Sweetness

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Dear Readers, if you should ever be lucky enough to go to the Sunshine Garden Centre in Bounds Green on the 102 bus. you might notice a tiny area of green, with a few hawthorn and cherry trees just coming into bloom.

And if, while you’re waiting for the bus on the way back you happen to take a walk along the path through the little green area (which is sandwiched between Albert Road and Durnsford Road, you might notice that, amongst the lesser celandine and daisies, there are patches of violets, as you can see in the top photo. And furthermore, these are not any old violets, but sweet violets. If you bend close enough, you’ll notice a heady scent, which reminds me of parma violet sweets, and that perfume that all the gift shops in Devon sell (called, imaginatively, ‘Devon Violet’.

What an unexpected pleasure it is to find these flowers in such an urban area! And as I only had my phone with me to take the (less than perfect) photos, here are some better ones so you can see exactly what sweet violet looks like (though the smell should definitely give it away if you get close enough).

Sweet Violet (Viola odorata)

My Plantlife magazine this month has a useful guide to identifying our commonest violets. With sweet violet, the sweet smell is diagnostic, but you can’t always get close enough to tell unless you’re a bit more limber than I am these days (in spite of my pilates). One way is to get technical, and to look at the sepals – these are the green coverings of the bud before it comes into flower, and in sweet violet they are blunt with short, downy hairs, as you can see clearly in the photo below.

Sweet violet (Viola odorata) showing blunt, hairy sepals (Photo By Frank Vincentz – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1855012)

The other violets that you might see at this time of the year are early dog-violet (Viola reichenbachiana) and common dog-violet (Viola riviniana). When a plant has ‘dog’ as part of its name, it tends to mean that it’s an inferior version of a plant, hence ‘dog’ violets have no scent.

This is early dog-violet – note that the sepals are pointed.

Early dog-violet (Photo by Tico Bassie at https://www.flickr.com/photos/tico_bassie/3391334455)

Now, unfortunately for any one keen to identify to species level, the sepals on common dog-violet are also pointed, but to tell the difference, we need to look at the spur, which is the backward pointed part of the flower. In early dog-violet, it’s darker than the flower, whereas in common dog-violet it’s lighter than the flower (as you can see in the botanical illustration below). Simples! Except that I suspect that where the plants grow together they might hybridise, and there are probably other garden varieties of violet that crop up from time to time.

Common dog-violet

I find that it’s lovely to be able to put a name to a plant – for me, it opens a door to understanding more about it, and how it fits in with the other plants and animals that interact with it. For example, I had no idea that violets (in particular dog violets) are the food plant of so many of our fritillary butterflies, and it reminds me how vulnerable a little soft-bodied caterpillar would be if it was feeding on violets in a public place, where it could be trampled.

Pearl-bordered fritillary (Photo by By Iain Lawrie – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33507212)

Silver-washed fritillary (Photo by By Uoaei1 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=99733829)

Interestingly, I was with my friend S, and although I could smell the sweet violets, she couldn’t. There is a legend that you can only smell sweet violets once, which I find rather intriguing, as the scent of the plant contains chemicals called beta-ionones, which temporarily shut off the scent receptors. However, there is also a genetic component – some people can smell beta-ionone very clearly as a floral scent, whereas others are one hundred times less sensitive, and when they do smell the chemical it seems to have a vinegary edge. Fascinating! And of course, the sense of smell of some people who were infected with Covid has still not returned, or has been somehow changed.

Let me know if you’ve had strange experiences with regard to flower scents, Readers! I had one friend who insisted that freesias smelled of sausages, and I am ready for anything.

Dog Violet

Wednesday Weed – Acidanthera

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Acidanthera – Photo from Suesviews https://www.flickr.com/photos/suzieq/242252223/

Dear Readers, many moons ago I had a very flat garden with very heavy clay soil, and not a lot of sunlight. So, I went to my ancient RHS Encyclopaedia to see what I could grow, and one of the suggestions was Acidanthera, so I duly popped some in. When they emerged I was stunned at their elegance and sweet smell but then, when I moved, I promptly forgot about them again. Until earlier this week, when my friend J was looking for a summer plant for clay soil that was white in colour, and here we are.

The corms only come in supersized bags of 60, so we’ve split a packet and the Race For Acidanthera is now on, with prizes for first flower and largest flower. What the prizes will be remains to be seen, but I’m sure it will involve cake.

