Snowdrops in St Pancras and Islington Cemetery in 2022

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

Dear Readers, I have exactly two tiny patches of snowdrops in my garden, and neither is anywhere near flowering yet – the temperatures are below freezing, and look set to stay that way for the rest of the week. And yet, even the sight of those grey-green leaves poking above the frosty soil is enough to gladden the soul. Alfred, Lord Tennyson certainly thought so…

The Snowdrop
by
Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Many, many welcomes,
February fair-maid,
Ever as of old time,
Solitary firstling,
Coming in the cold time,
Prophet of the gay time,
Prophet of the May time,
Prophet of the roses,
Many, many welcomes,
February fair-maid!

Welcome indeed, and do let me know how  the snowdrops are doing if you’re in the UK, I suspect that in some places they will be under about a foot of snow, but hopefully none the worse for that.

In Nature’s Calendar, Rebecca Warren describes how ‘our’ snowdrop (Galanthus nivalis, literally ‘milk flower of the snows’ is one of twenty species (and of course these days there are hundreds, if not thousands, of variants).

Here is Galanthus elwesii, or Greater Snowdrop, from the Caucasus…

Galanthus elwesii (Photo By Schnobby – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19185047)

This is the Pleated Snowdrop, Galanthus plicatus, from Eastern Europe and Western Asia…

Pleated snowdrop (Galanthus plicatus) Photo By V.Kotyak – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32689756

And this is the Green Snowdrop (Galanthus woronowii) from north-eastern Turkey and the Caucasus.

Green snowdrop (Galanthus woronowii) Photo By 4028mdk09 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13292602

Strangely enough, snowdrops are not native to the UK – they probably came with the Romans (cue the ‘What Have the Romans Ever Done For Us’ scene from Monty Python) but as they’ve been here for over 2000 years I think we can safely view them as a welcome part of our ecosystem. They spread easily (in theory, though as my garden shows, not necessarily in practice), and there were probably drifts of snowdrops in woods across the country when they’re first mentioned by John Gerard in his 1597 herbal.

A garden full of snowdrops in Dorchester

Snowdrops seem to have a calmness and austerity that I find most soothing at this time of year. They appear pristine whatever the weather, and they just seem to get on with it, resilient and stoic. They always lighten my heart with their promise of spring.

Dear Readers, just checking in to see if anyone else grew an amaryllis this year, and if so, how they’re doing. I have one friend who’s plant is about 6 inches tall, but I’m not being competitive, honestly. This particular variety has four flowers on each stem, and two stems, so it looks like one of those old-fashioned public address systems, much beloved of country fayres.

The other amaryllis is getting ready to bust, and I am excited to see what the flowers will look like. They’re supposed to be green and elegant, but only time will tell. I’ll keep you posted!

Anyhow, let me know how your bulbs, indoor or outdoor, are getting on. My snowdrops are putting in an appearance slowly, and some of my crocuses are sticking their heads up, but we’re expecting freezing temperatures and snow this week, so if I was them I’d press the snooze button and turn over for a few more weeks. And we’ve been relatively lucky in London (so far), there are other places in the UK that have had snow/ice/rain/wind sometimes all in one day. Hugs to everyone! At this time of year we could definitely do with them.

Dear Readers, sometimes when I’m stuck for inspiration for a post I have a quick look in my ‘Tree of the Day’ book by Amy-Jane Beer, and for 15th January it was all about collecting maple sap. As maple syrup is probably my favourite sweetener, and as we are expecting snow here in London next week, I thought it might be a good time to have a little chat about it.

One of the many reasons that I love maple syrup is its complexity of flavour – all those caramelly, toffee-like overtones make it much more interesting than your average brown sugar. Beware of imitations though! When in Toronto we always go to the Sunset Grill for breakfast (an ironic name as the place shuts at 4 p.m. but there we go) and if you don’t ask specifically for ‘real’ maple syrup (and pay a few dollars extra) you’ll end up with pancake syrup, which is basically corn syrup with brown colouring. Aaargh!

Maple syrup is the sap of the sugar maple (Acer saccharum) or the black maple (Acer nigrum). During the winter, the trees store carbohydrate in their roots as an energy reserve. In the spring, the starch is converted to sugar and the sap literally ‘rises’ as fuel for the developing leaves and buds. At this point, humans have traditionally stuck a spike into the tree just under the bark, so that the sap is diverted into a bucket. There’s then a whole lot of boiling involved to reduce the sap to about one-fortieth of its original volume, which concentrates all that sweetness.

