Photo By Santosh Kumar – https://www.flickr.com/photos/sntsh/36382208006/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=94604550

What a wet day it’s been today! But all weather is an occasion for poetry, as we know, and, it appears, those long rainy afternoons can set the scene for all sorts of shenanigans….

Eros
Louise Glück
I had drawn my chair to the hotel window, to watch the rain.

I was in a kind of dream, or trance —
in love, and yet
I wanted nothing.

It seemed unnecessary to touch you, to see you again.
I wanted only this:
the room, the chair, the sound of the rain falling,
hour after hour, in the warmth of the spring night.

I needed nothing more; I was utterly sated.
My heart had become very small; it took very little to fill it.
I watched the rain falling in heavy sheets over the darkened city —

You were not concerned. I did the things
one does in daylight, I acquitted myself,
but I moved like a sleepwalker.

It was enough and it no longer involved you.
A few days in a strange city.
A conversation, the touch of a hand.
And afterward, I took off my wedding ring.

That was what I wanted: to be naked.

Rain
Carol Ann Duffy
Not so hot as this for a hundred years.
You were where I was going. I was in tears.
I surrendered my heart to the judgement of my peers.

A century’s heat in the garden, fierce as love.
You returned on the day I had to leave.
I mimed the full, rich, busy life I had to live.

Hotter than hell. I burned for you day and night;
got bits of your body wrong, bits of it right,
in the huge mouth of the dark, in the bite of the light.

I planted a rose, burnt orange, the colour of flame,
gave it the last of the water, gave it your name.
It flared back at the sun in a perfect rhyme.

Then the rain came, like stammered kisses at first
on the back of my neck. I unfurled my fist
for the rain to caress with its lips. I turned up my face,

and water flooded my mouth, baptised my head,
and the rainclouds gathered like midnight overhead,
and the rain came down like a lover comes to a bed.

Dear Readers, I had rather forgotten about my trail camera: when I downloaded the photos there were about 1400 shots, which is about six weeks’ worth. So I thought I’d give you a flavour of an average East Finchley evening. Eat your heart out, David Attenborough.

At 8.35 an example of Homo sapiens heads out to the shed to retrieve a frozen pint of milk, and to check on how the washing is drying (our dryer is in the shed. Go figure).

Finally at 10.21 Homo sapiens decides to bring the washing in and hang it up instead. Our dryer doesn’t like it when it’s cold, and as you can see it’s a chilly 27 degrees Fahrenheit (nearly -3 degrees Celsius)

At a quarter to 11 a fluffy cat wanders past to check on the handful of food we’ve left out for the fox. I suspect this is Cosmo, who lives on the next road but who has adopted half a dozen households in our road. He often stands on the pavement yowling and demanding some attention. Apparently his owner has four other cats, so maybe he feels he needs a little one-on-one time.

At 2 a.m. the first fox turns up. What a fine looking lad! Nothing mangey about this one.

And very thorough he is too!

I am a little puzzled about what’s happened to the time here, but not about the cat – he clearly came along after the fox, and has a wound on his right leg. He’s been around for a while, and the wound is clearing up so I think he’s had treatment. He’s a right old tom cat though – have a look at this enormous head, in a photo from the Whatsapp on the road. Unneutered toms often have  such miserable lives, getting into fights and making themselves generally unpopular.

No problems with this handsome fluffy cat doing the rounds at 4.25, though – looks like Cosmo making a return trip, though the family a few doors up also have a magnificent fluffy cat, so maybe it’s that cat. Whoever it is, it’s no wonder that there’s not usually any food left in the morning…

Photo By Path slopu – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=93473375

Dear Readers, the author and botanist James Wong always has something interesting to say in about plants and gardening, and this time his article in New Scientist is about how to stop your seedlings getting long and leggy.

