from the Yew tree rather than submitting to the Romans. It is known to be poisonous to horses, and the foliage, in hot weather, can produce a gas which is said to cause hallucinations. This same chemical, however, can be used to produce a drug for use in breast cancer, and for a while pharmaceutical companies were traveling the world, looking for substantial Yew forests to buy and destroy. What is new to science is often long-known by local peoples, however, and Yew has long been used by Himalayan people as a treatment for breast and ovarian cancer.

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This is not the first time that Yew has been subject to a threat of over-harvesting. Its wood is perfect for the making of longbows, and in the fifteenth century compulsory longbow practice for all adult males was introduced. This depleted the supplies of these slow-growing trees so profoundly that Richard III introduced a ‘tax’, insisting that every ship bringing goods to England had to include ten bowstaves for every tun of goods. During the sixteenth century the supply of Yew dwindled to such an extent that there was none to be had in Bavaria or Austria. The habit of planting Yew trees in churchyards to ensure future demand may have begun during this time.

Yew trees have a dark, sombre aspect to them and yet, as one of our few native conifers, they provide some greenery when the other leaves have fallen. Their red berries provide a useful source of food for the birds, and I have often watched Goldcrests working their way through the needles with their needle-sharp bills, searching for any hibernating insects or badly-hidden cocoons. I shall be keeping my eyes and ears open in future for the high-pitched piping calls of these birds. Goldcrests are the smallest birds in the UK, with each one weighing less than a two-pence piece.

Goldcrest (By Missy Osborn from New Forest, England (GoldCrest Uploaded by Snowmanradio) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)

Goldcrest (By Missy Osborn from New Forest, England (GoldCrest Uploaded by Snowmanradio) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)

There is something about spending time outdoors that soothes the soul, and this is particularly true, I find, when I am in the company of a tree of such remarkable character as the Totteridge Yew. It has experienced so much in its long life that my mind is fairly boggled when I think about it. It was already a thousand years old when the Normans came with their stone masonry and castle-building and taste for wine. How many babies have been borne past it in their mother’s arms for Christening, how many young couples have passed under its branches on their wedding day, how many sombre coffins have been carried under the lych-gate to the freshly-dug graves that surround it? Once, people came up to the church on foot or in horse-drawn carts, where now they swoosh past in cars. If only it could tell me what it has seen. As I go, I rest my hand for a moment on that smooth, rose-pink bark, as I suspect so many have done before me. I feel a sense of calm descend, as if I have been holding my breath for a week, and have finally let it out.

Dear Readers, I am occasionally castigated by your good selves for designating a particular plant as a ‘weed’. People have been roused to fury by my inclusion of Feverfew and Yarrow, Holly and Ivy as ‘weeds’, and I understand how for many people (including me) these plants are helpmates and sources of wonder rather than problematic. You can imagine, then, how nervous I am about including that most venerable of plants, the Yew tree, as a ‘Wednesday Weed’, let alone the oldest Yew in London. However, my point is this: no plant is quintessentially a ‘weed’ – this is a purely human label. There is not a single plant that I have included in this series, from the fecund  Duckweed to this week’s remarkable conifer, that doesn’t have much to fascinate and amaze the keen observer. Our urge to classify the natural world into ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘useful’ and ‘useless’ is what got us into the mess that we’re currently in in the first place. We need to understand the connections between things, even the most commonplace of ‘weeds’, in order to make sensible decisions about everything from the plants in our gardens to the future of the planet. Every week, I learn more about my local environment, but I have also glimpsed the limitless depths that I have yet to understand.  This blog has made me humble, which I have grown to think is the only sensible reaction to the complexity and beauty of the natural world.

Adriaen Coorte – The Still Life Painter’s Real Subject

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Still Life with Asparagus (Adriaen Coorte, 1697)

Dear Readers, the art of ‘still life’ was surely at its most extraordinary during the Dutch Golden Age, an era that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed learning about from Benjamin Moser’s extraordinary book ‘The Upside World – Meetings with the Dutch Masters’. Earlier this week, I did a post on the animal painter Paulus Potter, but I couldn’t leave the subject without a quick look at the work of Adriaen Coorte (roughly 1697 – 1707). Still Life as a genre demands a kind of calm contemplation – in the book, Moser makes an interesting comparison with the contemporaneous Japanese poet Bashō, whose haikus demand a similar level of stillness. Take this one, for example…

A field of cotton–
as if the moon
had flowered.

or this one…

Awake at night–
the sound of the water jar
cracking in the cold.