Sugar maple (Acer saccharum) Photo by By Bruce Marlin – Own work http://www.cirrusimage.com/tree_maple_sugar.htm, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2611206

Maples and maple syrup really are the emblems of Canada – after all, there’s a maple leaf on the national flag, and Canada produces over 80% of all the maple syrup in the world, with the rest coming from the north-east of the US. Within Canada, the bulk of the production comes from the province of Quebec. We watched an interesting documentary a while back about the ‘maple syrup heist’, when 3,000 tonnes of the sticky stuff, worth 20 million Canadian dollars, was stolen from the Strategic Reserve in Quebec. Who knew that there could be so much riding on tree sap?

Before the American Civil War, abolitionists switched to using maple syrup as a sweetener because, unlike cane sugar, it wasn’t grown and harvested by slaves. And during the Second World War, when sugar was again hard to come by, American housewives were advised to switch to maple syrup. Not a hardship, surely?

And here is what looks like the mother of all maple syrup steamed puddings. The recipe is here. You’re welcome.

Interestingly, other trees also produce a sweet sap, and I was intrigued to hear that birch syrup is becoming popular with chefs. You apparently need twice the quantity of birch sap to make a syrup (presumably because it isn’t as sweet), and it’s described as having notes of soy sauce, molasses or balsamic vinegar. Not surprisingly, it’s more often used with savoury dishes as a glaze. Let me know if you’ve tried it, I’m intrigued! Birch syrup is produced in the chilly northern parts of Canada, the US and Russia, where there are (not surprisingly) birch forests. The sap is also used ‘straight’ for a whole range of medicinal purposes across the Baltic states, Eastern Europe and Scandinavia.

Commercially produced birch sap from Russia (Photo By User:Fox89, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31920113)

And look, here’s a poem. I rather like the slow meander of this, and the house, with the root cellar underneath, feels like a familiar North American place. See what you think.

Maple Syrup
BY DONALD HALL

August, goldenrod blowing. We walk
into the graveyard, to find
my grandfather’s grave. Ten years ago
I came here last, bringing
marigolds from the round garden
outside the kitchen.
I didn’t know you then.
We walk
among carved names that go with photographs
on top of the piano at the farm:
Keneston, Wells, Fowler, Batchelder, Buck.
We pause at the new grave
of Grace Fenton, my grandfather’s
sister. Last summer
we called on her at the nursing home,
eighty-seven, and nodding
in a blue housedress. We cannot find
my grandfather’s grave.
Back at the house
where no one lives, we potter
and explore the back chamber
where everything comes to rest: spinning wheels,
pretty boxes, quilts,
bottles, books, albums of postcards.
Then with a flashlight we descend
firm steps to the root cellar—black,
cobwebby, huge,
with dirt floors and fieldstone walls,
and above the walls, holding the hewn
sills of the house, enormous
granite foundation stones.
Past the empty bins
for squash, apples, carrots, and potatoes,
we discover the shelves for canning, a few
pale pints
of tomato left, and—what
is this?—syrup, maple syrup
in a quart jar, syrup
my grandfather made twenty-five
years ago
for the last time.
I remember
coming to the farm in March
in sugaring time, as a small boy.
He carried the pails of sap, sixteen-quart
buckets, dangling from each end
of a wooden yoke
that lay across his shoulders, and emptied them
into a vat in the saphouse
where fire burned day and night
for a week.
Now the saphouse
tilts, nearly to the ground,
like someone exhausted
to the point of death, and next winter
when snow piles three feet thick
on the roofs of the cold farm,
the saphouse will shudder and slide
with the snow to the ground.
Today
we take my grandfather’s last
quart of syrup
upstairs, holding it gingerly,
and we wash off twenty-five years
of dirt, and we pull
and pry the lid up, cutting the stiff,
dried rubber gasket, and dip our fingers
in, you and I both, and taste
the sweetness, you for the first time,
the sweetness preserved, of a dead man
in the kitchen he left
when his body slid
like anyone’s into the ground.