There are pluses and minuses about starting your plants off indoors. They’re protected from the wind and the rain, the cold and any pesky pests that might be lurking over winter. Alas, this lack of ‘challenge’ can also lead to them growing tall and fragile. Who amongst us has not planted out our seedlings only to see them all keel over at the first available opportunity! What they are lacking is a bit of buffeting.

Wong points out that plants respond to wind and other ‘mechanical perturbation’ by growing thicker stems and a stockier ‘body’ overall. This phenomenon is known as (takes deep breath) thigmomorphogenesis. Furthermore, plants subjected to touch seem to have more resilience to pests and drought as well.

Experiments with plants as varied as petunias and tomatoes, involving  fans, feathers or even a sheet of paper brushed across the leaves have all shown a reduction in stem elongation of 20 to 40 percent.

Wong suggests that just 10 seconds per day of ‘plant stroking’ is enough to trigger the effect. So, while many of us talk to our plants (and in my case often plead with them to do better) maybe we need to get hands on?

Hedwigia ciliata (Photo By Kurt Stüber [1] – caliban.mpiz-koeln.mpg.de/mavica/index.html part of http://www.biolib.de, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7226)

Furthermore, for those of you in the UK with access to I-Player, you might enjoy this wonderful documentary about moss, which certainly opened my eyes!

And finally, for those of you who read and enjoyed ‘Braiding Sweetgrass – indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants’ by Robin Wall Kimmerer might also like her book ‘Gathering Moss – A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses‘.

And now, let’s have a chat about mosses, these most unobtrusive and resilient of plants.

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

Dear Readers, I’ve always had a soft spot for the small, unobtrusive plants and animals that live amongst us, going about the business of photosynthesising or munching up detritus while being studiously ignored by everyone except the very young, or the very curious. So I was very happy to see that this mini-season featured moss. As the author, Kiera Chapman, points out, when there are other, more flamboyant plants to attract our attention the delicate beauty of moss is easy to overlook. But it has been around for a long time, and it grows in locations where nothing else could possibly grow.

Mosses are non-vascular plants, which means that they don’t have the internal pipework that allows them to transport water and nutrients through their bodies. Neither can they stand up tall like a tree. Instead, they inhabit very particular microsystems, generally ones that are damp, as they can’t just find water deep in the soil and use it as plants with more developed root systems do. They like areas which are calm, and which have lots of water vapour – look closely at where mosses grow, and they’re so often in cracks and crevices, on the sides of trees that are protected from the prevailing wind, and which allow them to husband any water that they can find. Some mosses, however, live in places where water is fleeting and the area where they live dries up at certain times of year. You might think that this would be a death sentence, but no – some mosses can survive being desiccated by 85 or even ninety percent, only to revive when the rains come.

Some mosses, of course, live in places that are not just a bit on the damp side, but positively wet, such as sphagnum moss which is the backbone of a bog. It is this moss which forms a key ingredient of peat, which is fortunately, finally, being recognised as the important carbon sink that it is. Sphagnum moss has an extraordinary ability to soak up fluids, and it was used as a wound dressing during World War I – not only was it more absorbent than cotton, it also seemed to have a microbial action which meant that it could be left longer without needing to be changed.

In the photo below we see the UK’s largest moss, Common Haircap moss, with sphagnum moss in the background.

Common haircap moss (Polytrichum commune) plus sphagnum moss (Photo Five by ceridwen )

All mosses, like all frogs, need water to reproduce: they produce spores, but the male sexual cell needs to swim in order to fertilise the female cell in the first place. In order to spread their spores, the mosses need an area of more turbulent air in order to distribute them, which is why many mosses produce their fertilised spores on setae, long stalks.

Setae on moss

Some mosses also have the ability to catapult their spores up to eight inches away from the plant, which is quite some feat when you consider how small the moss is.

