Monsters – A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer

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Dear Readers, I bought this book while I was in Canada, because I’ve always been interested in how and why we decide what it’s acceptable to enjoy, and how far we are able to separate the artist from the work. This is particularly current when someone was recently arrested for attacking the Eric Gill sculpture outside the BBC with a chisel only last week – Gill, who was instrumental in the design of the typeface for the London Underground, and who was lauded for his artistic works, is also notorious for his sexual abuse of his daughters, and his dog. Dederer doesn’t actually discuss Gill, but she does talk about some of our more recent ‘monsters’ – Michael Jackson, Roman Polanski, Miles Davies etc.

In The Guardian, Rachel Cooke  gave the book a truly terrible review, while Kathryn Hughes kind of liked it. And so, as you might expect, the book turns out to be just as polarising as the question. ‘Should’ we still enjoy the paintings of Picasso, even though he was a serial abuser of women? ‘Should’ we still enjoy the music of Miles Davies, who openly discussed slapping women around? How far does the ‘stain’ of knowing about an artist’s life contaminate the things that they created?

Well it’s a vexed subject and there are no easy answers. One point that is well-made, though, is that this, like so many things, has been turned into an individual decision. If we refuse to listen to the music of Michael Jackson, who are we benefitting (apart from making ourselves feel good?) And how about the fact that Jackson was probably a victim of child abuse himself? We get ourselves tied up in knots, and I can’t help thinking that, compared to the problems that the world is facing, worrying about such things is a luxury. Just imagine if we took all that energy and argument and turned it towards actually changing things that are wrong.

The ‘monsters’ in Dederer’s book are overwhelmingly men, but she has some interesting things to say about what makes a woman artist a ‘monster’. Largely this involves abandoning their children – Doris Lessing took one of her children with her when she left what was then Rhodesia, but left the other two behind. For me, the difference between what Lessing does, and what the male ‘monsters’ do is that Lessing left in order to do her artistic work. I’m not sure that beating up your partner adds anything to your ability to make jazz, or that abusing children makes you a better sculptor. We seem to cut male artists more slack when it comes to terrible behaviour, which comes as no big surprise to me.

Ach, I don’t know. I don’t think that there are any easy answers about what we should and shouldn’t like, and how far we should stop enjoying the art of those who are execrable human beings. The paradox of seeing that something is beautiful, and moving, and true, and that the person who created it is a terrible human being, is one that I don’t think that anyone has ultimately cracked. But I would love to know what you think, Readers. Is there something that you no longer feel comfortable about enjoying, now that you know about the artist’s life? Or are you able to separate the two?

I should say that I found Dederer’s book thought-provoking, frustrating and a little confusing, but then that’s pretty much what the whole subject is like.

Lavender at Last!

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Dear Readers, after what feels like months the lavender, which has been on the verge of flowering, has finally started to attract its first bumblebees, and I could not be happier. A few days ago there were just a few common carders, and now the buff-tails and white-tailed bumblebees are here. I hope you’ll forgive a few photographs of them getting stuck into all that nectar. And the front garden smells amazing, although I shall have to don some gloves and clear out the worst of the green alkanet now that it’s gone over.

This being nature, danger also lurks in the form of a quite well-grown spider, who is optimistically slinging her net between the Bowles mauve wallflowers and the lavender. I think she’s still too small to snare a bumblebee, but the honeybees had better watch out…

The bottlebrush plant that my Aunties bought for me is coming into flower – strangely enough the bees are ignoring it, though in the past they’ve always been quite partial. Bottlebrushes are normally bird-pollinated however, as their colour indicates – birds love (and can see) red, while bees seem to prefer the blue end of the spectrum (though of course the flowers can look quite different under ultraviolet light).

And finally (because after four days hunched over my computer catching up with all the stuff that needed to be done after my exams my back could do with a break), here are the flowers that I featured over two weeks ago, and look! I cannot imagine a better advert for buying British flowers. What’s interesting is how many of the blooms have actually changed colour as they’ve gotten older. I have been meticulous about changing the water every two days, and I imagine that might have helped.