Ptarmigan (Lagopus muta) in winter plumage in Glencoe, Scotland (Photo By A S Begbie – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=115432271)

Dear Readers, the ptarmigan is the UK’s only true mountain bird, found only in the Scottish Highlands, and becoming vanishingly rare even there. They are renowned for the way that their plumage changes, from a mottled brown which blends in perfectly with the heather-covered hillsides in the summer to pure white in the winter. Sadly, as the mountains of Scotland become warmer and snow falls less frequently, those white feathers become a liability rather than an asset, and the birds are easy pickings for the eagles that are their main predator.

Ptarmigan in summer plumage (Photo by By A S Begbie – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=92497729), 

I have never seen these birds, preferring to walk in the mountains in the more hospitable summer months, but they are distributed across mountainous areas in Scandinavia, Europe, northern North America and Asia . During the breeding season, males develop rather fine red ‘eyebrows’ that remind me a little of Groucho Marx, but the colour seems to be directly related to the amount of testosterone that the bird produces, and may correlate to how aggressive the individual is to other male birds.

Male ptarmigan in breeding plumage (Photo By Daisuke Tashiro – Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41916590)

The ptarmigan feeds throughout the winter, picking up everything from aspen seeds in North America to willow buds and catkins in Europe. Such a hardy bird! Its genus name, Lagopus, means ‘hare legged’ due to those feathery limbs, and the word ‘ptarmigan’ comes from the Scottish tàrmachan, which means ‘croaker’. So what’s with that strange ‘p’ at the start of the name, you might ask? Apparently it was added by Robert Sibbald because of the Ancient Greek word ‘pteron‘, meaning ‘wing’ (as seen in ‘pterodactyl’ for example, which literally means ‘winged finger’).

The recording below is of a ptarmigan from Lapland, recorded by Terje Kolaas – does anyone else think that it sounds like a fingernail drawn over a comb?

Actually, I can’t get enough of this extraordinary sound! Here’s another ptarmigan, again from Lapland, but this time recorded by Tero Linjama.

And finally, this one is of a displaying ptarmigan on Lake Mývatn in Iceland, with greylag geese, redshanks and redwings in the background. It certainly makes me want to rush off to Iceland. This was recorded by Patrik Äberg.

Honestly, what a truly amazing sound. How poor the mountains of the world would be without these birds around.

Ptarmigan in Norway (Male and female) Photo By Jan Frode Haugseth – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10534500

In Japan, the ptarmigan is known as the ‘thunder bird’, and because it has so few four-legged and two-legged predators it can be extremely relaxed around people. This is sometimes the case in the Alps too – I’ve seen photos of little flocks of white ptarmigan foraging around the skiers in Obergurgl. However, development for skiing can be detrimental to ptarmigan – one study found that breeding success was much lower in areas of the Cairngorms that were used for this purpose . Ironically enough, the lighter snow in the Cairngorms in Scotland might deter further construction of skiing infrastructure, and might prevent a further decline in this already beleaguered species.

Incidentally, in spite of its Red List status, it is still legal to hunt ptarmigan from 12th August (the so-called ‘Glorious Twelfth’) to 10th December. Words fail me, yet again.

Ptarmigan chick in Japan (Photo By Alpsdake – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33426292)

Great Tit (Parus major)

Dear Readers, my January edition of British Birds has come through, and while there are exciting articles on Common Nighthawks ( a rare vagrant nightjar that’s more often found in North America) and the breeding range expansion of the Caspian Gull (which will probably end up in the UK at the rate it’s going), I found myself drawn to the Letters section. In it, there was a response to an event that occurred back in 2023.

There was a report that, during a ringing session, a male Great Tit was briefly separated from its mate. The female started to sing, and the conclusion at the time was that she had taken over the defence of their joint territory. However, Richard Broughton, of the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, had another explanation.

Many tits have a song that is used only when they are unable to locate their partner. . Known as a ‘mate-separation song’, it’s most commonly used when the female takes a brief break from incubating eggs, and can’t see her mate, but it can be used by either sex. Great tits are socially monogamous and they are totally dependent on one another to raise their broods, which can often comprise 12 chicks – that’s an awful lot of caterpillars. It’s no wonder that there are high levels of anxiety if one mate can’t see the other, so while the male was off being ringed the female would have been calling incessantly in the hope that he hadn’t been killed – the death of a partner invariably means the end of any eggs that haven’t hatched, and for most fledglings, especially as the remaining bird can’t both forage for food and either incubate her eggs, or defend her offspring from predators.

