Well, Readers, the results of the BSBI Annual New Year Plant Hunt are in. You might remember that this year I took part for the first time, and managed to spot a princely 9 species in flower – some Botanical Recording groups managed to find 100 but then they had both strength of numbers and expertise on their side.

This was officially the largest plant hunt ever, with over 3,000 participants, with over 20,000 plants recorded on 2,200 lists. The streets and parks and countryside must have been awash with eager plant hunters. 629 different plant species were found in bloom, which is 30% higher than in 2023, and the third highest number ever recorded (the two previous bumper years were 2022 and 2021).

But what of the plants? The bulk (53%) were plants that were late-flowering – in other words, the mild winter had enabled them to keep flowering, although obviously there were regional differences, with some plant hunts having to be abandoned because everything was under snow. The autumn stragglers include yarrow, common ragwort and white dead-nettle, and they’ve been seen regularly in previous years.

Only 27% were springtime specialists, such as primrose and lesser celandine, but it was noted that there was a lot more of the latter about than last year (over 300 records compared to just over 50 in the 2023 hunt). This is not surprising – in his very interesting talk for the LNHS on how plants are flowering earlier than they used to, Alastair Fitter noted that lesser celandine appeared to be coming into bloom an astonishing 47 days earlier in 2016 than it did in 1951, and it’s possible that that trend has continued.

20% of records were of plants that seem to be in flower for most of the year, or which you might reasonably expect to appear in late December/early January – the three most commonly seen flowers were daisy, dandelion and groundsel, all of which pop up at any time of year.

New entries to the top twenty list were common ragwort and smooth hawksbeard, which are both plants of urban/semi-urban areas, and the aforementioned lesser celandine, a woodland plant. They displaced smooth sow-thistle, ivy and hogweed from the list. I find this a little surprising, but still, I only have my little ‘patch’ to go by.

Finally, the Plant Hunt data gives a breakdown between native and non-native plants. 35% of the species seen were non-natives – in other words, plants which had ‘escaped’, usually from gardens, and had become happily established ‘in the wild’. The full BSBI results document indicates that, because the majority of the hunts have taken place in urban or suburban areas, the ‘heat island’ effect allows many plants to continue to flower that would otherwise fall silent at this supposedly chilly time of year. Cities, because of their history of trade and diversity of inhabitants, also usually have the highest number of non-native species – a walk along the Regent’s canal often yields the most astonishing range of plants, for example.

One notable comment from the report is that our standard floras, which indicate when a plant is likely to be in flower, are hopelessly out of date – most of the respected ones state that only about 2% of plants will be in bloom at the period of the Plant Hunt, and this is clearly a major underestimate. It will be interesting to see what happens when these books are updated.

It seems as if lots of people have become interested in plants this year, and have taken themselves outside to see what’s happening botanically. Let’s hope that the BSBI finds a way to retain the interest of some of these people in the year to come – we need all the keen observers that we can get.

And in the meantime, if you’re in the UK, don’t forget the RSPB’s Great Garden Birdwatch which takes place from 26th to 28th January (i.e. this weekend!!!) For me it’s always an excellent opportunity to spend an hour wondering where all your usual birds have gone, but maybe you’ll have better luck 🙂

 

Dear Readers, I apologise for getting your week off to such a squirmy start, but I am reading a lot about bedbugs at the moment, and as other insects are pretty hard to find in sub-zero temperatures I thought I’d have a chat about these little chaps.

Plus, I have a personal story to tell. During WW2, my mother and gran were evacuated to Slough. After their first night (they were sharing a double-bed – my Mum was only six) they both woke up to find themselves covered in little red blotches. The following night they turned on the light to see lots of little reddish creatures crawling up the wall. Well. They pulled the bed away from the wall, begged some bowls from the lady of the house and filled them with water, and then each leg of the bed in a bowl. Apparently this was enough to fox the bugs, but even if it hadn’t been, Mum and Nan were somewhat stuck. In the end they decided to go back to the East End and take their chances with the Luftwaafe.