Chapman points out that mosses are indeed ancient plants, but they are far from being relicts: they have adapted to live in the harshest of environments, which our walls and pavements and buildings certainly represent. But in a talk by Jeff Duckett, who was describing the changing flora of Hampstead Heath, he points out that mosses and liverworts are reliable indicators of the levels and types of air pollution, and the moss and lichen population of London changed greatly after the Clean Air Acts in the 1960s. These days, some mosses are taking advantage of the nitrous oxides produced by cars – the nitrogen-loving marble screw moss hated the sulphur that used to foul London’s air, but are quite happy with the products of car exhausts.

Syntrichia papillosa or Marble screw-moss (Photo by HermannSchachner, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons)

What’s always interested me about mosses is the way that they make tiny microhabitats. If you look closely you can often see other plants growing with and through a mossy spot, and little invertebrates hurrying about their business. These are miniature worlds, full of interest and complexity. Next time you’re hurrying along an urban street, or strolling through a woody glade, stop and have a look at any mossy spot that you find. I guarantee that you’ll find something to surprise you.

For more on mosses, here’s a piece that I did following a talk at the Natural History Museum a few years ago. It’s what really got me interested in these plants. Plus there’s an amazing Theodore Roethke poem at the end, for those of you who are poetry lovers….

Dear Readers, apologies for the blurry photos but there has been a lot of fun and games in the garden ever since the weather got really cold. At the moment, it’s parakeets vs starlings, and  to be honest I’m not quite sure who’s winning. You really have to admire the feistiness of the starlings when faced with a huge green parrot with a strong beak – the little guys think nothing of pecking him (and it usually is the male, at least to start with – you can tell by that strong black line around the neck). The woodpigeon will often hold out for a while as well – if it’s just one parakeet s/he can hold her own, but if there’s more than one the woodpigeon will often retreat and watch as the parakeet snaffles what’s on offer. You can almost hear the woodie harrumphing. And yes, I did just create a completely random new verb – to harrumph.

Disgruntled woodpigeon

In other news, I watched a squirrel carrying a whole chin-full of leaves up into the whitebeam earlier this week, and they’ve constructed quite a fine drey – in December the squirrels were chasing one another round and round, so I think they’re preparing to have their babies soon. It seems a bit early, but then there is pretty much year-round food here, so they should be ok. And once the leaves come, it will be pretty much hidden away.

The drey!

January can seem like a pretty quiet time in the garden, but there’s often a lot more going on than meets the eye. What’s going on for you? Any snowdrops yet?

Dear Readers, it’s fair to say that my foster kitties, Sunrise and Pudding, are really starting to relax and come out of their shells now. You might remember that the black cat, Pudding, hid behind the books on the bookshelf when we first started looking after her, so all you could see were two ears and two terrified eyes. But this is a pretty quiet household, and both cats have gradually taken over the place.

Every evening before bed time Pudding comes up onto the sofa with me and  rolls around like a lunatic.

But mostly they sleep, often cuddled up together on the very convenient IKEA chair…

Though a few weeks ago we moved the bird table, and now the cats spend a lot of time squirrel watching…

You might also remember that the cats have a touch of food anxiety (i.e. they wrestled a loaf of bread to the ground  and ate the crust on one occasion). We’re now giving them four small meals a day, but I also decided to hide a tiny bit of dry food in an egg box to give them a bit of a challenge. Well, suffice to say that that was a ten-minute wonder.

I shall have to invest in a ‘proper’ puzzle feeder, I fear. I am also wondering about a cat tree that’s tall enough that they can look out of the window (we have privacy film on the lower part of the living room window) but clearly it needs to be robust enough not to fall over, and not too hideous to look at.

But honestly, you’d think someone would have adopted these two by now. They are absolutely adorable, and not at all a nuisance once they settle down and relax. If you live in London and think they might work for you, you can contact the RSPCA on the link below….

https://www.rspca.org.uk/local/friern-barnet-adoption-centre//findapet/details/PUDDING_SUNRISE/275341/teaser

Dear Readers, Thomas Hardy is rather out of fashion these days, but in mitigation I’d like to offer this, which I think captures the moment when a song thrush sings on a winter day better than anything I’ve ever read. And it’s hopeful, and goodness knows we could all do with a bit of that.

