Canonbury Square

Dear Readers, I lived in a maisonette in Islington for ten  years at the beginning of the ‘noughties’. There was much to love about the area, but the flat had no garden, just a tiny balcony, too small to stand on. Occasionally a woodpigeon or a butterfly would come to visit, but basically I was without access to all the things that keep me sane. A series of truly awful downstairs neighbours didn’t help, either. There was the air steward with permanent jet-lag and a part-time job as a DJ, who would get going on the decks at 3 a.m. There were the two young women who worked in the media and had a tiny, neglected ‘handbag’ dog who would whine and cry when they left him alone all day. And, finally, there was the alcoholic, drug-addicted ex-banker who would break up his flat in fits of rage in the middle of the night. And so, I took to spending time in the squares of the borough, just in order to retain any kind of equilibrium.

Islington has very little green space, but it does have its squares. In Kensington or Westminster, these would be accessible only by residents of the surrounding houses, but in Islington they are mostly open to the public. Each one has its own unique character.

Canonbury Square

This is the earliest of the Islington Squares, created in 1800. George Orwell once lived on this square, but it’s fair to say that it’s gone a bit upmarket since then.

The square itself is in two parts, intersected by a busy road. Like several Islington Squares, it has a stand of palms in the middle. One of these seems to have seeded itself into a crevice in a nearby tree.

There are many memorials here. Some are benches, some are even more poignant. Christmas is a very hard time for those who have recently lost their loved ones, and I know of some who would much rather hibernate through the whole festive season. Who can blame them? The relentless emphasis on family togetherness and harmony can be overwhelming.

The trees in many Islington squares are magnificent. They are mostly august London plane trees, but they provide a fine viewpoint for more recent visitors, such as parakeets.

I noticed one bench that, rather than being in remembrance of a loved one, was a celebration of wine, and a small advert for the beverages of the Loire. Apparently the Loire Valley Wine Company also helped plant the roses, lavender and a small vineyard in the centre of the square.

Gibson Square

Gibson Square is in Barnsbury, and is slightly less ‘upmarket’ than Canonbury Square (though when all these houses cost millions of pounds to buy these days, it’s a very fine distinction. But what of these two fluffy panthers?

They seemed to be waiting for something, or someone. As did all the other critters in the square.

And before long, a lady with a wheelie shopper arrived, and was converged upon by all.

Well, this was a mystery that I couldn’t resist, and so I walked over for a chat.

‘What beautiful cats!’ I said, by way of making conversation. The lady sighed.

‘They’re mine’, she said, ‘But they won’t come indoors during the day, so I feed them over here’.

As usual, the felines had got their human perfectly trained.

We talked for a while about how much Islington had changed. The lady had lived here for her whole life, and wasn’t so chuffed about how things were going.

‘A little boy threw an apple at one of the cats, and when I told him off his parents told me off, and then we had a blazing row’, she said. ‘You can’t say anything to kids these days. I blame the parents. It’s not the kids’ fault’.

So, we nodded sagely about the way of the world, and parted on good terms, with the lady making a hasty getaway ‘in case one of the cats notices me going and follows me and then I’ll have to turn round and try to take her home’.

Lonsdale Square

In the heart of Barnsbury is Lonsdale Square. The houses here are rather different from in the two previous squares: they have a kind of Gothic Revival ‘thing’ going on, and were all built between 1838 and 1845. Simon Rattle apparently has a house here, and Salman Rushdie has a basement flat.

The square features some huge fir trees, and I spent some time listening in case they’d attracted an errant goldcrest, but no such luck.

Goldfinches visited the very tops of the plane trees, and a magpie surveyed the area from an aerial. This square always felt rather sinister to me, maybe because so few people visit it. The noise from building work on one of the townhouses eventually drove me away, to my last square. Thornhill Road Garden

The last of my visits, however, was not to a grand square, but to a little scrap of rose beds and slightly neglected bushes called Thornhill Road Garden.

It isn’t the prettiest of the squares, but it was the nearest to where I lived, and the one that I knew best. I found a long-tailed tit nest here, as stretchy as a green glove. I spotted my first ever brambling in one of the plane trees. My husband and I walked circles of this park when we had something important to discuss, like whether to have children. Sometimes, there were benches full of street drinkers enjoying some British Sherry. Often, there were dogs, sometimes dozens of them (this being one of the few squares in the borough where dogs are allowed). But always there was the sound of wind in the trees, and a few moments of peace. And that, above all, is what our green spaces, however small and urban, do for our souls. They reconnect us, and ground us. We need them more than we realise.