Anyway, what on earth is this flower? It used to be known as Acidanthera bicolor,  but these days it’s been firmly plonked in the Gladioli family, and is known as Gladiolus murielae. Its English names include Abyssinian gladiolus, and fragrant gladiolus, and indeed the plant comes originally from East Africa, with a range from Ethiopia to Malawi. The shape of the flowers is very unusual, and they seem to dangle from the stems like so many butterflies, but the Sarah Raven website calls the plant the peacock lily, though it isn’t a lily.

Incidentally, the name ‘Gladiolus‘ means ‘small sword’, which refers to the spikey green foliage when it first emerges from the ground. ‘Acidanthera’ means ‘pointed object’ or ‘needle’. So now we know.

In theory, Acidanthera should be hardy if you give it a thick mulch, but the Gardener’s World website suggests that it should be treated as an annual, which seems like a bit of a waste. It also suggests that the plant needs well-drained soil, which makes me wonder about my ageing encyclopaedia. Oh well, we can only try. Interestingly, it also suggests soaking the bulb in warm water before planting, and also says that the bulbs shouldn’t be planted until late spring. Have any of you had a go with this plant, Readers? Give me a shout if you have any experience/advice.

Photo by Yercaud-elango, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

Acidanthera is thought to be pollinated by moths in its native countries, and this makes a kind of sense – the scent is stronger at night, and many moth-pollinated flowers are white.

It appears that the flowers (described as ‘lettuce-like’ in flavour) are edible for humans : the Van Meuwen website suggests including them in ‘sweet and savoury spreads’, while the individual petals can be used in salads.

The corms have been used as antimicrobials and anti-inflammatory agents in African traditional medicine, for both humans and animals.

Most of all though, for the gardener, this is a plant that promises to fill that awkward gap in late summer, when most plants have already ‘gone over’ and the autumn specialists (such as asters and sedums) aren’t yet ready to pop. I will be interested to see how my friend J and I get on.

And finally, a poem. As you might expect, poems celebrating the Acidanthera are few and far between, probably because what would you rhyme with it? But here is a poem by South African poet Mbuyiseni Oswald Mtshali that mentions gladioli in general, and although it’s set in a Johannesburg park, it also reminds me of Parisian parks that I’ve visited, where people sit with their bare feet on the low fence around the lawn, occasionally touching a toe to the green if they don’t think the park keeper is watching….see what you think.

KEEP OFF THE GRASS by Mbuyiseni Oswald Mtshali

The grass is the green mat
trimmed with gladioli
red like flames in the furnace.
The park bench, hallowed,
holds the loiterer listening
to the chant of the fountain
showering holy water in the congregation
of pigeons.

“Keep off the grass,
Dogs not under leash forbidden.”

Then Madam walks her Pekinese,
bathed and powdered and perfumed.
He sniffs at the face of the “Keep Off” sign
with a nose as cold as frozen fish
and salutes it with a hind paw
leaving it weeping in anger and shame.

 

It’s The Little Things….

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Dear Readers, it has been a dank and miserable couple of days here in East Finchley, but when I popped out to the shed last night I could hear the frogs singing (finally) – the males have been around for a month now, but the females have finally taken the hint, to much excitement.

And today, finally, there’s frog spawn. And all sorts of frog-related goings on.

Honestly, just look at them. Where do they go to after the breeding season? I have absolutely no idea. A few hang around in the pond, but most of them just seem to disappear. They could be in the woodpile beside the shed, they might have wriggled into the dark, damp space under the wooden stairs, but wherever they are they’re not very obvious. The tadpoles are, though, and if I don’t get ahead of that duckweed this week it will soon be full of little wriggly amphibians so clearing it will be something of a challenge.

The one in the photo below was actually calling, though he froze mid-croak when he spotted me. Who knew that they were so shy?

Just look at them all! They will all initially spawn in the shallow bit at the end of the pond, next to the ‘beach’, which is a bit foolish because as the water level goes down, the tadpoles end up stranded, unless some kind person (i.e. me) notices and washes them into the water with a bucket of water.

And in other news, I looked out of the window yesterday to see a squirrel getting tucked into the squirrel-proof feeder, having somehow removed the lid from the top. Did I not put it on properly, or have they learned how to twist it off? Only time will tell.

The squirrel-proof feeder with lid intact.

And finally a lone parakeet continues to visit the seed feeder, and a very tough bird she is too, though not as tough as Rambo the feral pigeon. Here she is seeing off a collared dove, and she’s seen off a woodpigeon too.