So, first up, what is a bed bug? It’s a parasitic insect, and the family Cimicidae has over 100 species, only 3 of which prey on humans. The insects need a meal of blood every 3 to 7 days, and spend the rest of the time hiding while they digest it: this means that they need to have a regular supply close at hand. The first Cimicids evolved to feed on the blood of bats or birds, which return to the same roosts every night, but once humans were no longer nomadic some species evolved to feed on us. There is a theory that as birds and bats nest in the roofs of human habitation, it was but a short crawl for a bed bug to discover us. When a bed bug isn’t feeding, it’ll be hiding – sometimes in a corner of the mattress, but also under plaster in a wall or in a crack in the floor (which must have been the case with Mum and Nan’s experience) The cue for a hungry bed bug to get active is a rise in temperature – in some other parasitic insects, such as midges, the CO2 in the breath can also be a signal and it’s thought that this might be the case with bed bugs too.

Many Cimicids can survive for up to a year without feeding however, which is handy when your host might hibernate (as with bats), migrate (as swallows do) or move house (us pesky humans). However, the current upswing in bed bug numbers, after they were practically eradicated in the UK, is down to a variety of factors.

Firstly, many bed bugs are now resistant to chemical treatments. As many of those treatments were carcinogenic and destructive of other organisms, this is probably all to the good. You can now get rid of a bed bug infestation by sealing a room and heating it to 55 ° C, though you run the risk of furniture etc being damaged by the heat.

Some pest controllers point out that the rise in bed bugs could have been exacerbated by the decline in cockroaches, because the latter eat the former. Even in our houses there’s an ecosystem which we’re constantly interfering with.

Secondly, we do so love our international travel now, and our clothes are ideal harbouring places for bedbugs from overseas. Even the poshest hotels may now have a bed bug problem. This is probably an excellent reason for unpacking and getting your clothes in the wash the instant you arrive home, however jet-lagged you are.

Thirdly, second-hand furniture (especially stuff with soft furnishings) can harbour bedbugs. Clothes from charity shops should be largely ok as they’re washed and steam-cleaned before going on sale.

And finally, there’s transport. There have been exciting photos of a bed bug on someone’s trouser leg while travelling on the London Underground, and Sadiq Khan has sought to reassure people. The suggestion was that the pesky bug came from Paris, but I am fairly sure that we have a lot of home-grown ones. One pest controller suggests that you should never sit down on public transport, which would be excellent for the core muscles, but not so good if you’re carrying a massive backpack.

There is a real sense of shame about bed bugs, as there is about parasites of any kind, but, as with head lice, there is no suggestion that bed bugs favour dirty conditions – all they need is a person, and they don’t care at all about your income, your social status or your level of education. Furthermore, although the bites can be irritating, bed bugs transmit no known diseases, unlike mosquitoes or fleas or lice (though a very bad bed bug infestation can cause anaemia).

In his wonderful book “House Guests, House Pests”, Richard Jones describes how in 1944 his father, then aged 14, bought a secondhand bed and manhandled it through the streets of London on a borrowed costermonger’s barrow. When he discovered bloodspots on the sheets the next day, his father and mother set about stripping down and dismantling the bed, eradicating the vermin and giving everything a good wash, before putting it back together and having no further trouble. As he points out, this would have been completely normal. We have been living with insects and other invertebrates for a very long time, and nothing that we do will ever make for a completely bug-free environment. While I can understand completely why no-one wants to share their homes with bed bugs, I think it does help to be a bit more pragmatic and a bit less squeamish about our house guests. Our homes are ecosystems in their own right, with the equivalents of miniature deer and tigers stalking about in the crooks and crannies. Let’s give some of them house room!