Great tits are not the only birds who have a mate-separation song – in North America, chickadees have a similar call, and in Europe the Marsh Tit also has one. But Great tits are renowned for the variation in their songs (up to 80 different variants have been recorded), and they were amongst the first bird species to have recognisable ‘accents’. This blog, by Sam Hardman, has a number of recordings of Great tits from different parts of the UK and Europe, and it’s fascinating to hear the differences, so do have a listen. I always think of the typical Great tit song as being a variation on ‘Tee-cher, Tee-cher’, but clearly I haven’t been paying enough attention. Hardman’s field of research was the great tit, and there is much to learn about these ubiquitous little birds – have a look at this post here, which mentions, amongst other things, that city great tits sing at a higher frequency than their country cousins, but are also duller in colour, probably due to the physical resources needed to combat city pollution.

And holy moly, Hardman reports that in times of food scarcity, a population of great tits in Hungary learned to feed on hibernating pipistrelle bats. They located the bats by their calls (even when hibernating, some bats will stir and call, which ist thought to deter mammalian predators by indicating that the bats are awake and will be difficult to catch). When the researchers provided sunflower seeds for the birds, the bat predation stopped, indicating that it is a last resort – bats have sharp teeth, and even a small bat would be a match for a great tit if it was fully awake. Furthermore, the behaviour was observed over a period of eight years – the lifespan of a typical great tit is only four years, so the behaviour is likely to have been taught to each generation by their parents. As Hardman says, there is clearly still much to discover about these unassuming little birds.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Setae on moss

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Readers, a lot of you will have been fascinated, as I was, by the film of a wood mouse ‘tidying up’ the shed of wildlife photographer Rodney Holbrook, who lives in Powys, Wales. He noticed that items that he’d left on his workbench were being tidied away overnight, and so he set up a night vision camera (as you do). The film of what was happening has gone viral, and hopefully you’ll be able to watch it here.

What is really going on here though? There are a number of clues. Holbrook mentions that the mouse was also stashing birdseed in his work shoes which he also left in the shed, so what the mouse could be doing is preparing to have hibernate, or to have babies – s/he appears to be hiding food away for a rainy day, and the ‘tidying up’ could well be an attempt to nest. Anyone who has kept small rodents as pets will know that they will put all sorts of things into their nests that don’t appear to be very comfortable. The urge to make a safe place seems to be compulsive in some animals, and they’ll use whatever they can find in order to add to it.

Exhibit Two.

This is the magpie nest/squirrel drey in my whitebeam tree. After a few days of high winds the nest is rather less substantial than it used to be, but these pieces of plastic were originally tightly tucked into the structure. They look to me like the stuff that’s used to wrap building materials, and there’s been plenty of construction going on in the County Roads here in East Finchley, as there usually is. Either the magpies who nested in the spring, or the squirrels who took over the nest later in the year, decided that this material was too good to waste, and used it to make their nest/drey.

This shows how adaptable animals are, but also makes me sad. Maybe the plastic provides a degree of waterproofing, but it might also wrap around somebody’s neck, or get eaten. Just as the mouse appears to be trying to make a cache or a nest out of bottle tops and plastic lids, so the animals in my garden are using what they find around them to make themselves safe and comfortable. Their survival depends on it, and while Tidy Mouse might be cute, it shows how instinct can encourage animals to use their time (so short in the case of a wood mouse, which lives a couple of years at best) to do things that might not be in their best interests.

Still, at least Tidy Mouse has access to probably plentiful supplies of bird seed, and a warmish, dry place to live, and maybe there are other interpretations for their behaviour. Let me know what you think, Readers! And for those of you who have long memories, here is another story of a mouse in a shed, this time one that found his or her way into the seed bin for the birds. It was written a few months before my mother died, and it’s painful to read how full of hope for her recovery I was. Still, it’s hope that often gets us through, so let’s not knock it…

Long-tailed macaques in Borneo (Photo by John Tomsett)

Dear Readers, when I read this piece in New Scientist this week I was transported right back to my 60th birthday special holiday in Borneo, when we watched long-tailed macaques playing alongside the river. I remember thinking how intelligent and dextrous they seemed to be. I was also very impressed that one macaque who had lost one of his hands (possibly in a snare, or from a predator attack) was doing very well, keeping up with the rest of the group and appearing to be in good condition. Clearly there are benefits from being a social animal.

Injured macaque, but doing very well.