So even on a drizzly, murky day there’s always something to see, and who could resist those little frog faces? They seem somehow so defenceless and so single-minded, but if you ever pick one up to move them to safety (they don’t like being handled and so I only do it in an emergency) you’d be amazed how strong those back legs are. The sound of frogs singing is the official start of spring for me. Now all I need to hear is a chiff-chaff, and I’ll be in business.

Good News From Toronto…

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Bald Eagle – Photo by Andy Morffew from Itchen Abbas, Hampshire, UK, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

Dear Readers, I am off to Toronto in a few weeks to visit family and friends, so I was especially excited to read that a pair of Bald Eagles are nesting in the city for the first time in recorded history. This is very good news, implying that a) there are some big trees for them to nest in, and b) that there are sufficient fish stocks in Lake Ontario for them to feed on. The exact location of the nest is being kept a secret, and hopefully this will give the birds enough privacy to raise their chicks, though hiding a bird with a wingspan the size of a door will be a bit tricky. Fingers crossed!

I well remember seeing an osprey nest just a few miles outside Toronto when I was sitting on a train at Aldershot station on my way back from the Royal Botanical Gardens. I wonder if they nest there every year?

Although I have often been a bit curmudgeonly about how little green space there is in the very centre of Toronto, there is plenty of interesting habitat round about. The lakeshore area is over developed in my opinion, but you don’t have to go very far to see less built places. Recently, new floodplains and wetlands have been created around the mouth of the Don River, where the land had been previously heavily polluted by industry. The Don has also been prone to floods over previous years, so a new ‘man-made’ exit for the river to Lake Ontario hopes to alleviate some of these problems. The new marshland habitat could be very important for migrating birds and for other aquatic life.

The new river during regulated flooding

The new river mouth in normal times

And some creatures, such as this beaver filmed moving what appears to be a small tree towards its dam along by the harbourfront, will presumably be glad of a more convenient and conducive place to build its home. I’m very impressed by how respectful the people watching are, even the small children. Who would ever forget an encounter like this one? Though back in 2021 a beaver was spotted wandering around Royal York subway station (comments included ‘I recognised it from the back of a nickel’ and ‘at first I thought that someone had dropped a hat’. This one had probably come from the nearby Humber River, and was collected and dropped off back in the marshlands there.

Photo by Jenn Abbott.

And of course, we can’t leave the subject of Toronto without talking about the raccoons. The city is probably the raccoon capital of North America, and it’s fair to say that Torontonians have a grudging admiration for the animal. Everyone has a story – my husband’s late father told the tale of opening the garage door only to have a raccoon fall on his head. But my favourite is about the ‘raccoon-proof bins’ deployed by Mayor John Tory in 2017 (who is a Tory – nominative determinism if ever I saw it).

Within days some raccoons had learned that they could open the bins by tipping them over so that the locks broke, and others had become adept at manipulating the lock itself. Well, these are very dextrous creatures, so I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised. And, much like the foxes that we Londoners share our streets and gardens with, the raccoons were there first. We just need to learn to live with the wildlife.

Toronto raccoon (Photo by Terry Ozon from Toronto, Ontario, Canada, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

 

 

‘A Field Guide to Getting Lost’ – Rebecca Solnit

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Dear Readers, I’ve long been an admirer of Rebecca Solnit’s writing – it’s difficult to sum up someone who’s a cultural historian, an environmentalist, a political writer, an art critic and a feminist  –  her piece ‘Men Explain Things to Me’, in which a man at a party patronisingly advises Solnit to read her own book in order to grasp the subject that he’s lecturing her about, thrust the notion of ‘mansplaining’ into common usage (though she didn’t actually use the term in the essay). ‘A Field Guide to Getting Lost’ is a wide-ranging look at the many, many different ways in which we can get lost, but it isn’t at all a sad book, just a thoughtful one, full of interesting facts and the most extraordinary stories.

Take the Wintu people of south-eastern California, for example. Solnit explains how they don’t use words like ‘left’ or ‘right’ to describe their own bodies, but the cardinal directions – north, south, east and west. She goes on:

“As Dorothy Lee wrote, “When the Wintu goes up the river, the hills are to the west, the river to the east; and a mosquito bites him on the west arm. When he returns, the hills are still to the west, but, when he scratches his mosquito bite, he scratches his east arm.” In that language, the self is never lost the way so many contemporary people who get lost in the wild are lost, without knowing the directions, without tracking their relationship not just to the trail but to the horizon and the light and the stars, but such a speaker would be lost without a world to connect to, lost in the modern limbos of subways and department stores. In Wintu, it’s the world that’s stable, yourself that’s contingent, that’s nothing apart from it’s surroundings'”.