The Darkling Thrush

By Thomas Hardy

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

The Adoration of the Magi – Edward Burne-Jones (1894)

Dear Readers, a few years ago I was following the 72 seasons of the British year, as described in the wonderful book ‘Nature’s Calendar‘. so I thought I might have a bash at doing the same thing this year. Let’s see how we get on! It’s interesting to see how the book ties up with what I’m actually observing, and for the period 5th to 9th January the authors look at how the light is gradually, gently coming back.

However, the mornings seem every bit as dark as ever, even though sunset does seem a tad later every day. I’ve always found this very hard to get my head around. In her piece in the book, Lulah Ellender explains that this is because of the difference between Solar time and Clock time. Solar time is measured according to the Earth’s position relative to the sun, which is affected by the tilt of the axis, the fact that our orbit isn’t circular, and by the speed that the sun itself travels. Clock time takes a measurement of where the Earth would be in relation to the sun without these disparities. A Clock-time day is 24 hours long, and noon and midnight fall at set times. A Solar-time day runs from the highest point of the sun one day, to the highest point of the sun on the next day. In the northern hemisphere, the Earth tilts closest to the sun and is spinning faster than clock time. So, until 9th January our sunrises stay static – after this, we should notice a bit more light at both ends of the day.

Go figure! My head explodes with stuff like this. So much of what we live by is arbitrary – the date of New Year, the time when the sunrises and sets. I am reminded that not too long  ago, the UK had ‘local time’: for example. Bristol time was 11 minutes behind London time, and in Truro the time was 20 minutes later than here in good old East Finchley. In 1840 Greenwich Mean Time was adopted, mainly because the burgeoning railways demanded a standardised time across the country, but a study showed that actually some areas were very slow to adopt this, and there was something of a free-for-all until 1880. I imagine that only the rich had watches, and everybody else relied on the town hall clock.

Another thing that pops up in Ellender’s chapter in the book is that this very day (6th January) is Epiphany – for Christians, the day when the Three Wise Men finally reached Bethlehem. 7th January is Distaff Day, traditionally the day when women would get back to spinning and weaving after the Christmas break, while the first Monday after Epiphany is Plough Monday, when the chaps get back to the fields. There was often much jollity around these two days: on Distaff Day, the men would try to set fire to the womens’ distaffs (the rod where the wool or flax was kept) before the women could douse the distaffs (and hopefully also the men) with buckets of cold water. I imagine this was a whole lot of fun on a cold January evening.

Reine Berthe et les fileueses, 1888 by Albert Anker – Queen Bertha shows the young women of the court how to spin.

Those of you who studied English might also remember that James Joyce thought of the epiphany as a moment of revelation, one of those times when something quite ordinary somehow seems to be lit up with an inner light. This is the piece that I remember most: the bird-girl from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Looking at it today it has resonances about the male gaze etc etc, but I still think it’s an extraordinary piece. See what you think.

A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane’s and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and softhued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips, where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down. Her slateblue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird’s, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some darkplumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.

She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze, without shame or wantonness. Long, long she suffered his gaze and then quietly withdrew her eyes from his and bent them towards the stream, gently stirring the water with her foot hither and thither. The first faint noise of gently moving water broke the silence, low and faint and whispering, faint as the bells of sleep; hither and thither, hither and thither; and a faint flame trembled on her cheek.

—Heavenly God! cried Stephen’s soul, in an outburst of profane joy.

He turned away from her suddenly and set off across the strand. His cheeks were aflame; his body was aglow; his limbs were trembling. On and on and on and on he strode, far out over the sands, singing wildly to the sea, crying to greet the advent of the life that had cried to him.

And happy Epiphany! Make sure you lock up your distaffs for 7th January  too. You never know when someone will appear with a bucket of cold water.