Now, the report in New Scientist is about a group of long-tailed macaques who live in Thailand, on the island of Koh Ped. Normally these monkeys have a splendid life, as tourists visit the island by boat and often bring mangoes, cucumbers and nuts for the animals. The monkeys were also visited by a group of researchers led by Dr. Suchinda Malaivijitnond of Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, who had been visiting the macaques for over a decade.

However, all of this came to a grinding halt in 2020, due to the Covid-19 pandemic. No mangoes! No researchers! And when the researchers were allowed back to the island in 2022, they discovered something astonishing: the macaques were using stone tools.

The macaques had discovered that they could use stones to smash the shells of the oysters that occur along the beach. According to the researchers, they were using quite a crude method, raising the stone above their heads and then throwing it at the shellfish, but 17 separate monkeys were using the method to get themselves some much-needed food. At the moment it’s not clear if the monkeys came up with the technique individually, or if they learned it from one another. Nor is it clear what will happen now that the tourists are back with their fruit and nuts, but primatologist Jonathan Reeves, of the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, thinks that now that the oysters are part of their culinary repertoire they may well keep doing it.

Interestingly, a study on captive long-tailed macaques concluded that they couldn’t use tools. But why would they, when presumably they were getting food regardless? The monkeys on Koh Ped innovated because they had to, and because they had the intelligence and dexterity to figure it out. I think we often conclude that animals can’t do a particular thing because we didn’t offer them a big enough reward, or didn’t design the experiment well enough. For example, I remember reading a study that found that tortoises were perfectly capable of negotiating a maze provided it was wide enough for them to turn around the corners comfortably. Doh.

Long shadows and electric-green algae in Coldfall Wood, January 2024

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

Dear Readers, I have been neglecting my Nature’s Calendar over the Christmas period but here we are again, and today’s theme feels particularly apposite. I have friends who suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder, and for them this point in January, when the distraction of the festive season is over and it’s back to work (and in my previous field, accountancy, there’s often the year-end to cope with too). The third Monday in January has been christened ‘the most depressing day of the year’, admittedly by a travel company who was hoping for everyone to book their summer holidays. And yet, in the Northern Hemisphere (sorry Southern Hemisphere friends) we actually already have an hour’s extra daylight per day, depending on where you are.

In her piece in Nature’s Calendar, Lulah Ellender explains how it’s getting lighter in the evening rather than the morning (due to the differences between clock-time and astonomical time), but that the time between the sun dipping below the horizon and it getting dark is actually shorter at this time of the year, due to the angle of the sun. It’s all very confusing, but I do feel a slight quickening in the pace of life, especially in the garden. Two robins were beating one another up only this morning and the place seems absolutely mobbed with sparrows, who are enjoying the tangle of honeysuckle and bittersweet that stretches up into next door’s apple tree. Plus suddenly the days are crisp and sunny rather than wet and cloudy, which always raises my spirits a tad.

Long shadows in St Pancras and Islington Cemetery

Ellender makes reference to British artist Gillian Carnegie, in the context of darkness not always being what it seems, so I had to have a quick look at her painting ‘Black Square’ (2008), shown below.

Black Square 2008 Gillian Carnegie born 1971 Presented by Tate Members 2010 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T12935

The painting is based on a night scene in Hampstead Heath. It follows in the grand tradition of ‘Black Square’ paintings, with the first one by Kazimir Malevich being painted in 1915, but Carnegie brings a much more naturalistic sensibility to her work. I can imagine myself back in Coldfall Wood looking for spiders, tripping over roots and getting everyone lost.

Kazimir_Malevich,_1915,_Black_Suprematic_Square,_oil_on_linen_canvas,_79.5_x_79.5_cm,_Tretyakov_Gallery,_Moscow

Here is another one of Carnegie’s paintings. She is described as ‘reclusive’, which to me means that we should leave her to get on with her work. She was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2005, much to her horror apparently. I always love it when someone puts their art first, a lesson to us all I think.

Black Square 2003 (Gillian Carnegie) from https://www.londonartroundup.com/reviews/Why-I-Like-It-gillian-carnegie-black-square

For Ellender, the point of Carnegie’s painting is that there is always much more to see in the darkness than you spot at first glance, and she’s right, of course. As the days lengthen in the UK, it’s nice to make the most of the darkness that remains, before the hectic springtime is upon us.