Solnit writes of being physically lost, but also of her friend Marine, dead of a drug overdose at 24, of lost  love, of the failure of memory. She writes about Alfred Hitchcock, her fondness for country music, and the artist Yves Klein, who once painted a gallery pure white and left it empty. Even so, thousands of people came to see it, and the blue cocktails served at the opening event made people pee blue for days.

Why should you read it? Well, the prose is so beautiful. Take this evocation of the desert, where Solnit lived with a man she calls ‘the hermit’, and where she returned after they had split up.

“Heartbreak is a little like falling in love, in the way that it charges everything with a kind of incandescence, as though the beloved has stepped away and your gaze now rests with all the same intensity on all the items of the view that close-up person blocked. Out in the small house in that desert one of the insects called walking sticks took up residence on one of the windows, and after I poked it to make sure it wasn’t a stray bit of straw, I took to talking to it occasionally, so companionable was it. A spider with an image like a foolishly smiling face on her big white abdomen dwelt in the eaves over the door I passed through to write. Paper wasps built nests in those eaves. All around the little house Mexican grasshoppers flung out their wings, black. yellow and scarlet, vivid like butterflies while they flew, drab again when they landed. Bumblebees landed on coneflowers that dipped halfway to the ground under their weight. Occasionally a velvet ant upholstered in red or yellow plush walked by, and black beetles with a forward tilt left tiny trails in the dust.

There were lizards in abundance, and when they climbed the screens of the windows, I was delighted as I’d always been by the azure stripes on the undersides of the species we always called blue bellies. they kept drowning in the horse trough under the drainpipe, where they would float pale and hapless like sailors in a Victorian shipwreck poem. In the distance was the celestial drama of summer thunderstorms, clouds assembling in vast arrays that demonstrated how far the sky went and how high, that shifted from the bundled white cumulus into the deep blue of storm clouds, and when we were lucky, poured down rain and lightning and shafts of light and vapor trails like a violent redemption. It was as though the whole world consisted of the tiny close-up realm of these creatures and the vast distances of heaven, as though my own scale had been eliminated along with the middle ground, and this too is one of the austere luxuries of the desert”.

Of course, I would love this, with its close observation of the insects and the lizards, but there is something about that sudden opening up to the grand scale of the thunderstorm that takes my breath away. And how enigmatic those drowned lizards are!

And sometimes there’s something transcendent about Solnit’s writing. She has a way of opening up an idea, of making me think about something that I’d never thought about before. Here’s my final extract.

“Movies are made out of darkness as well as light; it is the surpassingly brief intervals of darkness between each luminous still image that make it possible to assemble the many images into one moving picture. Without that darkness, there would only be a blur. Which is to say that a full-length movie consists of half an hour or an hour of pure darkness that goes unseen. If you could add up all the darkness, you would find the audience in the theater gazing together at a deep imaginative night. It is the terra incognita of film, the dark continent on every map. In a similar way, a runner’s every step is a leap, so that for a moment he or she is entirely off the ground. For those brief instants, shadows no longer spill out from their feet, like leaks, but hover below them like doubles, as they do with birds, whose shadows crawl below them, caressing the surface of the earth, growing and shrinking as their makers move nearer or farther from that surface. For my friends who run long distances, these tiny fragments of levitation add up to something considerable; by their own power they hover above the earth for many minutes, perhaps some significant portion of an hour or perhaps far more for the hundred-mile races. We fly; we dream in darkness; we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured. “

This is a book to be ‘devoured in small bites’ too, because there’s much to think about and consider. It feels worth it though, to me at least. If you see someone on the Tube wearing a red coat, holding a copy of this book, furrowing their brow and then occasionally gazing into space, that’ll be me.

The Good Mother – A Tale of Artificial Intelligence

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Dear Readers, when you glance quickly at the ‘photo’ above, what are your first thoughts? Here are a few from the Facebook page where it appeared:

“Wow, wonderful mother”

“Maternal love”

“So beautiful and precious!”

Um, yes. And also completely fake. Although this is tagged as photography, it’s an image generated by artificial intelligence. As are the ones below. I particularly like the parrot with the kittens.

And then there are the slightly more realistic but still fake birds. These are often based on real birds, but have been slightly tweaked into a kind of hybrid between two or more species.