For both the painter and the poet, I sense a need to capture a precise moment in time, perfectly. Moser describes how Coorte

“..fiddled about with what looks like the same bunch of asparagus – zooming in and out, toying with the lighting, adding, and then removind, a few currants; now trying them in combination with an artichoke, now with a bunch of strawberries – for no less than eighteen years”. 

Still Life with Asparagus and Red Currants (Adriaen Coorte, 1696)

Still life with asparagus, a spray of gooseberries and a bowl of strawberries
(Adriaen Coorte, 1698)

We know so little about the artist, except what he’s left us in his paintings. What do they tell us? The man was a perfectionist, for sure, struggling again and again to get his pictures right. He was an observer of the fall of light on the most ordinary of objects – a peach, a grape, a wooden bowl.  His masterpiece, described as “the Mona Lisa of the late seventeenth century Dutch still-life art” by art historian Laurens-Jan Bols, is the picture below, ‘Three Medlars with a Butterfly’ (1705)

“Three Medlars with a Butterfly” (Adriaen Coorte, 1705)

Moser describes the painting thus.

“It is hard to say exactly what makes this painting so perfect. A centimetre higher and the butterfly would seem detached from the rest of the scene, unrelated to the medlars, floating past them irrelevantly. Half an inch lower, it would be crashing in to them. As Coorte has placed it, the butterfly is wafting gently toward the fruit, enhancing, not disturbing, the tranquillity of the scene”.

As I look at these paintings, I find myself both mesmerised by their stillness, and held in a place beyond rational thought. They fill me with both melancholy at the inevitable passing of time, and a sense of wonder at how perfect a butterfly, a stalk of asparagus or a medlar can be for just a few moments. In the pictures below I can almost smell the strawberries, feel the furriness of the peaches, even as some of the strawberries are starting to rot.

Still Life with Wild Strawberries (Adriaen Coorte, 1696)

Three Peaches and a Butterfly (Adriaen Coorte, 1693-95)

Many still life painters incorporated a ‘memento mori’ into their works, such as a spider catching a fly or a lizard hunting a butterfly. Coorte was much more subtle than this: he allows us to feel what we feel without directing us. Moser concludes his book with this statement:

“Adriaen Coorte, like Bashō, sought ‘a vision of eternity in the things that are, by their own nature, destined to perish”.

Maybe that’s what makes these painting both glorious and melancholy. What a feast.

“Still Life with Shells” (Adriaen Coorte, 1697)

Even the Most Unpromising Garden….

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Dear Readers, today I was out for a walk to the Farmers’ Market, and to the accompanying Craft Exhibition – I found someone who might be able to re-upholster our armchair (one arm was shredded by my late cat Willow, bless her) and there were lots of lovely stalls. I always feel bad at these events, though – I don’t really need any more ceramics/painted tiles/cushions and my ears aren’t pierced (or to be exact they have been pierced at least three times, but the holes always close up) so the lovely earrings on sale are surplus to requirements. I feel for all the craftspeople looking so hopeful as I drift past, admiring their work but knowing that I’m not going to buy any of it. I do hope that they all find enough customers to make their time and effort worthwhile – as someone who makes things herself, I know the amount of hard work that goes into creating beautiful things.

Anyhow, after marching up Summerlee Avenue on the way home, I was stopped in my tracks by the garden in the photo above. It’s on Fortis Green, a very busy road with a very narrow pavement, so I usually don’t linger. But just look at this display of Japanese Anemones! This is a plant that although supposedly good for ‘woodland gardens’ and also described as ‘a bit of a thug’ has never actually taken to my plot – maybe it’s a bit too dry? But look at it here.

Front gardens are difficult to manage on this road – sometimes these big houses are divided into flats, and are sometimes the flats are rented, so there isn’t the incentive to make a garden (though some people still do). Nonetheless, in spite of the stony soil, and the fact that there’s nowhere to put the wheelie bins except bang slap in the middle of the garden, someone has created some beauty here, and the bees were buzzing around in gratitude.

