Bluebell time

Never corny, the flowering of our bluebell woods is always spellbinding.  Despite the erratic weather in the 2015/16 winter the plants seem to be doing just as well as ever.  This is from Killingan Wood in Sedlescombe.

Butterflies continue to appear.  Today I had a chat with this splendid comma (below) resting head down and wings spread to catch the sun's warmth on dead bramble stalks in a blackthorn thicket.  Although so familiar, I ruminated on the jagged edges to the wings which hardly seem designed to enable the insect to fly better.  If they are supposed to disguise the insect by making it seem like a fallen leaf then come on Evolution pull your socks up.  The butterfly is more cryptic if the wings are closed allowing only the dark underside to show, but then why is the upper side not dark also?

Woodland bee wall

In ancient Churchland Wood just at the end of our garden there is a root plate on  a sweet chestnut that was toppled in the 1987 great storm.

Microhabitats like this can be interesting and are important to species of plants and animals that need the conditions they provide. I have often looked at it for wildlife and this year was pleased to find that there were many females of Clarke's mining bee, Andrena clarkella, digging out nest holes, mostly near the top of the plate, as comfortable, well-stocked quarters for their progeny.  These bees are fond of pollen from sallow flowers and will visit dandelions and other species for nectar.  We have several sallows in the garden and, combined with the root plate, a breeding opportunity is created that is becoming increasingly scarce.  I worry though that in 'well-managed' woodland (now often thought of as a essential conservation requirement), root plates would be levelled (might get in the way of forestry machines) and sallows removed as tree species of little worth.

Andrena clarkella is widespread in the south of England.

Blinks confirmed (maybe)

Late last spring I found some tiny plants among short grass on an earth bank running down from the front garden of a house in a modern estate on the edge of Sedlescombe village.  It was a very dry, sunbaked spot and the plants were brown and dry too, but had clearly been flowering.

I brought a few small pieces home and potted them up, though I had little hope that they would grow. However, some tiny seedlings appeared in the autumn and developed gradually, coming into flower in late March.  They appear to be blinks, Montia fontana, probably the subspecies chondrospermia which grows in drier places, but it is not an entirely accurate fit and I will have to wait for seeds as their outer casing is diagnostic for the subspecies.  There are also various foreign species of Montia and I will have to bear that in mind as members of the genus appear to travel well.

M. fontana is a wintergreen plant and, with its rather larger sister subspecies (which grow in wet places) has been used as a salad, though one would have to pick a lot to get any satisfaction.  In some places it is known as 'annual water miner's lettuce'.

All that is made?

I found an old hazelnut on the floor of our sitting room today. It might have been something I brought home in my pocket or, more likely a survivor from the bag of Kentish cob nuts we bought in the autumn. From its shape it might be the variety known as Merveille de Bolwiller. Anyway, I drilled a hole through it and threaded it onto green ribbon.  It reminded me, as hazelnuts always do, of the wonderful passage from the writings of the 13th/14th century English anchoress Julian of Norwich in her Revelations of Divine Love:

In this vision he showed me a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, and it 

was round as a ball. I looked at it with the eye of my understanding and 

thought "What may this be?" And it was generally answered thus: "It is all that is 

made." I marvelled how it might last, for it seemed it might suddenly have 

sunk into nothing because of its littleness. And I was answered in my 

understanding: "It lasts and ever shall, because God loves it. 

Also William Blake:

To see the world in a grain of sand

And heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

And eternity in an hour.

My hazelnut, as you can see from the photo, is ovoid rather than round. Nevertheless, the principle applies.  I am struck by the way Julian's vision anticipates the Big Bang and how our current universe arose, so they say, from a tiny singularity.  I think she, William Blake and Plotinus would have got on very well.

From mild to cold

In the last few days the exceptionally mild, wet period seems to have ended and we have had several overnight frosts.

The relatively high winter temperatures seem to have produced uneven effects.  As I wrote on 31st December, many camellias are flowering already and daffodils are out here and there in the village, though they do not look comfortable.  Hazel catkins are now just starting to expand and are slightly later than usual and there are no snowdrops out in our garden yet.  Perhaps these need a cold spell, like many seeds, to trigger them into action.