Does it matter? Well, it’s a bit cynical to be generating fake animals (and plants) for the purpose of getting Likes, and I hate that some people are being taken in. All of the sites that I found these pictures on are tagging them as photographs, which they ain’t. But some of them are getting so good now that they could easily be taken as real photos. The more scrupulous AI artists are being clear about what exactly their images are. The two below, which were both labelled as AI images,  are both of species of owl that really exist and actually look like this. I rather like both of these images (by Aye Aye at this Facebook page). However, do they add anything to the best photographic images of the birds?

I have no problem at all with AI images if everyone knows that that’s what they are (in fact, in a shameless plug, my brother has an Etsy shop selling a whole range of images here). However, if I was trying to make my living as a wildlife photographer I think I would be very fed up with the way that AI images are being passed off as ‘actual’ animals. I know that we all know that the internet is full of fake news, but I’m particularly peeved that you can’t even look at a thrush and some chicks anymore without someone messing with your head.

I think there’s also a slightly different issue here. If you look at the AI images above, they seem ‘hyper-real’ to me – the birds are fluffier, larger-eyed, brighter coloured, and altogether more ‘cute’. Does an overdose of this make the real life creatures seem a bit, well, boring in comparison? Does a constant diet of sugar make you less partial to things that are more complex, harder to digest?

And just a few tips to see if something is AI or real on the interwebs…

a) Has someone actually specified a species? This makes it easier to check on whether the image is accurate.

b) Click on the photo, then right-click. One of the options is ‘Search the Web for Image’. If this is a real species, it will throw up other images that you can compare it with. Sometimes you’ll find that it is a real bird/plant/bug but that it’s had its colours changed, or has been digitally manipulated in some other way. This leads us into something of a grey area, but for me if it’s been ‘tidied up’ in Photoshop that’s a bit different from being completely digitally created.

What do you think, Readers? Have you been caught out by AI? Have you, like me, seen an image of, say, a colourful insect (like the one below) and had to check if it’s real, only to find that it is? Do you get really aggravated by images that say that they’re photos when they’re clearly someone’s fantasy? Am I just being a curmudgeon (you can be honest (ish)). Over to you!

A real, actual insect – the Picasso Bug (Sphaerocoris annulus) Photo by By Alandmanson – Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75139200

At Tate Britain

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Detail from ‘Requiem’ by Chris Ofili

Dear Readers, today I went off to Tate Britain, in theory to see the exhibition of John Singer Sargent’s paintings of fashionable women in lovely frocks, but instead I found myself awestruck by this mural, painted by Chris Ofili on the main staircase. I’d heard nothing about it, but it’s about Grenfell, and in particular artist Khadija Saye. Ofili had met her in 2017 at the Venice Bienniale, but she perished along with her mother in the fire in 2017.

The first image, ‘Chapter One’, represents a prophet presenting the burning tower to us. His tears fall into an ocean of despair. The souls of the people are escaping as embers or falling into the water.

In Chapter Two, Khadija Saye is shown at the centre of an energy force. She holds an andichurai (a Gambian incense pot) to her ear – the pot was precious to Saye, as it belonged to her mother. Ofili tells us that it symbolises Saye’s dual faith heritage of Christianity and Islam, and invites us to imagine the sound of calm solace here.

To me, the image is disturbing, almost as if Saye is melting or fading away. Maybe that’s the point. You can see some of Saye’s photographic images, including the one that this painting is based upon, here.

In Chapter Three, the spirit of the souls emerge from the sky and the water to arrive in a paradise-like landscape, where two mythical beings play a hopeful melody on their instruments. The colours of the burning tower turn into a sunrise. The water links collective grief to both Venice, where Saye and Ofili met, and Trinidad, Ofili’s home.

The artwork will be in place for a decade. Will the survivors of Grenfell see justice before the mural is painted over? I’d like to think so, but I somehow doubt it. It’s good to have a reminder, though, that no one has been held to account for the death of 72 people in the Grenfell fire.

After this, the Sargent exhibition seemed pretty but trivial. What wasn’t, though, was the ‘Women in Revolt‘ exhibition, about feminism and art in the 1980s.  What a trip down memory lane this was! ‘Reclaim the Night’ marches! Greenham Common! Consciousness Raising Sessions! ‘It starts as you sink in his arms, and ends with your arms in his sink!’ The ‘Don’t Do It Di’ protests when Princess Diana was marrying Prince Charles! Holy moly. There were lots of women ‘of a certain age’ who were probably there (like me) but lots of younger women too. I think we thought that a lot of those battles were won, but  you only have to look at what’s happening in the US and some parts of Europe to see that the war goes on.