Along the path there are some more Japanese Anemones, and some asters/Michaelmas daisies, also a favourite with bees at this time of year. I’m not sure if the planting is down to the current residents or if the garden has just been inherited, but I hope it cheers the people who live here up as much as it lifted my spirits. It’s usually at this point that my leg really starts to ache, but I left with a most unexpected spring in my step.

And then  I spotted this. The bollard on the corner of Lincoln Road, previously so impressively upright, is at a 45 degree angle yet again. I’d love to know what happens – is it large vehicles backing up? It can be difficult to pull out of these roads into Durham Road (which runs along the bottom of the County Roads). What is the bollard meant to do, I wonder? It clearly isn’t able to look after itself.

Below, you can see the Lincoln Road bollard in happier days (November 2022).

Still, it’s been a great weekend, with two expeditions and a real sense of the change of the seasons. Progress is not a steady curve, but the overall arc is definitely towards greater mobility. And I am really enjoying my first Open University course module – it’s on speciation, so I expect there will be a few thoughts on things scientific later in the week. In the meantime, here’s a poem by Clive James, written five years before his death in 2019. There is something very wise about it, and peaceful. See what you think.

Sentenced to Life (Clive James, 2014)

Sentenced to life, I sleep face-up as though
Ice-bound, lest I should cough the night away,
And when I walk the mile to town, I show
The right technique for wading through deep clay.
A sad man, sorrier than he can say.

But surely not so guilty he should die
Each day from knowing that his race is run:
My sin was to be faithless. I would lie
As if I could be true to everyone
At once, and all the damage that was done

Was in the name of love, or so I thought.
I might have met my death believing this,
But no, there was a lesson to be taught.
Now, not just old, but ill, with much amiss,
I see things with a whole new emphasis.

My daughter’s garden has a goldfish pool
With six fish, each a little finger long.
I stand and watch them following their rule
Of never touching, never going wrong:
Trajectories as perfect as plain song.

Once, I would not have noticed; nor have known
The name for Japanese anemones,
So pale, so frail. But now I catch the tone
Of leaves. No birds can touch down in the trees
Without my seeing them. I count the bees.

Even my memories are clearly seen:
Whence comes the answer if I’m told I must
Be aching for my homeland. Had I been
Dulled in the brain to match my lungs of dust
There’d be no recollection I could trust.

Yet I, despite my guilt, despite my grief,
Watch the Pacific sunset, heaven sent,
In glowing colours and in sharp relief,
Painting the white clouds when the day is spent,
As if it were my will and testament –
​
As if my first impressions were my last,
And time had only made them more defined,
Now I am weak. The sky is overcast
Here in the English autumn, but my mind
Basks in the light I never left behind.


​

Making a Virtue of Necessity

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Dear Readers, when I broke my leg I was told that I should have ‘full mobility’ three months after the accident. Well, I am most likely being signed off by the Orthopaedic Department at the Whittington on Thursday, and I can certainly walk around, get on the tube and the bus and go up and down stairs if I’m careful and take my time. However, I still limp, and am walking at about half speed compared to my previous pace, so I would say that there’s a way to go before I’m back to my pre-accident levels. Nonetheless, today I decided that if I was going to need a walking stick for a while I was going to purchase a classy one, and so we headed to Central London for the first time in three months (the Angel doesn’t quite count). We had two aims: to visit the London Review of Books bookshop, because it’s my husband’s birthday in a few weeks, and to buy a walking stick at James Smith and Sons.

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

I love the LRB Bookshop! It is impossible to visit it without walking out with something exciting. Today, although I was meant to be shopping for John I also came out with David Spiegelhalter’s new book The Art of Uncertainty and How Migration Really Works by Hein de Haas, which was recommended by New Scientist no less. I have very few vices (with the possible exception of cake) but buying books seems to be one of them. Now, if I could arrange to live to about two hundred years old I might actually stand a chance of reading them all.

Having laden John down with my books and his ‘surprise’ birthday books which he chose himself and will hopefully have forgotten by the Big Day, we headed to James Smith and Sons. Better known as ‘that Umbrella Shop’, the shop itself has been around since 1830, with its current premises dating to 1865. I was tempted to pick up a Dagger Cane or a Sword Stick as advertised in the window, but in the end I settled for a very fine walking stick and a folding walking stick for travelling. The gentleman who served me checked that it was the right height – they saw a bit off of the bottom of the cane and fit a non-stick ferrule so that it’s in full working order. He also checked out a variety of folding canes – I’d been tempted to buy a fancy one online, but thank heavens i didn’t as it would have been too short. In the end I decided to go for utility over a pretty floral pattern.