The unseasonal warmth has allowed some plants to flower on beyond their season.  The hogweed to the right (with a visiting anthomyiid fly) was photographed here on 7th January.  Normally a late summer flowering species, it grows in our lawn and has probably been cut back by mowing but has grown up again and continued its development long past its normal season.

A mild ending to 2015

It is New year's Eve and just as mild as it has been for the past several weeks, though we had a couple of light frosts in November.  All the photos below were taken on 31 December 2015.

The unseasonal warmth has had a mixed effect on wildlife and several times I have heard on the media that daffodils are already out.  The significance of this, of course, depends on the species and variety of daffodil and where it is growing.  In our garden there are none anywhere near flowering, but I did find a few this afternoon in the grounds of the village community centre.

Out of hundreds of bulbs planted here there were maybe a dozen open or half open and not looking particularly happy.  The majority were in the sheltered lee of a south facing hedge with, no doubt, a warm microclimate, but I don't think they would have been flowering on this date last year.

Different plants respond in different ways to mild winters.  The usual species - gorse, winter heliotrope, dandelions, daisies and red dead-nettle - that usually flower in the colder months are all doing well while those that will not flower before their time, even if we have a heat wave, continue to follow their seasonal clock.  Try as I might I could not find a hazel catkin or a snowdrop fully out. Bluebells are showing early green leaves as normal.

Among the cultivated plants, camellias are well ahead of their usual timetable, as is often the case with plants from the Far East that respond to temperature rather than day length.  Greater periwinkle and intermediate periwinkle are also doing well and, by a cottage wall, I found winter jasmine (a native of China) and summer snowflake blooming together (see above).  A nice juxtaposition of names, but summer snowflake is an early flowerer in most of Britain and its name is a translation of the scientific name Leucojum aestivum given to it by the Swedish taxonomist Linnaeus.  In his part of Sweden it does flower in early summer.

The two flowers I thought were rather unusual for New year's Eve were a marsh marigold (below  left) by the pond in Red Barn Field, our Local Nature Reserve, and a couple a quite expansive patches of lesser celandine, the latter with some very active leaf mines of the agromyzid fly Phytomyza ranunculi, clearly able to feed throughout current weather conditions.

Spread of the fern smut moth

There are a few plants of the wintergreen common polypody fern (Polypodium vulgare) growing in Killingan Wood at OS grid ref. TQ781190 about 200 metres from our house.  The one below is growing on the base of a mossy hornbeam trunk.

On taking a closer look at the underside of the fronds I discovered several greyish scars next to damaged sporangia (the round, spore-containing structures on the underside of the fronds).           These manifestations seemed to be small leaf mines, or cocoon-like structures, and the inmates had clearly been feeding on the sporangia.  I am fairly certain they are evidence of the young larvae of the fern smut moth (Psychoides filicivora) - there isn't much else they could be - but I will try and breed some through to confirm the identity.

The fern smut was first discovered in Ireland in 1909, and in mainland Britain in 1940 and is thought to have been introduced to the British Isles on imported ferns.  In the 1990s it was discovered in Madeira where it is thought to be a native endemic.  Most British records seem to be in the West Country and north and south Wales, but it is gradually moving inland perhaps, like so many recent arrivals, helped by an increasingly milder climate.

Rather appropriately I found this insect on the day of the Paris Agreement at the United Nations  Conférence sur les Changements Climatique (Conference on Climate Change) when 195 nations agreed to do their best to control global warming.

Fern time

In November after the leaves have fallen and before the first hard frost have bitten, the ferns in our local woodlands stand out more than usual.  The picture below shows and extensive 'mini-forest' mainly of male fern (Dryopteris filix-mas) and broad buckler fern (Dryopteris dilatata).

Not far away there is an old brick pit full of ferns of different species including some very large examples of the male fern complex which I think are referable to Dryopteris x complexa a hybrid between the scaly male fern (Dryopteris affinis) and the common male fern (D. filix-mas).  This is a very complex group that seems to be changing rapidly in evolutionary terms with much crossing and back crossing.  The hybrid male fern is, however, most easily recognised by its large size (the plant in the first picture below has fronds longer than I am tall),  Sometimes several plants form a group as in the second picture below.  These examples are also growing in the right sort of habitat.