All blog content copyright Vivienne Palmer. Free to use and share non-commercially, but please attribute and link back to the blog, thank you.

I knew that the night had been a cold one from the way that the heating boiler lurched intermittently into life, the radiators clicking and jolting as the hot water gurgled through their veins. But it wasn’t until next morning, when I couldn’t get the top off of the composting bin because it had frozen shut, that I realised exactly how cold.

Through the window, I could see that the rosehips were wearing halos of ice, and the slats in the dark blue fence were rimed with frost. A destroying angel had pointed her finger at the geraniums next door, and they had collapsed. She had touched the leaf edges of other, hardier plants with a delicate brush, painting traceries of white along the veins. The lawn crunched under my feet and, as I left the bungalow and headed out along the pavement, every indentation held a milky puddle.

I didn’t want to walk too far: the sun had risen but it was bitterly cold, and I was fighting a throat infection. So I stopped to take a picture of a rook silhouetted against the sky on one of the roof tops, and then pressed on. I was heading for a sad little farm gate just along the road, surrounded by weeds and discarded farming equipment. I had a feeling that it would be worth pausing there for a few minutes to let the calm seep back into my bones.

I was in Milborne St Andrew visiting my parents and, while there are no immediate crises, there is always the question of whether there will soon be one. Dad has a bad cough, Mum has a potential UTI. We’d been out and about, buying a new bed (Mum took a tumble out of the old one because of the inadequate mattress) and looking at carpet (because the old, cream bedroom carpet had taken a dropped cup of coffee too many). We’d been out to dinner at an inn where we had been the only customers, and the standard of the meal was evidence as to why. Add into that some computer support, a fair bit of cooking and general troubleshooting, and it was clear to me that I needed to recharge for half an hour. It’s been my experience that just being still and patient and keeping eyes and ears open is a fine cure if I’m overwrought or anxious.

I cross the road to the farm gate, and take a few minutes to tune in. This really is an unprepossessing spot: there’s a pile of logs, a fine stand of teasel, some of the ubiquitous farm sacks and pieces of orange twine, a copse of hazel and hawthorn. But there’s also a little stream that winds past the shrubs and the gate, and disappears into the estate of fine cottages next door.

I can see and hear that the branches of the hawthorn are full of little birds: there is the chirruping of sparrows, the wheezing of starlings, the tinkling of goldfinches and the occasional irruption of an angry blackbird. I lean over the fence and can see that the birds are waiting on twigs above the stream to bathe.

I am always surprised by the joy that birds take in bathing, even when the temperature is below zero. But there they are, bellyflopping into the water, ducking and flapping and shaking themselves. Perhaps the importance of keeping feathers in good condition is even more marked when the weather is cold, and insulation is vital. Or perhaps they just enjoy it. At any rate, whole flocks of birds are ‘utilising the facilities’, a noisy, enthusiastic rabble.

Closer to me, goldfinches are flitting down to a shallow ‘beach’ on the other side of the stream, taking a few mouthfuls of water and throwing their heads back to swallow before flying back to the safety of the shrub, and then off. Something tells me that these are migratory birds, just arrived from Scandinavia, and on their way to somewhere else, with no time to hang around. They seem to be in perpetual motion, anxious to be off, a bit like my Dad when he has a doctor’s appointment and the car to take him to the surgery hasn’t arrived yet.

The water at the sides of the stream is a little bubbly, as if there is some kind of mild pollution. Nitrate run-off and other water contamination is widespread in the countryside, pouring off of the fields where crops have been fertilised or sprayed with biocides, but hopefully this is neither of these things. I hop over a stile (no mean feat in my long coat) and walk along the shady, overgrown path for a few yards until I can see the stream more clearly. Here, where the sun hadn’t yet touched the water, there is a filigree of icy lace along the bank, a thousand individual shards that are melting back into water even as I watch. I wonder what has fashioned each pattern: some combination of the shape of the bank, the currents in the water, or a stray piece of weed or stalk of grass seems to have changed the structure of each shape.