The main walking stick is beechwood, with what’s known as a Derby handle, and it’s been ‘scorched’ to a dark red and ‘rattaned’ which means that it has a pattern on the lower bit. Just the thing for clearing a path through the crowds of Oxford Street!

And my folding stick is a black folding Derby, actually meant for ‘gentlemen’, but then I am nearly six feet tall so I need something substantial. I can pack this away in my rucksack if I’m catching a plane (which I hope to be doing in about six weeks) so it’s perfect.

I must say that the staff in the shop have the patience of saints. Lots of people seemed to be coming in just to take photographs or even film inside the Victorian interior. I think they were glad to just have an actual customer. And to be honest, the prices were not ridiculous – walking sticks started at about £30 and umbrellas start at £40, so although you can pick these up for much cheaper than this, these come with a lifetime guarantee. So if you’re looking for excellent service and something special for yourself, or as a gift, I would really recommend James Smith and Sons. If we don’t buy from unique shops like these, we’ll lose them.

James Smith and Sons – Interior (Photo by Edwardx, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

 

Paulus Potter – Painter of Animals

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Paulus Potter – The Young Bull (1647) Public Domain

Dear Readers, I’m always intrigued by artists who choose to make animals their subject – partly because of what it says about the attitude to animals at the time, and partly because the best painters seem to be able to incorporate the personality of the animal in such a way that it becomes a portrait. Back in the 17th Century, Dutch artist Paulus Potter(1625 – 1654) took to painting monumental pictures of farm animals, but no illustration can give you an idea of the scale of the work. ‘The Young Bull’ shows a life-size bull, and its realism is striking – there is an enormous cowpat more or less at eye level. This looks like a living animal, although in his book ‘The Upside Down World – Meetings with the Dutch Masters’, Benjamin Moser points out that the bull is actually a composite of several animals, drawn from memory. This doesn’t take away from the impression it made when it was first shown in the Louvre in 1795, after Napoleon had added the masterpieces of the Netherlands to his burgeoning collection of European art. The Dutch traveller Adriaan van der Willigen described its impact:

“I saw two French peasants taking a good long look at Potter’s large bull. Their natural and correct judgment pleased me particularly, and came down to their opinion that they thought this was the best painted and loveliest picture in the whole gallery. After they had spent a while this way, as if in bliss, they left the object not without regret”.(B.Moser, ‘The Upside Down World’ pg 247.

Clearly, Potter had a ‘thing’ about animals. He started off by painting images from mythology, as most artists did, but his humans paled into insignificance beside the animals. As a genre, there was no such thing as ‘animal painting’ in the Netherlands, so Potter invented it almost single-handedly. As he moved onto painting farmyard creatures, humans disappeared even more – I love the image of the milkmaid concealed behind the more important cow in the picture below.

Cattle with Milkmaid (1643) Paulus Potter

Although there are probably more paintings of cattle than any other animal, Potter could turn his hand to most mammals. I love the painting below, of two pigs below. You can see their individual characters, and also a kind of sadness, as if they knew what their ultimate end would be.

Two Pigs in a Sty (Paulus Potter, 1649)

And how about this splendid wolfhound? What has he seen in the mid-distance?

Wolfhound (Paulus Potter c. 1650-52)

And then there’s this piebald horse, looking somewhat anxiously off to the left. Does she sense a storm coming?

The Piebald Horse (Paulus Potter, c. 1650 -54)

Potter’s most interesting, and certainly most gruesome picture is ‘The Punishment of the Hunter’. What a complex painting it is! The outer twelve photos show various hunting scenes of varying degrees of cruelty. However, in the centre two paintings the animals take their revenge, killing the hunter by roasting him on a spit and hanging his dogs from a tree. Well, there is a certain amount of wish-fulfilment here I’m sure (except for the dogs) but it has the feeling of a virtuoso, wanting to cram as many different species as possible into one painting. 