End of season, start of season

On one of my most frequent walking routes around Hurst Lane in Sedlescombe I spotted this fading plant of betony (Stachys officinalis) the other day. I cannot imagine how I have missed it until now since, from the green spiky bit at the top of the stalk, it has clearly borne quite a number of flowers through the summer.  It was much used in the past by herbalists as a cure for almost everything.

When I was younger it was much commoner in the countryside than it is today.  It likes road banks and rough fields, but road banks are regularly cut and rough fields ploughed up for 'improvement'.  The one in the photo is, I am sure, the only one over a mile of more of the lane verge and I doubt that it will survive for many more years and not return.

Along the same verge leaves of  winter green cow parsley have been showing for a few weeks. Mostly they are fresh, bright green as in the upper part of the picture right, but sometimes they fade prematurely through pink and white and ultimately brown when they are infected by the microfungus Ramularia anthrisci.  There is also a small fly, Phytomyza chaerophylli, that produces tiny whitish mines towards the tips of the leaves.  Both these are quite common in our area, but probably not often recorded.




Another microfungus that shows up both itself and its host plant at this time of year is Melampsora hypericorum, the hypericum rust shown left spotting the leaves of tutsan (Hypericum androsaemum).  It is not, in my experience, a fatal affliction and the host plant should recover for next year.

Also from the verge of Hurst Lane.

Late common wasps

We have had a continuous visitation of common wasps (Vespula vulgaris) on the east window of our sitting room for about a month.  They are nearly all males (distinguishable by the long antennae and body and larger size than the workers) and we get up to four or five a day.  I let them out and they sail away across the garden and, I suspect, we get newly emerged ones every day rather than yesterday's coming back again.  I have not yet worked out where they are coming from and we had rather few workers in summer.

It is not unusual for this species to be on the wing very late in the year, especially if the weather is mild, but it seems that there are a disproportionate number of males (we have yet to see a queen).

Autumn berries

One of the most dramatic phenomena of the British countryside in winter is a large female holly with a full crop of berries caught in a sunlight which makes the glossy evergreen leaves as well as the clusters of red fruit shine with an almost tropical glory.

I once saw royal poinciana trees (Delonix regia) in flame red flower in Sri Lanka and, more surprisingly, a splendid example of  the Chilean fire bush (Embothrium coccineum) emblazoning a small garden in Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands, but neither had the sharp, in-your-face confidence of our native holly.  And we not only get the brilliance, there is all the folklore and the Christmastide symbolism.

Perhaps a little more sinister are the sagging ropes of poisonous black bryony berries, jewels of Halloween as writer Paul Evans called them, and, reminding of the snaking vines that clambered through fences and bushes in summer. They spring from large black tubers, once known as 'womandrakes' with a variety of magical and medicinal properties.

Such riches within quarter of a mile of home.

Terra Incognita

I headed south today in the still warm November autumn.  Our lane runs between hedge and wood to a dead end closed by a wrought iron padlocked gate that does not seem to have been used for a long time.

To the right of this gate there are a number of plants of butcher's broom (Ruscus aculeatus) growing in the hedge.  They have been there as long as I can remember, but I expect they were planted as the species seems to occur almost entirely in hedges in our area.



It is, rather surprisingly, a plant of the asparagus family (Asparagaceae) and has had many uses both practical (brooms etc.) and medicinal being presented, as with many herbs, as a universal cure-all.  I won't list the conditions it is supposed to alleviate, though one remedy I do like is given by Mrs Grieve in her famous herbal "The boughs have been employed for flogging chilblains."  (I hope 'chilblains' isn't a misprint for 'children')  It is supposed to flower in spring, but I found one in bloom today (see picture).  The spear-like 'leaves' are, technically, cladodes, flattened leaf stalks and the flowers appear in the middle of the undersurface of these. Occasionally they turn into attractive red berries.