I was so carried away that I didn’t take many photos, but this piece stopped me in my tracks.

This piece is by Marlene Smith, and shows Dorothy (Cherry) Groce, who was shot by a police raid on her home in Brixton in 1985. She was paralysed and eventually died from the effects of the incident in 2011. The incident sparked major unrest in Brixton. The police eventually apologised to Groce (and her family) in 2014, and also apologised for the length of time that it had taken to apologise. The piece was remade by Smith in 2023, after the original piece was lost.

So, there’s pretty much for something for everyone at Tate Britain at the moment. The Ofili mural is free, but both the Sargent and the Revolting Women exhibitions have an entry fee – if you go to see a lot of art the Tate Friends scheme is definitely worth a look.

And here’s a plug for something else for us ‘women of a certain age’. On Charing Cross Road there used to be a women’s bookshop called ‘Silver Moon’ and one of the founders, Jane Chomeley, has written a book about her time there. I haven’t read it yet (you should see my reading pile, Readers. It’s just as well that I’ve retired) but I am sure that it will be worth a read. It was while walking back to the tube from Silver Moon that I gave some money to some folk collecting for the Miner’s Strike. Instantly I realised that I didn’t have a single penny left to buy a ticket home, and there was no way that I was going to dig back into their bucket to reclaim my money, so  I had to walk from Tottenham Court Road to Seven Kings. Still, I was in my twenties and it was a sunny day, and I had nowhere else to be.

Silver Moon bookshop in the 1980s

Nature’s Calendar – 6th to 10th March – Woodpeckers Drumming

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Great Spotted Woodpecker (Dendrocopos major)

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

Dear Readers, great spotted woodpeckers come and go in my garden – one will visit for a few days or weeks, and then there will be a gap for several months or even years. But you can be sure of hearing a woodpecker drumming if you take a walk in St Pancras and Islington Cemetery, or Coldfall Wood. Woodpeckers were thought for the longest time to have shock absorbers in their skulls, to stop them from getting concussion, but last year it was discovered that this was not, in fact, the case. However, as Lulah Ellender points out in her piece in Nature’s Calendar, the idea had already inspired designer Anirudha Surabhi to design a cardboard cycle helmet based on the three-layers (bone, cartilage and foam) that were supposed to protect the bird’s brain. And very exciting it looks too! Sadly it was never brought to market – the cardboard would have to be waterproof, which would involve using some non-recyclable components. The company survives as Quin, which manufactures ultra-safe motorcycle helmets.

The internal design for a Kranium (woodpecker-inspired) helmet (Photo from https://www.quin.design/en-gb)

However, just because the skull of the woodpecker isn’t what protects it from concussion, it doesn’t mean that these birds are not superbly adapted to a life that involves ‘bashing your head against something hard’. Because they eat grubs that might be buried deep inside trees, woodpeckers have extremely long tongues that actually wrap around their skulls when not in use.

Image from ‘Food of the Woodpeckers of the United States’ (Posted on https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/14749524544/)

But how about that drumming/drilling activity? Whenever I try to do any drilling I almost invariably get stuck at some point, and Ellender mentions that the same thing happens to woodpeckers – in fact, it’s been estimated that they get stuck approximately 36 per cent of the time. I’d be taking that beak back to B&Q if it was me, but as the woodpecker is rather stuck with its appendage, it’s developed a number of ways of getting around the problem, such as ‘walking’ their bills out of the hole a bit at a time.

And here for your delectation is an actual film of an actual woodpecker in Coldfall Wood here in East Finchley. It was recorded at maximum magnification, hence all the movement, so if you are of a queasy disposition you might want to give it a miss.

Woodpeckers are adapted in every way for their arboreal life styles, from the protective membrane and stiff nasal hairs that keep the dust out to their stiff tail feathers to enable them to stand ‘upright’ while drumming. They are both shy and bold, loud and elusive, as anyone who has ever tried to find the location of a drumming bird will know. They are the very sound of the woods at the start of the year. And how about this poem? Philip Gross is a poet that I haven’t come across before, but I’ll certainly keep my eyes open now…

A woodpecker’s
BY PHILIP GROSS

                                 working the valley
or is it the other way round?