Punishment of a Hunter by Paulus Potter (c. 1650 – 52)

Paulus Potter was one of a kind, an artist who didn’t shy away from the facts of life, and death. One of his paintings, known colloquially as ‘The Pissing Cow’ (brown standing cow on the left hand side if you want to see why) proved too much for its intended owner, who bundled it off to the vaults of the Hermitage instead.

The Farmyard aka The Pissing Cow by Paulus Potter, 1649

Potter died of tuberculosis in 1654. His life was short, but full of art – he created over a hundred paintings in his twenty-eight years, and his wife said that she never saw him without a notebook in his pocket, so that if he saw something unusual he could do a sketch on the spot. Some of these drawings have survived, and they’re full of energy and curiosity. They are all, without exception, of animals, and yet what shines through reminds us that we’re not the only species with emotions and personality. I am very glad to have discovered him, and will keep an eye open for his paintings when I visit European galleries – there is one at the National Gallery in the UK, for example. He is definitely in the same league as George Stubbs as far as I’m concerned, and he didn’t have a half-dissected horse in his garage.

Sketch of Pig and Piglet by Paulus Potter (c.1652)

A Small Survivor

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Dear Readers, when I was taking a shower yesterday I looked down and, without my glasses on, noticed a little blob in the corner that I took to be a bobble from a jumper or  some such thing. I decided to ignore it for the time being, and went on with the two shampoo, one conditioner routine that I usually have. It was only when I finished that I realised that the aforesaid ‘blob’ must have been sentient, because it had completely disappeared!

I thought no more of it until today, when I was cleaning my teeth (with my glasses on) and noticed that not only was the ‘blob’ back, but that it was actually an extremely resilient spider, though clearly one with a low sense of self-preservation. I noted earlier in the week that spiders often suffer from desiccation in our centrally-heated houses, but this one was obviously taking things to extremes.

How she (for I can currently see no pedipalps so am hedging my bets) survived the pounding from a hot ten-minute shower (I’m a bit slower after the broken leg) plus gallons of purple shampoo (to keep my ‘naturally silvery locks’ silver) not to mention my amber and oud shower gel I have no idea, but I am regarding the little arachnid with a new respect. Later today I shall encourage her to relocate to somewhere else in the bathroom, and I shall make doubly sure to check all corners of the shower stall before entering. After all, having survived this ordeal (and quite possibly a number of previous ones) I think she deserves another chance. I’m going to call her ‘Harriet’ because she is surprisingly hairy.

And incidentally….I am rather liking the deodorant and shower gel that I’m getting from Wild. You buy one case and then you can buy refills – the cases are made from recycled plastic, and the shower gel or deodorant comes in a completely recyclable cardboard container that you just slot into your case. The deodorant lasts for at least a month with daily usage and they have a wide variety of scents, plus some for people with sensitive skins. There’s no palm oil, no parabens or other nasties. And no, I’m not on commission. I find the deodorant very effective, and the shower gel is lovely and seems to last forever. So if you’re thinking to reduce your plastic usage, or cut back on the chemicals in your toiletries, I’d recommend Wild. Every little helps, I’m sure.

Has anyone else made a switch to a new company for environmental/ethical reasons lately? Any recommendations? Let me know in the comments, and I might knock a blogpost together if I hear about some good suppliers. Often, little companies don’t get the credit for innovation that they deserve.

The Post Box Topper Phenomenon

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A crocheted Christmas Post Box topper from Inverkip in Scotland (Photo by By dave souza – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=97993838)

Dear Readers, after yesterday’s rather heavy blogpost, I wanted to share a phenomenon that seems to be gathering momentum here in the UK – the post box topper. These are knitted or crocheted ‘scenes’ that local knitters pop on top of a postbox to cheer people up, to highlight an issue or to celebrate something. Sometimes they get vandalised (usually by drunken adults), I imagine that they get grubby, and that birds occasionally poo on them, but the Post Box Topper gang are undeterred. Anything that we put out into the world is vulnerable, but from the response to these woolly wonders, the positive responses far outweigh those who like to destroy things. Here’s just a selection from the interwebs…

First up is a Postbox Topper from Walthamstow, full of poppies for Remembrance Day.

 (Photo by By GrimsbyT – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=96009048)

The next one is to celebrate the Coronation of King Charles III – it’s from Godalming in Surrey.