I turn to walk home, and pause to look at the stand of teasel between the gate and the road.

I love these seedheads with their myriad facets and their alien appearance, and so, it seems, do the travelling goldfinches. I notice that one of the seedheads is bobbing up and down, and realise that a goldfinch is grasping the stem with his claws, turning his head this way and that to pluck out the individual seeds. He weighs the plant down, and when he flutters to the next plant the teasel head bounces back up. The goldfinch is soon joined by another bird, and then another, the gold bands on their black wings fluttering between the plants until something spooks them, and they fly off into the bushes beyond. There is no time of year when it is more important to feed the birds: this year’s youngsters may not yet have worked out how to keep themselves alive when it gets cold enough to freeze the ground. And the way that birds of all kinds are attracted to the water reminds me to make sure that the ice on the garden pond and in the birdbath is broken so that they can get fresh water.

So, I head for home, only mildly frozen myself. A collared dove preens a wing with a long stroke of his foot, while he stands on top of a roof that is golden with lichen. A starling whistles from a telephone line. The puddles outside the house are starting to thaw around the edges. The beauty of this time of year is ephemeral, and it’s been worth dragging myself out of bed, and out of the house, to see it.

All blog content is copyright Vivienne Palmer. Free to use or share non-commercially, but please attribute and link back to the blog, thank you!

Dear Readers, this week I paid a visit to the Barbican Centre to see Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, and while I was there I thought I would pay attention to how this masterpiece of Brutalist architecture works for wildlife. You might think that the concrete and towers would be inimical to life of any kind, but a lot of work has been done to make it more appealing for humans and animals. In the photo above, you can see how the expanses of water have been softened by the addition of reedbeds, and in my dreams I imagine spotting some bearded tits passing through (no, this is not an unkind reference to hirsute young men) or a heron standing quietly, waiting to catch one of the truly enormous fish who sometimes surface with a disconcerting splash. There are also some sunken gardens, which are inaccessible to mere visitors but which look rather intriguing (you can see them to the left of the lake).

Moorhen

A number of waterbirds appreciate the habitat. There are dozens of moorhens and coots, and a fine assembly of mallards nibbling at the algae on the stonework, and exploring the leaves that have fallen onto the water.

Mallard

One of the surprising things about the Barbican is the way that it wraps around some of the much older buildings of the City of London. It flows around St Giles Church, for example, which was rebuilt after being badly damaged in the Blitz. The church is partnered by a fine weeping willow and what I think is a silver birch.

St Giles Church

Pigeons normally roost on the old Roman walls and the actual Barbican gatehouse, but today there was a keep fit class going on, with athletic businessmen running around in circles and using the benches to strengthen their thigh muscles. I considered taking a photo of them for your delectation, but it hardly seems fair to capture people at their most sweaty and dishevelled. I certainly wouldn’t like it myself. Plus, I’m not sure that taking photographs of people without their permission is entirely ethical, especially if you intend to share those photos with a wider audience. But, I know that I might be rather old-fashioned in my view about this, and as usual I digress.  Onwards!

The moments ticked by before the 1.30 performance of my play, and so I crossed to the other side of the lake. It was a chill day, and so there weren’t many people eating outside, but those who were were very popular with the usual suspects.

Black-headed gull

And so, with some reluctance, I headed into see the play. I settled down to watch the ramifications of ancient Britons and their problems with Rome, and winced at the casual misogyny of some of the characters. I eventually got my head around the sex-change of Cymbeline into a woman. I enjoyed the performances and the music. And yet, I was increasingly restless.

Do you ever get the feeling that you should be somewhere else?

At the interval, I decided to go and have a look at the flowerbeds which had been planted up for pollinators last year. I wondered how they looked now that winter was here, and I could easily get back in time for the second half.

And here, for your delectation, is a view of the grasses dancing.

I checked my watch. Five minutes to get back for the second half! And then I noticed something. In a flurry of sulphur and ashes a small bird arrived by the pond under one of the buildings. It seemed full of urgency, and I was worried that it had hurt one of its feet, although this didn’t interfere with its bounding flight. And all the time that long tail wagged. The name ‘grey wagtail’ doesn’t begin to describe the brightness of this bird, even in the fading light.