That bone-clinking clatter, maracas
or knucklebones or dance of  gravel

on a drumskin, the string of  the air
twanged on the hollow body of  itself …

It’s the tree that gives voice,
the fifty-foot windpipe, and the bird

is its voice box, the shuddering
membrane that troubles the space

inside, which otherwise would be
all whispers, scratch-and-scrabblings,

the low dry flute-mouth of wind
at its  just-right or just-wrong angle,

the cough-clearing of moss
or newly ripened rot falling in.

But the woodpecker picks the whole
wood up and shakes it, plays it

as his gamelan, with every sounding
pinged from every branch his instrument.

Or rather, it’s the one dead trunk,
the tree, that sings its dying, and this

is the quick of  it; red-black-white, the bird
in uniform, alert, upstanding to attention

is its attention, our attention, how the forest,
in this moment, looks up, knows itself.

Wednesday Weed – Red Dead-nettle Revisited

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Dear Readers, I don’t know if you’ve noticed (or indeed if this is happening in your neck of the woods) but there seems to be a lot of red dead-nettle about. It seems to have formed a fondness for the bottom of walls here in the County Roads in East Finchley – maybe it’s just a little bit damper there, and this is also where the very first soil seems to form, as weeds from previous years die away and are returned to the ground.

One intrepid red dead-nettle has made its home actually in the wall, a habitat that I associate more with ivy-leaved toadflax and our old friends the ‘Port and Porsch’ bellflowers. Although it looks a little white in the photo it is in fact the palest pink.

And here’s a poem! it’s by Gabriella Brand, and I love the close observation of the plant, and the new name that the children give it. See what you think…

QUILT: LAMIUM PURPUREUM

Under the magnolia tree,(a gazebo of thick pink petals)

we find a plummy crimson quilt of tiny blooms.

At first, the children and I are puzzled.

Magnolia babies, says one. Clover, guesses another.

We lie down on our bellies to get a closer look.

In dappled light we note the whorls of reddish-purplish flowers,

hooded like Capuchins with blushing faces,

leaves bent into hearts, toothy stitches, straight stem seams.

A knowing friend identifies them. Red dead-nettle, she says. No sting.

The children decide it’s a blanket for bumble bees, a sleeping bag for caterpillars.

They give it a new, less macabre, name.

Pretty Not Nettle, they call it. And it is.

And so Readers, let’s venture back to 2015, when I wrote my first ‘Wednesday Weed’ about red dead-nettle.

Red Dead-nettle (Lamium purpureum)

Red Dead-nettle (Lamium purpureum)

In East Finchley, all the Red Dead-nettle plants seem to have come into bloom at exactly the same time. Where last week there was just a clump of leaves, this week there are those tiny magenta-pink flowers, each one a complicated combination of long throat (corolla) and upper and lower lip. They seem designed to encourage a foraging bee to take a sip of nectar, with a handy landing-platform provided by the lower lip, and the stamen poised to gently tap the insect on the back, as if administering a blessing. It is also a source of pollen, especially for Queen bumblebees who are looking for food for their new offspring. This is reflected in the name given to the plant in Nottinghamshire and Lancashire – ‘Bumblebee flower’.

IMG_1764However, like many plants, Red Dead-nettle is not dependent on bees to reproduce. It can self-pollinate if times are hard, and ants have been observed dispersing the seeds by carrying them into their nests as food, where some of them will germinate before being eaten. A quick look at the Garden Organic website tells me that a single Red Dead-nettle can produce 27,634 viable seeds if there isn’t any competition from other plants. Such abundance! This is not surprising, as unlike its close relative White Dead-nettle, which is a perennial, Red Dead-nettle is an annual, and so has only one chance to pass on its genes. As with many things in nature, it’s lucky that not every seed or egg is able to reach adulthood or we’d soon be buried under a positive carpet of furry leaves and pink flowers.

IMG_1768Red Dead-nettles are plants of disturbed soils, but they are not tolerant of trampling, so they often crop up just at the edge of footpaths or other open spaces. Although it is native to continental Europe, it is thought to have been brought to the UK during the Bronze Age – remains of the plant have been found in deposits of wheat and barley from this period. It has since travelled widely with its human compatriots, and is hence found in North America and New Zealand too. Unlike many ‘weeds’ however, this is not an especially vigorous plant, and so it is not generally considered to be a problem. In addition to its value to pollinators, it is also useful for humans: the leaves and flowers can be eaten as a salad vegetable, and if you want to experience the delights of Dead-nettle and Chilli Soup or, indeed, Dead-nettle Beer, you can have a look here.