(Photo By Doyle of London – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=131071989)

Royal occasions are something of a favourite – the topper below was for Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee. Not content with the Queen, we have corgis, a beefeater and a Queen’s Guard.

 

It’s not all about royalty, though…this one is in honour of the Hospice at Home service run in Sidmouth, Devon.

This one celebrates autumn in Liscard Village in The Wirral.

This one is celebrating the new school year, in Orpington, Kent.

This one celebrates a donkey sanctuary in Devon..

Bug Woman obviously approves of this topper…it’s by@ToppersBySteph on Queen Square near Great Ormond Street Hospital in London.

And finally, this one is very special. It was made to commemorate the life of Sophie Lancaster, a young woman who was murdered because she looked ‘different’ (she was a goth). The photos are from the Bailgate in Lincoln, and were taken by Glen Red Imp Hughes (Photos from here).

So, are postbox toppers just a British thing, or does anyone else have something similar? I think what I love about them most is that people spend many hours on them, then release them into the world to take their chance. I’m leaving the last word to Sue Cockcroft, a topper-maker…

“Although it can be a bit gutting if the thing you’ve made is taken, I think we all do it with the idea of spreading some happiness into our communities… That’s something you have to do knowing that not *everyone* will feel the same way.
But we keep on going, and sharing happiness, because it gives us happiness too. 💚”

Thoughts About an Eco Friendly End

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Woodland Burial Area in the City of London Cemetery (Photo by By Acabashi – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=91073911)

Dear Readers, my dear friend’s mother died last week, and she had very definite thoughts on what she wanted for her funeral. There was to be no church service, but she wanted music and poetry. Most of all, she wanted a woodland burial, in a wicker coffin. She yearned for simplicity, and for a ceremony that celebrated her as a human being. And so, I’m sure that’s what she’s going to have, and I’m just keeping my fingers crossed that the weather is kind, and that the peace of the beautiful trees will help to calm the grieving souls who stand beneath them.

And so, my thoughts turned to what I would want when I die. I believe that it’s never too early to start thinking about these things (though of course I hope that any planning won’t come to fruition for quite a while yet). I’ve been to rather more funerals/memorial services/internments than I’d have liked over the past few years, but they have given me a bit of an idea of what I’d like.

Mum wanted to be cremated because she didn’t like the idea of the ‘creepy crawlies’, and so that’s what she got. As Bug Woman, however, I am very happy to feed the creepy crawlies, though an important thing to note is that one shouldn’t be embalmed – the chemicals are terrible for the soil and for the very creatures that do the work of decomposition. Plus, I have heard of too many people terrorised by the sight of a embalmed loved one in an open coffin, completely changed from how they looked in life. I do respect that in other traditions this is an important part of the ceremony (in fact, take everything written here as purely personal, and not a judgement on what anybody else wants), but I wouldn’t want a long lying-in in state. I’m not Lenin, after all.

Cremation is also very energy-intensive, as you can imagine – some forward-looking crematoria are aiming to power their cremators by renewable energy, but even so I can’t help thinking that there must be at least some air pollution from the whole process. Plus I can’t get past that James Bond film where he wakes up in a coffin being fed into a cremator and has to kick his way out with flames all around him. No thank you!

If one is being buried, however, it’s important to think of what you’re being buried in. In some woodland burial sites, you can be buried in a simple cotton shroud, or a wicker or cardboard coffin. I always fancied one of those Ghanaian coffins, which are designed to represent the interests of the person who has died, though I’m not sure that they’re that eco-friendly. Maybe we could get a cardboard one, and someone could paint it with a few burial beetles so they’ll get the idea of what’s expected of them.