I carried on into Terra Incognita in the shape of the interior of Framabo Wood.  Framabo is a small property with a caravan and a couple of sheds but has a quite large secondary woodland which is virtually unvisited and whose interior I have never explored.  One hundred and fifty years ago it was an open field then in the early 20th century an orchard.  Now is has large mature trees and coppiced hazels like those in the picture below that look as though they have been there for centuries.  It is salutary to observe how quickly the woods return without any planting or special 'management' help.

One mile around home

Life has changed a lot since my last entry.  I have been found to be diabetic and, as a consequence, have had to give up driving.  At 77 years old I don't move too quickly either so my ramblings are restricted to a radius of about one mile (I prefer this rather old fashioned phrase to 'one kilometer').

Taking excercise is important for everyone, so as often as possible I go for what I call a 'constitutional', a walk of a mile or so from home and back.  This all takes place in the parish of Sedlescombe in the High Weald of East Sussex.  By dint of long habit I always look at the wildlife and usually manage to find something I have not seen before - it is extraordinary how very rich a relatively small area of our planet can be and I suppose I shall never run out of novelty or phenomena that make me reflect on the way things work.  From now on I will try to update this blog regularly and you are welcome to walk with me (especially if you are suffering from insomnia).

The photo at the top of this page was looking south west from the corner of our lane to the distant town of Battle.  It seems fine: fat sheep grazing contentedly, trees and hedges touched with autumn yellows and browns.  But, we are having one of the mildest Novembers on record.  Most of the leaves are still on the trees, many of them green.  The grass that is being chomped by the sheep is much more vivid and lush than normal at this time of year, and still growing vigorously.  In the woods by this field there have been almost no terrestrial fungi since late summer - there used to be thousands of many different species.  There are hardly any autumn insects either and, if there are no fungi for their larvae to eat, there may be hardly any in the future to the detriment of birds, small animals, spiders and other creatures.  The ground in the wood is deeply carpeted with leaves, but they do not seem to be rotting down in the usual way; maybe due to the warmth and lack of frost or, more worryingly, because soil-dwelling invertebrates are not doing their jobs properly.  In the past fallen oak leaves have usually borne a good crop of spangle galls each with a small worm at its heart that could have been a quick snack for many fossicking creatures, but I have seen very few this year and many of those do not seem to have developed properly and are twisted and shrivelled.

As though to make a point, I found an unseasonal primrose in full flower.  I have no idea, by the way, why this property is called 'Ariel'.  The name has been applied to all sorts of things and people over the years, but none seem to have any particular relevance to the small country retreat flagged up here.

I also found a branch that had been knocked off a beech tree at the plot called 'Rosewood'.  This has recently changed hands, so it might have been a visiting lorry that pulled the branch down. Tomorrow I shall cut a length of wood suitable for making a paper knife.  I like making paper knifes, or letter openers as they are often called.  It is just simple whitling, but there is some technique in getting a high polish on the blade and creating other small details.  Each one takes many hours, so they are definitely not a commercial proposition, but I like making them out of different woods and then giving them away - a sort of antidote to the computer and writing a blog.

Corizus on Schizostylis

The brightly coloured plant bug  Corizus hyoscyami (Hemiptera: Miridae) seems to be reasonably frequent in our area.  Yesterday I found this one sitting on a Schizostylis (or, more properly Hesperantha) flower in our garden in Sedlescombe, East Sussex.

Chilli fly

I have been looking after a chilli plant for one of my granddaughters and, having persuaded it to come into bloom, I have noticed that some of the flowers are dropping off.

I learnt from a chilli-growing web site that this might be due to the absence of pollination by insects or the wind so, if the weather is good enough I will put it out in a sheltered place in the fresh air.

Today there were two insects running about on the leaves, though not visiting flowers.  One was a very small, black hoverfly, the other a shining black sepsid fly frantically waving its wings as sepsids do.

Some May pictures

There are several plants of greater celandine or swallow-wort (Chelidonium majus) in the garden.  They were brought in originally by our granddaughter but seem to have naturalised as they have in many other places in the British Isles.

The plant is actually a member of the poppy family and not related to the lesser celandine (Ranunculus ficaria).  The greater celandine has a prodigious medicinal reputation and a huge array of toxic chemicals in its orange sap.