Twinflower – a Hopeful Story

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Twinflower (Linnaea borealis) Photo By Walter Siegmund – Own work, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2283836

Dear Readers, I have never seen Twinflower, and the chances are that unless you’re livijng in Scotland and have access to a Caledonian pinewood, you haven’t either. Which is a shame, because this is one of those fairy flowers, tucked away beneath the heather and the blaeberry, with the Scots pines towering over head. In case you’re not sure why it’s called Twinflower, have a look at this:

Photo By Walter Siegmund (talk) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12083429

What has happened is that as the pinewoods have become more and more fragmented, pollination no longer works, as the bees have to fly too far to find other populations, and the plants cannot be self-pollinated. Instead, they grow into colonies like the one in the first photo, which means that all the individual flowers are genetically identical – clones. This means that they are at risk from any gene that is dangerous because there are no plants to provide any diversity, and if conditions change they are especially vulnerable.

Enter the Cairngorms Rare Plants and Wild Connections Project. They are helping the plants do what they can’t do on their own – meet new plants. Some members of the group have been nurturing cuttings from the original plants in their own gardens, and the young plants are now robust enough to be planted in the wild, at ten sites across the Cairngorms. Within ten years, the hope is that the plants will be producing seed themselves which will cross-pollinate with the existing plants and create colonies of their own. Let’s hope that this is the start of a whole new lease  of life for Twinflower. After all, this flower such a favourite with the father of taxonomy, Linnaeus, that the whole genus of Twinflowers, Linnaea, was named after him.

Photo by Alastair Rae from London, United Kingdom, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

 

 

 

Wednesday Weed – Broadleaved Willowherb Revisited

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Dear Readers, there are many, many little willowherbs about, popping up all over the place and largely going unnoticed. Broad-leaved willowherb (Epilobium montanum) is one of the commonest, but there are half a dozen others, all going about their business without anyone to celebrate them. So here I am! In urban areas you might also see American willowherb (Epilobium ciliatum) which is usually tinged red. You can see one below for comparison.

American willowherb (Epilobium ciliatum) Photo by Jeremy Rolfe)

My broad-leaved willowherb has popped up in a neglected pot, where it has grown to about two feet tall without any attention whatsoever. As you can see from my original article (below) it is very popular with a whole range of caterpillars, and has been used as a cure for urinary problems and prostate disorders. Different small willowherbs grow everywhere, from the sides of streams to the edges of woodlands, from urban streets to rolling grasslands, and everywhere they go they flower prolifically, with their four pink petals, fires their seeds and then depart, until the next generation arrives in spring. And on this hot summer day (in London at least), let me share a poem by Edward Thomas that seems to sum up the languor of these June days.

Adlestrop
BY EDWARD THOMAS

Yes. I remember Adlestrop—
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop—only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

And now, let’s find out what I was writing about back in 2015, when this first Wednesday Weed piece was posted.

Dear Readers, I am always surprised at what turns up along the dark, gravelly path that leads to the side entrance of my house. Yellow corydalis, greater celandine, forget-me-not, buddleia, Mexican fleabane, Canadian fleabane, sow thistle and chickweed all put in an appearance, but this is the first time that I have spotted this little beauty – Broad-leaved Willowherb (Epilobium montanum). I have a garden full of Great Willowherb, but this plant passed me by. It has a delicate, shy habit that means that it is often overlooked but once I’d noticed it, I realised that it was everywhere.

IMG_2815The plant has four, deeply-notched mauve-ish petals, and the stigma in the centre form a distinctive four-lobed shape. The leaves are rounded at the bottom (hence the ‘broad-leaved’), and are practically stemless.  Like most of the other willowherbs, it’s native.

Note the notched petals and the stigma, which are ways of identifying the plant (By Frank Vincentz (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons)

Note the notched petals and the stigma, which are ways of identifying the plant (By Frank Vincentz (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons)

IMG_2813As with all the willowherbs, the soft leaves seem irresistible to insects, and the plant that I used for identifications was covered in enthusiastic greenfly. However, the genus is also subject to the depredations of some larger creatures, such as the caterpillars of the Small Phoenix:

Small Phoenix (Ecliptopera silaceata) (By Donald Hobern from Copenhagen, Denmark (Ecliptopera silaceata) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)

Small Phoenix (Ecliptopera silaceata) (By Donald Hobern from Copenhagen, Denmark (Ecliptopera silaceata) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)

the Striped Hawkmoth:

Striped Hawkmoth (Hyles livornica) ("Sphingidae - Hyles livornica-1" by Hectonichus - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sphingidae_-_Hyles_livornica-1.JPG#/media/File:Sphingidae_-_Hyles_livornica-1.JPG)

Striped Hawkmoth (Hyles livornica) (“Sphingidae – Hyles livornica-1” by Hectonichus – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sphingidae_-_Hyles_livornica-1.JPG#/media/File:Sphingidae_-_Hyles_livornica-1.JPG)

and, most spectacularly, the Elephant Hawkmoth and the Small Elephant Hawkmoth, shown below:

Small Elephant Hawkmoth (Deilephila porcellus) ("Deilephila porcellus-01 (xndr)". Licensed under CC BY 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Deilephila_porcellus-01_(xndr).jpg#/media/File:Deilephila_porcellus-01_(xndr).jpg)

Small Elephant Hawkmoth (Deilephila porcellus) (“Deilephila porcellus-01 (xndr)”. Licensed under CC BY 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons )

Plants of the Epilobium genus have long been used as a treatment for prostate and urinary complaints, and indeed a company which manufactures supplements made from willowherb has taken the genus name of Epilobium  for its company name (note that this is not an endorsement).  Although the showier members of the family are the ones most often used in herbal medicine, Broad-leaved Willowherb was singled out in an Austrian study as having a stronger effect than the others. While there is a lot of interest in Chinese herbal medicine and Ayurveda, herbal medicine in the West is still seen as something of a niche area. Maybe this is because when something grows all around us, it’s difficult to make money from it.

I love Rosebay Willowherb and Great Willowherb.  I admire the way that they can take over a spot of damaged and derelict land and turn it into a sea of cerise. But this little plant lurks in the interstices of the city, at the bottom of walls, in the crevices and the dark places, cheering them up with its mauve flowers and graceful habit. And, when the time is right, it fires its fluffy seeds with just as much vigour as its bigger relatives. It might be little, but it’s a plant with ambition.

Seeds of Broad-leaved Willowherb just waiting to emerge (By Frank Vincentz (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons)

Seeds of Broad-leaved Willowherb just waiting to emerge (By Frank Vincentz (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons)

After the Rain

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Dear Readers, it’s been a hot, humid day, followed by a thunderstorm, followed by some more of the hot, humid stuff. I’m back at work after my exams and my inbox is hilarious. I used to start reading my emails from the oldest ones, but after many years I’ve learned that the best way to do it is actually to start with the most recent, because it’s surprising how many of them have been sorted out by the time you get to the end of the thread. Still, it’s strange to be back, and I still feel a bit disoriented.

I popped outside after the storm just to see which plants were still vertical, and spotted the loveliest little common carder bee. I have a great fondness for these little ginger chappies – they seem even more busy than your average bumble. Their nests, which are ‘carded’ together with grass and moss, are usually on the surface of, or just below, the ground, and there are rarely more than 100 workers. They have a great fondness for deadnettle flowers, or foxgloves, and they are able to ‘buzz pollinate’, so you might see them making one hell of a buzzy noise around your tomatoes (or in my case, the bittersweet that’s been growing wild). They need to vibrate the flowers at just the right frequency to get them to relinquish their pollen. In countries where there are no bumblebees (such as Australia), the tomatoes are instead pollinated by humans (usually migrant workers ) with the equivalent of a plant vibrator. So if ever I’m feeling hard done by, I always consider someone tickling tomatoes in the blistering heat and count my many, many blessings.

In the south of England there are normally two generations of common carders, which explains why you might see them on the wing right into late October in a mild year. In the north their flight season is a lot shorter, but one was recently spotted on Orkney, but as climate change edges many creatures further and further north, who knows where it will turn up?

And in other news, my teasel is coming along very nicely, and looks more and more like a skinny, spiky green person every day.

And my bottlebrush plant is about to burst – my lovely Aunties, Rosemary and Linda, who died last year, bought it for me when they came to visit, so it’s very special, and I’m pleased to see it doing well. It’s another one that the bees normally love, so I’m hopeful, but I have to say it’s been very, very quiet on the bee front so far this year. Let’s hope that things improve.