Ghanaian Coffin in the shape of a lobster…(Photo by Yanajin33, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons)

A Selection of Ghanaian Coffins (Photo by Walt Jabsco at https://www.flickr.com/photos/waltjabsco/263248255)

Cocoa pod coffin (cocoa was one of Ghana’s main exports) Photo Christina B Castro at https://www.flickr.com/photos/cbcastro/1393532104

In a lot of woodland burial sites, there are no headstones and no memorials, though you can often plant an appropriate tree. Personally I don’t mind this – I don’t believe that I’ll be there, except as a recycled earthworm or lesser celandine or, if I’m lucky, a robin. I believe that you live on in the minds and hearts of those who knew you, or came across your writing or art or whatever you left behind, and that feels like enough. I think it might have been different if I’d had children – I certainly get a lot of comfort from visiting Mum and Dad’s grave, but I think that’s more because of the whole village and my memories of it, rather than any thoughts that Mum and Dad are actually there. They’re with me in my heart, always, in my DNA and in the way I cook a roast dinner (Mum) or plant out my seedlings (Dad),

There are some new burial methods coming up as well. One is known as water cremation, and it seems to basically involve the same technique that murderers have used to get rid of  bodies after their dastardly crimes. Technically known as alkaline hydrolysis, the body is basically dissolved in boiling potassium hydroxide and water, before the remains are reduced to a small amount of ash. Apparently it’s becoming more popular in the UK, and it certainly has a much lower carbon footprint than cremation, though for totally illogical reasons it makes me feel a bit sick in a way that cremation doesn’t.

And then there’s composting – the body is placed in a stainless steel container with wood  chips, alfalfa and straw, and after about two months everything has literally been turned to compost. Alas, this isn’t available in the UK yet, but it’s becoming popular in the US, so I imagine it will become an option here soon. You can use the compost for trees and plants (though I have no idea if you can be ‘spread’ on your own vegetable garden).

All in all, I think I fancy the idea of a woodland burial, but with this caveat: I think that the ceremonies that we have after death are really for those left behind. So while there is comfort in doing things according to a loved-one’s wishes, I think there’s a lot to be said for also reassuring those that you love that, in the end, it was what happened while you were alive that mattered, and if your wishes can’t be followed it doesn’t matter. I think of the torture that people went through during lockdown when they couldn’t have the ceremonies that they would have liked to remember their loved ones, and what an additional burden of grief and guilt this put on people who were already suffering. And  so, preferences are just that – preferences. If they can’t be fulfilled, it’s not important. And no one should punish themselves for things that turned out not to be possible.

Over to you, Readers! Preferences for burial, cremation, something else? I am not forgetting that Hunter S. Thompson asked for his ashes to be fired out of a cannon, and I have heard several people express a preference for a Tibetan-style Sky Burial, where your bones are carried off by vultures (though you’d wait a long time for a vulture in East Finchley). Is it something you think about, or something you’d rather not dwell upon? Have you been to a funeral or ceremony that seemed to hit all the right/wrong notes?

And we haven’t even gotten started on funeral music yet. The man being buried just before my Dad had chosen ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’, which was nothing if not dramatic. But that’s maybe something for another post.

The Springtail – The Springiest Animal Known to Science

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Dear Readers, if you have ever turned over some leaf litter in the garden and noticed some tiny creatures pinging away in all directions, you might have encountered some springtails. Once upon a time, they were regarded as primitive insects, but these days they are considered to be such an ancient lineage that they’re described as ‘non-insect hexapods (hexapod meaning ‘six-legged’). The scientific name for springtails is ‘Collembola’,  which means ‘glue-peg’ – this relates to a strange organ called the collophore, which, as we shall see, is a vital part of the way the springtail gets around.

The springtail Deutonura monticola (Photo by By Philippe Garcelon – Deutonura monticola, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=93328444)

Because they are so small, springtails go largely unnoticed, which is surprising as there may be 30 to 40 species per square metre in deciduous woodland, and up to 100 species in the same area in the tropics. Some estimates suggest that a square metre of soil can contain up to 100,000 individual springtails. Although we will notice them most when digging in the garden, they can be found right up into the forest canopy, and hopping about on the snow in North America – this particular species is known as a snow flea (Hypogastrura nivicola) and it contains a protein which enables it to be active when most other small invertebrates are torpid.

Snow Flea (Photo by By Daniel Tompkins, en:User:Plantman2 – en:Image:Snow Flea close up.JPG, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3380961)

So, what are springtails doing in the soil, in such numbers? Some are detritivores, breaking down organic material and releasing its nutrients into the soil. Some are predatory, and eat a wide variety of other invertebrates and even microbes. They are clearly important in maintaining soil health, and  yet we know so little about them. One thing that is clear is that they are very prone to desiccation, and that they emit a pheromone that attracts them to one another – this helps them to find a safe, damp space where they can live together and share the same safe environment. While some species are very adaptable, others are not, and changes to land practices can cause the total elimination of some of the slower-moving, more specialised species. One species has been used as a model  to test soil toxicity, herbicides and pesticides.