Dear Readers, once every five years or so (or seven years in this case, ahem) I get the tree surgeon in to trim the whitebeam. The photo above doesn’t really do it justice – this magnificent tree is now nearly thirty feet tall, and is so dense in summer that it shades the whole garden. Just in front is a hawthorn which is about two-thirds as tall. But both are getting a little out of scale for what is essentially quite a small garden, and with the increasing number of storms that we have (particularly during times when both trees are fully-leafed) it feels important to look after them for the long-term.

I’m lucky enough to know a little bit about the history of the whitebeam, due to the magic of the internet – I was contacted by the lovely lady who used to live in my house, and who planted the original tree in 1976! That was a drought year, and the sapling was kept alive with bath water and washing-up water. Well, it’s certainly come on a bit since then.

The trees will be trimmed as soon as possible (before the birds think about nesting), and for a while they’ll look very sorry for themselves. Part of me hates doing this, but I know that sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind – if trees aren’t maintained then they can lose whole branches, or even topple over (my worst fear). Plus, when you live in a densely-packed neighbourhood you need to take account of the effect on the light in other people’s gardens. But I have a lot of faith in the tree surgeon – he’s trimmed the trees back twice in the past fifteen years, and I love how he always takes a drawing of the tree before starting work, and thinks carefully about preserving its shape and health.  I’ll make sure that the trees are well-watered and mulched post trimming, and I fully expect that they’ll come into even more vigorous leaf than they did last time we did any work. And then hopefully that will be that for another six or seven years.

Is anyone else about to launch into something that they’ve been putting off? How do you feel? I feel a strange mixture of relief and trepidation (not least because sorting out parking for a van and a chipper outside the house is always a fraught occupation in these narrow County Roads streets) . Roll on the day when it’s all over and the trees can start to recover.

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

Dear Readers, you’d have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by the plight of small garden birds here in the UK over the past few days. With temperatures well below zero here in the south, sparrows and finches and tits and robins have been hyperactive, looking for food from dawn until dusk to give them enough energy to get through the long, cold night. Many of them have transformed themselves into tiny feathery balls, using their feathers to create a honeycomb of warm air to prevent themselves from freezing.

This robin was very attentive when we visited Walthamstow Wetlands on Monday – we didn’t even have any crumbs to throw to him or her. Maybe next time I’ll take a pocket full of rehydrated mealworms.

There are actually three kinds of down. Body down is what is keeping our friend the robin warm. Natal down is what covers the bodies of newly-hatched chicks, and is most obvious in birds who have well-developed chicks (known as precocial) such as chickens.

The third kind of down will be familiar to anyone who has been unfortunate enough to have a pigeon fly into their window. Powder down is found in a small number of different bird families, including pigeons and doves, herons, and parrots. In these birds the tips of the barbules that make up a down feather disintegrate, producing a powder – these feathers grow continuously, and are never moulted. But why? In herons, it’s thought that the powder down may help with waterproofing, and with cleaning off fish scales and other gunk, but it’s not entirely clear if this is the same in the other bird groups. What is clear is that it’s an allergen, though it’s mostly a problem for pigeon-fanciers and anyone working in aviaries or with bird collections.

In her piece in ‘Nature’s Calendar’, Rowan Jaines discusses Chaucer’s poem ‘The Parlement of Foules’, in which he describes four groups of birds, each part of a different social group represented by their feeding habits. At the top are the birds of the ravine, or birds of prey. There are the seed-eating birds, though they sit apart from the other birds so it’s hard to work out their status (definitely lower than the birds of prey though). Jaines has the worm foules (blackbirds, robins and starlings) at the bottom, though I have also read an analysis that puts the waterfowl at the bottom. However, what is clear is that robins and dunnock became symbols of the working-class, suffering through the winter – as Jaines puts it ‘puffing, whistling and working without respite’.

And here’s a John Clare poem on the robin in winter. He wrote about these birds many times, but this poem is longer than most, and there is something in his description of ‘That house where the peasant makes use of a gun’ that makes me think he is speaking a bit more widely than just some robin-killing local. ‘Grimalkin’, by the way, is a cat.