Incidentally, I noticed how the swifts seem to follow the insects – after the rain they came screaming down the street, but as it warms up and gets less humid they get higher and higher. It reminds me of when I laid on my back as a teenager and watched hundreds of them swirling about until I had to hold onto the grass because I felt as if I was going to fall into the sky. I hope that somewhere they are still being found in such huge numbers,  because around here you’re lucky if you see half a dozen at any one time. I’m sure that the loss of insects means less insect-eating birds, but I’d love to know how it’s going where you live. How are the bees, and the birds?

It’s Not Just the Humans Who Are Getting Older….

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Dear Readers, last night there was a random letting off of fireworks fairly close to my house in East Finchley – not as impressive as at New Year (when it always sounds to me as if the aliens have finally landed and are taking out great chunks of central London) but noisy enough to make me glance up. The cat was asleep in the armchair, and as the noise grew to a crescendo she stayed blissfully unaware, proof, if any was needed, that she is finally pretty much completely deaf.

I am taking her to the vet for a blood pressure check-up in a week or so, but we’ve been keeping an eye on her hearing, and her problems seem to be purely down to age. And having a deaf cat comes with some problems, but also some benefits. The cat seems much more relaxed now that she can’t hear foxes/other cats/fireworks etc – on 5th November she used to spend most of her time slinking along the floor or cuddled up between the two of us, but now she couldn’t care less. On the other hand, she is very easily startled, so we try to take that into account if we need to handle her (i.e. get her into her box for her trip to the vet). It’s quite possible to walk up behind her without her noticing, and then she has an almost cartoon-like reaction which involves leaping into the air athletically.

She is largely an indoor cat, with occasional trips out on to the patio (but only if we’re there) so there aren’t the usual worries about her being run down, or set upon by another cat that she didn’t hear approaching. What is interesting is that her miaow has changed – it’s much louder and more authoritative now, presumably because she can’t hear herself and so has no idea of the racket that she’s making. Sometimes she goes to the other extreme and does a very plaintive ‘silent miaow’, with all the facial expressions and urgency that you might expect from a cat who clearly hasn’t been fed for at least a year.

And so we progress along life’s journey, me with my dodgy ankles and occasional health scares, and the cat with her blood pressure problems and lack of hearing. We’re both adapting, and also refusing to let what’s happening limit us. I hear my mother’s favourite quotation (which she had on a laminated poster on the kitchen wall, behind the scales if I remember correctly) about having the courage to change the things you can change, the serenity to accept the things that you can’t, and the wisdom to know the difference. It’s such a cliché, but somehow that really does seem to be the challenge as we go forward through life.

 

Finding Their Way Home

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Desert ants (Cataglyphis fortis) are experts at navigation (Photo by David Goldberg at https://www.flickr.com/photos/77764957@N00/17494697/)

Dear Readers, the life of a desert ant is a dangerous one. The species in today’s study, Cataglyphis fortis, lives on the salt flats of Tunisia, where temperatures are high and food scarce. There are predators everywhere, and it’s estimated that the life of an average adult ant is only 5 to 7 days. They can run at the equivalent of 600 km per hour, which helps to avoid the worst effects of overheating, but their big challenge is finding their way back to their nests, which have entrances which are only the size of a thumbnail, when their foraging trips can be up to 2 kilometres. Many animals navigate by using landmarks, but the saltpans are completely flat, so it was thought that this was not an option. So, how do they do it?

The Tunisian ants have been studied for over fifty years, and the first takeaway seems to be that the ants navigate by ‘dead reckoning’ – they keep a tally of both direction and distance, so that they can calculate their way home. Researcher  Rüdiger Wehner notes how the ants turn back to memorise the precise location of the entrance to their nest before setting out to forage. The ant seems to use the polarisation pattern of the sky, the wind direction and the Earth’s magnetic field as its compass, and it seems to be aware of the number of steps that it takes – when Wehner attached tiny stilts to the legs of ants (and goodness only knows how that was done) the ants ‘miscalculated’ because their stride length was longer. Wehner was so impressed that he wrote a book about the ants, called ‘Desert Navigator‘ which is available in English and with some fine photographs for all you formicophiles out there.