Folsomia candida – a model species used in laboratories to test everything from pesticide resistance to circadian rhythms (Photo By Andy Murray – Folsomia candida, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44266481)

Springtails are also food for a wide variety of other organisms, including mites, spiders and harvestmen. And so, they have developed a very particular way of escaping when threatened. Springtails have an organ called a furca, which extends like a stick at the end of the body, and is used as a kind of lever to flick the animal into the air.

Springtail Isotoma habitus – you can see the furca protruding at the end of the body (Photo by By U. Burkhardt – Taken and uploaded on de:WP the 01/06/2006 by de:Benutzer:Onychiurus, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=793827)

And what a flick! Scientists Adrian Smith and Jacob Harrison filmed some springtails after they’d given them a prod with a paintbrush, and discovered that they can leap up to 80 body lengths away from where they started in a single jump, rotating 368 times per second as they did so.

There seemed to be two types of landing – Smith described one as an ‘uncontrolled bounce and tumble’, and the other as an ‘anchored stop’ – the latter involved that organ for which this group is named, the collophore, which is a sticky tube (you can see it in the middle of the body of the springtail in the photo above). The tube is normally used for things like controlling fluid balance in the springtail’s body, but can also be used to anchor the body of the springtail after a jump.

You can watch the springtails ‘doing their stuff’ on the New Scientist Youtube page here. Highly recommended!

I’ll leave the last word to Adrian Smith:

“People might think that everything in nature is described and known, says Smith, but this isn’t so. “There’s so many things that are right there in and amongst us that are incredible.”

The New Scientist article is here.

The research paper is here.

A Little Mystery

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Dear Readers, I’ve been idly watching this web appear in the corner of our French doors for the past few weeks, but only today did I summon up the energy to hobble over and have a proper look. And what a structure it is! You can see that it’s a sheet, but in the middle there’s a hole that looks a little like some vortex in the middle of a nebula (plus a pretty impressive tear).

From inside the house, you can just about see the long tube leading down to the bottom left corner of the window.  What I can’t see at the moment is a spider, but I might hobble outside with a torch at some point, provided I can convince my long-suffering husband to come with me so that I don’t topple over.

But who has made such a structure? Interestingly, it might well be one of our autumn visitors, the Common House Spider – I don’t think of these spiders as making webs, but apparently they do. Furthermore, several generations of Common House Spiders can use a web, enlarging it and repairing it as they go, rather like the aged retainers of a country house. The spider will live at the bottom of the tunnel, waiting for prey to land on the sheet part of the web. The vibrations that the unfortunate insect creates in its attempts to escape alert the spider, which rushes out and grabs it.

One reason that I might not have seen the spider on his/her web is that at this time of year, as we know, male Common House Spiders go in search of love, and enter our houses to look for the (much larger) females. When he finds one, he might spend several days or weeks with her, before dying, whereupon he is sometimes consumed by the female. No point in letting all those nutrients go to waste! Spiders are nothing if not pragmatic.

Incidentally, you can tell adult male spiders from adult females because the males have these little ‘boxing glove’ appendages at their front ends – these are pedipalps, and are used to transfer sperm from the male during mating.

A very impressive male Common House Spider (Photo By sanja565658 – «собственная работа», CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6228310)

Female Common House Spiders can live for several years if they find a house with suitable conditions. They lay their eggs in cream-coloured egg sacs, usually suspended by a strand of silk somewhere within the funnel web. I shall have to keep an eye open and see if I can see one! Each egg sac holds about 50 eggs, which will hatch in April when the spiderlings will disperse.

I always find it interesting how our homes and sheds and outbuildings form their own unique habitat. As far as a spider is concerned, our centrally-heated homes are just a rather pleasant substitute for the caves that they used to live in millenia ago. If only, I’m sure they’d say if they could talk, our homes weren’t so dry! One of the big risks for a spider in our homes is desiccation, and some of the ‘spider people’ that I talk to online regularly put out little bottle tops full of water for their spider friends to drink from. And considering the number of clothes moths that the average Common House Spider can eat, it might be a good investment.