The Robin by John Clare (1793-1864)

Now the snow hides the ground little birds leave the wood
And flie to the cottage to beg for their food
While the domestic robin more tame then the rest
(With its wings drooping down and rough feathers undrest)
Comes close to our windows as much as to say
‘I would venture in if I could find a way
I’m starv’d and I want to get out of the cold
O! make me a passage and think me not bold’
Ah poor little creature thy visits reveal
Complaints such as these to the heart that can feel
Nor shall such complainings be urged in vain
I’ll make thee a hole if I take out a pane

Come in and a welcome reception thou’lt find
I keep no grimalkins to murder inclin’d
—But O! little robin be careful to shun
That house where the peasant makes use of a gun
For if thou but taste of the seed he has strew’d
Thy life as a ransom must pay for thy food
His aim is unerring his heart is as hard
And thy race tho so harmles he’ll never regard
Distinction with him boy is nothing at all
Both the wren and the robin with sparrows must fall
For his soul (tho he outwardly looks like a man)
Is in nature like wolves of the appenine clan

Like them his whole study is bent on his prey
Like them he devours what e’er comes in his way
Then be careful and shun what is meant to betray
And flie from these men-masked wolves far away
Come come to my cottage and thou shalt be free
To perch on my finger or sit on my knee
Thou shalt eat of the crumbles of bread to thy fill
And have leisure to clean both thy feathers and bill
Then come little robin and never believe
Such warm Invitations are meant to deceive
In duty I’m bound to show mercy on thee
While God dont deny it to sinners like me!

Dear Readers, while I was considering the parlous state of the world before sleep last night, it suddenly occurred to me that maybe, out there in the universe somewhere, there were people who had never come across my two favourite internet cats. And if you haven’t, I hope that you’ll find them both as funny as I do.

First up is Simon’s Cat. Written and animated by Simon Tofield, for me it’s one of the best evocations of what living with a cat can be like (and it’s only mildly exaggerated). Tofield first started the animation as a way of experimenting with Adobe Flash – he was already an animator, working on commercials for products such as Marmite, and companies such as Tesco. The short animations were based on Tofield’s four cats, Teddy, Hugh, Jess and Maisie, with Hugh being the main inspiration.

I think it’s fair to say that the first film, released in 2008, was an instant hit. See what you think. Called ‘Cat Man Do’ it follows that typical cartoon habit of upping the ante on every iteration.

But actually, ‘Let Me In’, released at the same time, is probably up there with my all time favourites.

And finally, ‘Fly Guy‘ features the total destruction of a living room. What’s not to like? Plus this one is such an accurate depiction of a cat’s hunting technique, right down to the slapping a paw onto something and then letting it escape.

Secondly there’s Henri Le Chat Noir. Henri was a cat much given to musings on existential themes, such as the meaning of life, and the films are in black and white, with background music similar to that of a 1960s European film. The films were made by Will Braden, and Henri, apparently a rescue cat, lived with Braden’s mother. She spoke French and helped Braden with his pronunciation, although this is actually a source of some additional humour. Henri’s relationship with the household’s other cat, L’Imbecile Blanc, is one of utter disdain.

In all there were 11 Henri films, with Henri retiring in 2018. The cat died in 2020, having been euthanized due to deterioration of his spine. What a very fine cat, though!

His first film, which kind of sets the tone, is here.  But actually the second one, which introduces ‘L’Imbecile Blanc’, is probably my favourite. And there’s a lot to be said for the third one, where he visits the vet, as well…

Some people think that the internet’s main purpose is the distribution of conspiracy theories and pornography, but clearly they are wrong. It’s an opportunity to celebrate our cat overlords, in all their tremendous variety. And goodness knows we could all do with a little light entertainment. Let me know if you have any internet go-to sites when it all gets too much!

 

 

 

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…

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

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

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.

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.