The latest news, however, comes in a study by Markus Knaden at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Germany. Knaden and his team noticed that the ants built mounds, both around the edge of the salt flats, where they were barely noticeable, and in the centre, where they could be up to 25 centimetres high. Could this be something to do with navigation? Like scientists do, they decided to remove some of the mounds and leave others alone. When the mounds were removed, mortality amongst these already beleaguered ants rose by between 250 and 400 percent, and it was noticed that the ants started rebuilding the structures as soon as they were destroyed. So, it appears that the ants not only have an inbuilt system of navigation but they build their own landmarks. Sounds a lot like tool-use to me. I find it amazing that not so long ago, we thought that humans were the only animals to use tools, and now it seems as if every class of animals has some variant on the process. Nature never ceases to amaze.

You can read about ants and their navigation here and their landmark building here.

Well That’s That

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Dear Readers, what a strange thing it is, after 9 months of slog and a couple of weeks of intense revision, to find that the exams are all over. Whatever did I do before every minute of the day was spent looking at mitochondria or genetics or natural selection in fiddler crabs? I am suffering from post-exam ennui, but I don’t expect it to last for long.

My second exam feels as if it went well, and I managed to upload it without incident this time, which is a big relief. But I have thoroughly enjoyed the courses this year, from putting out my dough balls for the magpies (who are now paying me back by nesting in the whitebeam and being mega-noisy at first light) to measuring the number of hairy-footed flower bees on my flowering currant. I have been astonished by the amazing complexity of cells, with a highlight being motor proteins that move things about in the cell. If you haven’t looked at it already, have a look at the animation of what they do in my post here.

So, with my level 2 biology courses done I am halfway through the degree. In the autumn I will be moving on to another environmental science module (I’m hoping to do half biology, half environmental science). You can read all about it here, if you are interested. I’m certainly very excited about it, though I’ll be glad of a rest over the summer – we’re planning to get back to Obergurgl in Austria, where we haven’t been since 2019. I wonder how much it will have changed? I’ll keep you posted.

One Down, One to Go

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An Ashy Mining Bee (Andrena cinerea)

Dear Readers, I was woken up at 5 a.m. by the magpie this morning, goodness only knows what s/he was on about but as I had an exam today I could have done without it for sure. Still, the exam went pretty well I think, even though at the end I managed to upload a blank version of my answers and had a very anxious hour while the OU sorted it out (Gawd bless them). Don’t ask me what I did, but at least I found it immediately – it’s so easy to assume that there’s only one version of something, when in fact there are several laying about waiting to trip you up. 

And then I wandered out into the garden to admire my climbing hydrangea, and look! There’s an ashy mining bee. I was only wondering where they’d gone yesterday, and now at least one of them is back. I wrote about them back in 2018, and there are some rather better photos of them here. How this little bee cheered me up! it reminds me of why I want to study science in the first place.

There are some rather pollen-covered bumblebees around as well, and lots of honeybees.

And then in the front garden, trying to pretend that she wasn’t conspicuous on the purple toadflax, was this crab spider. I think that the abdomen looks rather like a very small leather armchair. See what you think.

I wrote about these spiders recently too, so here I’ll just note that apparently they are most unsuccessful hunters (with a hit rate of only 3.5%), but that posing on a flower that is completely the wrong colour doesn’t actually worsen the situation. Last time I spotted a bright yellow crab spider, but this is the other common colour morph, so now I have a full set. It’s the little things that make me feel grounded and happy every time.

Not the most inconspicuous of spiders….

Welcome!

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Dear Readers, I took ten minutes from my revision today to pop outside. Can you see what I saw? You need to peer behind the leaves right in the middle of the photo…

How about now?

And yes, the blue tits have fledged – they are hopping about all over the garden. What innocent, vulnerable little balls of fluff they are! Their parents are pretty much losing their minds, but so far they seem to be ok. The same can’t be said for the magpies – there was a right old kerfuffle the other afternoon, and this morning there were tiny black and white feathers behind the hedge. I suspect that one of the near-fledglings fell out, and that a cat made short work of the poor little thing. Still, I suppose the blue tits will be pleased, and the parent magpies are still up by the nest so I imagine someone is still alive.

There we go! Travel well, little one. May all your parents’ hard work come to fruition in the form of at least a few adult blue tits, to grace the garden next year.