Grey Wagtail (Motacilla cinerea)

In the breeding season the grey wagtail is found by fast-running water, but in winter it can be found alongside any kind of stream or pond. It struck me that, in creating a variety of habitats including this shallow lagoon under one of the buildings, the Barbican gardeners had made a beacon to call in all kinds of animals. Who knows how useful this tiny man-made spot might be to this bird?

The wagtail pond.

Well, that was the second half of Cymbeline done for. How could I leave while this bird was here?

The City of London has very little green space, and so the churchyards and gardens and planted areas take on an even greater significance. As places for creatures to rest, and to feed, they can save lives. In fact, wintering grey wagtails often return to the same spot year after year and so this pond takes on an even greater significance. I have applauded the transformation of the Barbican gardens before, and I do so again here. And it gives me inspiration. With winter coming on, who knows what difference a water feature, or a berry-bearing tree, or some early-flowering plants might make to some weary migrating bird, or emerging queen bumblebee?

And, to end, here is a tiny film of the grey wagtail that I managed to take. Apologies for the wobbliness and the brevity, but I hope it gives you a small taste of what I saw amidst the grey concrete and the windy walkways of the Barbican. If we provide for wildlife, it will come.

All photos copyright Vivienne Palmer. Free to use and share, but please attribute and link back to the blog, thank you!

Dear Readers, I don’t know about you, but for me it’s been a hard week. Every new day has brought news of hatred and bigotry. People that I know and love on both sides of the Atlantic are angry and frightened about what’s happening, and what might happen. What is there to uplift the heart? Outside my window, the birds are going about their business as usual, bickering on the bird feeders. The collared doves in particular are using my garden as a breakfast bar, and last week I counted fourteen birds in the whitebeam tree waiting for their turn. I wondered what would happen if I increased the shutter speed on my camera to try to capture them in flight. And, although the results are far from perfect (I should definitely clean my kitchen window for one thing), I wanted to share them with you.

In the wing we see the perfect meshing of beauty and efficiency. The bird above is about to take-off and we can see the way that the wings are concave to increase lift on the downstroke. The few raised feathers on the bird’s ‘shoulder’ are called the alula, and are attached to what would, in other animals, be the ‘thumb’. This enables the bird to get greater lift at low speeds without stalling. The extended fan shape of the primary and secondary feathers on the edges of the wing maximise its area. Everything works together to enable the bird to take off. This happens all around us, every day, but at speeds too fast for us to normally see.

Here we can see a bird taking off in a hurry, swivelling its body and, again, increasing its wing volume to make sure that it doesn’t stall. Oh, and in the background a squirrel is attempting to dismantle the bird feeder. They have learned how to unscrew the metal perches that attach the plastic feeding spots to the tube, so that the seed pours out onto the tray and they can hoover it up at will. Clever squirrels!

Wings are strong but surprisingly flexible structures. Individual primary and secondary feathers can be controlled by muscles attached to the fine, hollow bones. Look at the angle of the individual feathers on the right hand wing, which have been separated to allow airflow over each one for maximum control. The fanning out of the tail feathers also slows the bird down as it comes into land.

It doesn’t take much to disturb the collared doves, unfortunately: a slammed door, a sudden movement, and they’re off, wheeling and flapping. They can fly perfectly well without making the ‘flap’ sound, so I think it’s often an alarm signal to the other birds. Collared doves don’t seem to have any kind of flock structure, and are monogamous, so maybe the noise is meant mainly for their mate.

I always found collared doves to be subtle birds, both in their colouration and their behaviour. They were just ‘there’ and I have gotten used to them being around. But these photos have really made me look at them again.So, lastly, I want to share with you my favourite image. It is ‘noisy’ and could have been sharper, I know. But there is something about the glory of those wings that fills me with awe and takes me out of my anxious brain for a few moments. The hamster wheel of ‘what-ifs’ stops. Dear Readers, let’s pause, feel the earth beneath our feet and be aware of our living, breathing world. It will provide solace and strength, if we let it.

All photos copyright Vivienne Palmer. Free to use and share non-commercially, but please attribute and link back to the blog, thank you!