According to Wiki, for example, it was used in Ukraine as the basis of an anti-cancer drug called "Ukrain".  This was created in 1978 by the Ukrainian chemist Vasyl Novytskyi and manufactured in Austria. Although the drug was never approved by any regulators, Novytskyi “claimed it to be a complete cure for all cancers, radiation-induced diseases and AIDS and [he]was arrested in Vienna for aggravated fraud on September 4, 2012.”

On the path to the village there is an old and battered oak tree festooned in ivy.  If you look carefully at the picture you will seen that someone has sawn through the ivy trunks, an event, in my view, of environmental vandalism.  I think the ivy would have been very unlikely to kill the oak and would have produced quantities of nectar and pollen in late summer and early autumn for the benefit of many invertebrates.  The dense foliage would also have provided much shelter for birds, bats and other creatures while the berries would have been a spring feast for woodpigeons.

After the recent high winds, the ground under oak trees has been littered with currant galls, the agamic stage of the gall wasp Andricus quercusbaccarum, usually found on oak catkins but also on young leaves.  ‘Agamic’ means this stage is female only and the resultant wasps will lay their eggs on the fully expanded oak leaves and create the spangle galls which will produce both sexes next spring.

A spring leaf-miner & saproxylic moth

I found a leaf mine on a leaf of snowberry (Symphoricarpos) growing in the hedge at Balcombe Green that separates the lane from Red Barn Field.

It was made by the larva of an Agromyzid fly, Aulagromyza cornigera, and the grub has already fed up and left the mine.  It addition to its shape, identification is made easier by the fact that its larval stages are spent in April and early May.

I also found an Oecophorid micromoth, the sulphur-underwinged tubic, Esperia sulphurella on a nettle leaf.  This is a widespread species and, I think, the name ‘tubic’, comes from the fact that the larvae, which feed on dead wood, conceal themselves in an under bark tube of spun silk.

How did this happen?

Wandering through a local wood I came across this sycamore tree and have been speculating ever since as to how the branches achieved this cruciform shape.

My best idea is that a normally shaped tree was half crushed under the weight of another blown down by wind (perhaps in the 1987 storm that did considerable damage to this wood) and managed to hold the branches in this espaliered shape for long enough for them to become a permanent feature.  It is too far from any boundary to be a result of deliberate pleaching into a hedge.

More spring in Killingan Wood

The early purple orchids (Orchis mascula) are now at their best and I thought it was worth posting another picture of one of the white-flowered examples.

Along the bank where the old beech trees grow there are quite a few beech seedlings indicating that last year was a good mast year with plenty of viable seed being produced and not too much of it taken by seed predators.  It remains to be seen how many of these seedlings will survive into adulthood.

There seems to be a growing number of slime moulds about too.  The yellow example is one about to change from a plasmodium to a spore bearing example, while the orange balls are the spore-bearing bodies of one of the Lycogala species – difficult to determine to species level.  They have some interesting vernacular names: wolf’s milk, toothpaste slime and groening’s slime.  ‘Groening’ is spelt both with a capital and a lower case ‘g’ so it is not clear whether it refers to something or someone, though bird-catchers have been known as ‘groenings’ in America, so maybe the slime mould is thought to resemble birdlime.

Crozier cradle

In Killigan Wood today I found this male Reaumur's longhorn moth, Adela reaumurella, cradled in the uncurling top of a soft shield-fern frond.  If you look carefully you can see a long antenna like a white thread running down from the head of the moth.  I also found several more plants of this fern in the wood, though it is not as common as the other ferns.  It is easy to pick out at this time of year as the frond tips bend outwards and the pinnae unroll from neat silver balls.

At the entrance to the wood I noticed a spray of oak leaves that appear to belong to the ‘other’ British species, Quercus petraea, the sessile or durmast oak (no lobes at the base of the leaves, stellate hairs on the underside, five lobes etc.).  The word ‘durmast’ is often spelt with a capital, but it does not appear to derive from a place-name.  The Oxford English Dictionary suggests it might have derived from a misspelling of ‘dun mast’.