IMG_1772

As we have seen before, the medicinal uses of plants often depend on their appearance, and Red Dead-nettle is no exception. Because of its colour, Nicholas Culpeper, the fifteenth century herbalist, considered it efficacious for any problems relating to the blood, especially menstrual problems. It’s also believed that the crushed leaves will help to staunch blood flow, which is useful if you are ever unlucky enough to walk through a particularly vengeful bramble patch en route to your destination. I also note that it is sometimes used as a treatment for piles, although Lesser Celandine is more commonly referred to as the ‘go-to’ plant for such afflictions.  Beware, however: Red Dead-nettle also has a reputation as a laxative, and, whilst browsing through the various ‘wild food’ websites on the internet I noticed several people referring to cramps and diarrhoea. So, the word here, as everywhere, is caution. On the other hand, if you have a pet tortoise, Red Dead-nettle seems to be a fine food for them.

IMG_1771Sometimes, it’s possible to find a more unusual flower tucked in amongst the Red Dead-nettle. This is the Cut-Leaved Dead-nettle (Lamium hybridum). Described as ‘easily overlooked’, you can see why. The main difference between this plant and Red Dead-nettle is that, as you might expect from the name, the leaves are less rounded and more deeply toothed.

Cut-leaved Dead-nettle (Lamium hybridum)

Cut-leaved Dead-nettle (Lamium hybridum) (By Fer55 (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) via Wikimedia Commons)

Red Dead-nettle is also has an angelic alternative name – Purple Archangel. It is argued that this is because the plant comes into flower around the time of the feast of the Archangel Michael, which is on 8th May. However, the plants that I saw today are obviously having a bit of calendar trouble if this is the case. Maybe there is something about the flowers which looks a little ethereal and heaven-bound. For the bumblebees, at least, they are manna.

By Beentree (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)

By Beentree (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Red List Twenty Nine – Capercaillie

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Capercaillie (Tetrao urogallus) Photo from https://animalia.bio/western-capercaillie

Dear Readers, what an astonishing bird this is! I have been intrigued ever since I watched the film of David Attenborough being menaced by a lusty male capercaillie in the Scottish Highlands,  – well worth a look. They are the largest members of the grouse family, and the males are almost twice as big as the females.

Female capercaillie (Photo by By Lars Falkdalen Lindahl – Flickr: Tetrao urogallus – Eurasian Capercaille – Tjäder, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16773482)

Capercaillie males ‘lek’ in quiet patches of Caledonian forest in order to attract females. But where, you might ask, are there quiet patches of forest anywhere? We walk, we cycle, we allow our dogs to roam, we camp, and there are rarely enough undisturbed spaces for a shy bird the size of a turkey to gallivant and preen. In Sweden and Norway there are so many capercaillies that you can see hens and their broods wandering along the road, but in the UK there are probably less than 1500 birds in total. However, help is on the way! A British Trust for Ornithology survey showed that capercaillie were particularly prone to colliding with deer fences, which have been removed or marked in a way that makes them more visible to the birds. There is hope in areas of reforestation, and the use of cattle to graze the underbrush, making a more suitable habitat for hens to nest in, and to give cover for chicks. Only last year there were helpful signs of an increase in capercaillie numbers for the first time in recent years. Let’s all keep our fingers crossed – the forests of Scotland would be so much worse off without this extraordinary bird.

UK capercaillies live only in the north of Scotland, where they live mainly on blueberries during the summer, and pine needles in the winter. They are herbivorous as adults, though the young eat a protein-rich diet of insects as they grow. Interestingly (to me at least), capercaillie have two appendixes which are full of helpful bacteria – this presumably helps them to get the maximum nutrition out of their limited winter diet.

The name ‘capercaillie’ comes from the Gaelic for ‘horse of the forest’, though Benedict MacDonald, who wrote the article on the bird in ‘Into The Red’, thinks that they sound like champagne corks popping. This recording was made by Jarek Matusiak in eastern Poland. But this wonderful article in The Guardian, which features a number of recordings of endangered animals, says that the call of the capercaillie sounds like  ‘the sound of clipping horses hooves, followed by a bottle opening and squirting water and ending with knife sharpening.’ See what you think.

The capercaillie became extinct in Scotland in the 17th century, but was reintroduced in 1830, where it did very well until the 1970s. Let’s hope that this time the bird is back for good.

Photo by By Arturo de Frias Marques – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28963698