‘David’s Squirrel – Clark Expedition’ (2012) by Mark Dion with ‘The Elephant’ (1996) by Balthazar Burkhard

Dear Readers, I had never heard of the Marian Goodman Gallery until a few days ago and, on waking up to the news that Donald Trump had won the US Election, I felt a need for some distraction. And so I went to see the Animality exhibition, which explores the ways that we relate to animals, and comes up with a lot of questions but not many answers. Nonetheless, the questions themselves have bothered me for a long time, so it’s good to see that I’m not the only one.

Take the enormous eviscerated plush squirrel in the first room, for example.

Titled ‘David’s Squirrel – Clark Expedition’ and made by Mark Dion, an artist who uses a lot of scientific presentations in his installations, the squirrel is enormous, and ‘dead’. There is no such thing as a David’s Squirrel, but it seems to me representative of the questions raised when scientific curiosity and living creatures intersect. I think of the bird artist Audobon, who has an enormous conservation legacy in the US but who, during his lifetime, made his famous paintings from dead birds that he had shot and then strung up in ‘life-like’ poses.

Bobwhite (Virginia Partridge) (1825) James John Audobon (Photo One – Credit below)

Much more recently there is the case of Dave the giant earthworm, discovered in Cheshire and shipped off to the Natural History Museum in a plastic box, only to be euthanized and added to the museum collection. Animals have much to fear from our thirst for knowledge, and our cold hearts.

Onwards! In the entrance lobby there is a small sculpture of a boy and a slug. This is the first time, to my knowledge, that the noble slug has been immortalised in this way.

Dawn, Fig 2 (2016) by Elmgreen and Dragset

Is the child contemplating the slug with wonder, or horror? The slug is just going about its molluscan business. Maybe this is about our total inability to comprehend what the lives of other animals are like. The boy looks at the slug, the slug looks for his breakfast, and neither are any the wiser.

In the corner, a pink octopus looks on, and we look back. It seems that we are separate from the natural world: we gaze at it, we dissect it, and we do what we like with it.

Pink Octopus by Carsten Holler (the maker of the tubular metal slides at Tate Modern a few years ago….)

Upstairs, though, the boundaries between humans and animals begin to breakdown. Roe Etheridge’s photographs of farm animals in a sanctuary are simply titled with the animals’ names.

‘Joy'(2014-16) by Roe Ethridge

‘Mark Jnr and Kayli’ (2014-16) by Roe Ethridge

When I look at these photos, I am no longer looking at ‘a’ goat, I’m looking at Joy, an individual with likes and dislikes. I love work that is particular, rather than generic. I love work that honours what it looks at.

And then, there are the pieces that cross over, that point out that we are animals too, and that what separates us is not as pronounced as we would like to think. Take these two ‘column sculptures’ by Stephan Baukenhol, each one made out of a single piece of wood.

Am I alone in finding the combination of human body and animal head rather appealing? These figures wear their strangeness very lightly: they are poised, relaxed, thoughtful. They look as if they could hop down off their plinths and wander off around the gallery. As a species, we have been fascinated by creatures that are chimeras, neither human nor animal, since we could first create representations. It seems that we haven’t lost the wish to experience life as someone else, to get back under the skin of the creatures that we share the world with. We try and try to understand, whether through art or science, and yet these other worlds remain elusive. Maybe it we stopped trying so hard and had a bit more respect, we would have more success.

And, in other news, foxes have been spotted in the cemetery…

This is one of this year’s dog cubs, and very fine he’s looking too, though he has a bit of a limp at the moment. Foxes seem prone to injuring their feet and legs, I suspect it’s all that shimmying over garden walls that causes the problem. It generally doesn’t seem to last very long before they’re moving properly again, but I have the arnica drops out just in case.

And here is the original dog fox, the father of this year’s cubs, and a bold, calm creature. He was watching me put out my jam sandwiches and seemed remarkably unperturbed by all my messing about and cursing as I dropped forks and dog food and the camera at one point.

The cubs are gradually dispersing and, although I’ve seen the vixen, she’s not stuck around long enough for a photo. Suffice to say that the whole family seem to be doing well. And in about month, the whole cycle will be starting all over again! How on earth can it be November already?

The Marian Goodman Gallery is free, and well worth a look. ‘Animality’ continues until 17th December.

Photo Credits

Photo One – Audobon Painting – By http://www.RestoredPrints.com, Attribution, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5644483

All other photos copyright Vivienne Palmer. Free to use or share non-commercially, but please attribute and link back to the blog, thank you!