Ash dieback again

Below: a healthy (for how long?) coppiced ash.

Many people in the media still seem to be behind the times on ash dieback and continue to prattle on about Denmark and how the disease is widespread in Central Europe (home of Count Dracula etc.)

Chalara fraxinea had spread to north west France by 2009 and Belgium since at least 2010. For more detail see: http://tinyurl.com/d6soy9s

The Forestry Commission map of Chalara outbreaks ignores the very significant fact that the disease is widespread in the bit of France shown bottom left just opposite the Kent outbreaks See: http://tinyurl.com/d4qp7t5

Surely it is pointless to 'take action' of whatever kind here when spores will keep arriving from Europe unless the disease declines of its own accord. I continue to read of hundreds of people scouring the countryside for infected trees, but it is not quite clear what they do when they find them. Do they destroy the whole thing, roots and all, and hoover the entire woodland floor or length of hedge for any spore carrying leaves?

Are these hundreds of people volunteers, long-term employees of someone, or recent recruits? Have they stopped doing their proper job? Whenever hundreds are involved there is usually a significant cost. Is it worth it?

Another piece of data that seems to have lain undiscovered is that ash dieback was added to the European and Mediterranean Plant Protection Organisation's (EPPO) alert list in 2007. They said: "Because ash dieback could represent a serious threat to forest, amenity and nursery ash trees, the EPPO Secretariat decided to add C. fraxinea to the EPPO Alert List in 2007." The UK has been a member of EPPO since 1951 but seemingly ignored this warning.  See: http://tinyurl.com/catk78n

I think I am suffering with Roper dieback.

More on ash die back disease

My mail box continues to be crowded with injunctions to help stop the spread of ash die back disease, Chalara fraxinea.  As someone who has done many years of study on our native trees and has the greatest possible affection for them I do not want to be seen as not caring about the ash.

However, I do think we have to be realistic.  It seems to me there is little chance of stopping a fungal disease that is spread by spores and is widespread all over Europe right up to the Channel coast from advancing into the UK (as the Forestry Commission suggest it already may have done) by perfectly natural means as well as on imported plants.

Prompted by this recent emergency I was particularly noticing ash trees on my way into Hastings this morning, a journey of about 10 miles.  There must be thousands, many the young trees that appear to be particularly susceptible, in hedgerows, on embankments as well as in the edges of the woodlands that I could see.  It would be very difficult to survey all these trees carefully for die back and, if the disease were found the prospect of the damage to the countryside that would result from unearthing them from hedges etc. is alarming.

Where the A21 enters Hastings there are steep embankments covered in young ashes on either side of a road bridge.  If the disease were to occur here, trying to deal with it (bearing in mind that it might be in the roots as well as in the top hamper) would involve major engineering works and probably significant road closure.

It occurs to me that the disease has probably been identified in plant nurseries and on Forestry Commission and Woodland Trust properties because young trees in these places get much more detailed scrutiny than elsewhere.  Many woods have  thousands of young ashes as well as older ones, often in rarely visited spots and systematic survey and destruction of the infected would involve an impossible amount of people hours and cost.  There will no doubt be extra vigilance in well-visited woods, but there are many places where ashes grow on farmland and other private property where detailed scrutiny is unlikely to take place.  Indeed, one of the characteristic habitats of the ash is on vertical limestone and other cliffs ...

While the present government does not seem to be particularly pro-wildlife, blaming them for outbreaks of ash die back in the wild as a consequence of not preventing imports of the trees sooner than they did seems like blaming the American government for hurricane Sandy.

If ash die back becomes widespread in the UK, as seems likely based on the experience in other European countries, it might be better to look for trees that do not have it rather than those that do.  As I said in yesterday's post, there seem to be some chalara-resistant strains of ash and these will need to be cherished.

Ash die back disease, Chalara fraxinea

Recently I have read and listened to many items about the fungal infection Chalara fraxinea or ash die back disease that kills the trees it attacks.  While I am sure no one would welcome any serious threat to our native ash trees, it does seem to me that much of the commentary is ill-founded and not very helpful.

The general story from the media is that nearly all the ash trees in Denmark have died, that a few cases have been found in Great Britain and that imports of ashes from nurseries abroad have been banned.

A good way of getting a more balanced understanding of the situation is by reading the Forestry Commission's fact sheet on the issue:

http://www.forestry.gov.uk/chalara

According to the FC the disease was first recorded in Poland in 1992 (other sources say 1990) and infected trees have been found widely across Europe, including several places from Kent to central Scotland in the UK.  Infected trees are widespread in north western France with up to 80% affected in some areas and the fungus has also been reported from Belgium where "eradication measures have sought unsuccessfully to stop the spread of the disease". 

In a recent Guardian article George Monbiot said “The only way the fungus can arrive in this country is through imports of infected saplings.”  However, as it is a fungus presumably it spreads by spores that can travel in all sorts of ways. Indeed, the FC in their fact sheet say that "It is believed to have entered Great Britain on plants for planting imported from nurseries in Continental Europe. However, now that we have found infected older trees in East Anglia with no apparent connection with nursery stock, we are also investigating the possibility that it might have entered Britain by natural means. These include being carried on the wind or on birds coming across the North Sea, or on items such as footwear, clothing or vehicles of people who had been in infected sites in Continental Europe." (I wonder how they are going to investigate these possibilities).

The banning of imports might, I suppose, slow the spread of the disease, but it looks rather like shutting the stable door after the horse has gone. If it can spread for some distance by spores from nursery stock it can, presumably, find its way across the Channel.  Most of us remember how fast the horse chestnut leaf miner moth spread: stopping imports of its host would have made little difference.

So far as containment is concerned the FC say "We are treating C. fraxinea as a ‘quarantine’ plant pathogen, which means that we may use emergency powers to contain or eradicate it when it is found. This is being done in the form of Statutory Plant Health Notices which we serve on affected owners requiring them to remove and destroy affected plants by burning or deep burial on site. Equivalent measures are being taken on land managed by the Forestry Commission. This is the only available treatment."

If the same situation prevails here as in mainland Europe landowners are going to be faced with an impossible and probably worthless task.  If infected trees were found, for example, not only the top but the roots would have to be burnt or deeply buried.  And what about trees nearby that might be infected but not yet showing symptoms.  Would the National Trust, for example, be expected to dig up and burn or bury  all the ash trees in Dovedale should Chalara strike there?

Sadly I suspect the FC and other government advisers know perfectly well that they are unable to stop spores crossing the Channel and that the current red flag waving and whistle blowing is just to try and show a public that loves its trees that something is being done.

With Dutch elm disease, the various afflictions of oak, phytophthera on sweet chestnut and other species I sometime wonder if these diseases might be the way nature operates, killing whole swathes of trees from time to time and opening up forests for other flora and fauna. Often a few individuals of the species attacked seem to survive, like post-myxomatosis rabbits, to repopulate the old habitat which, by then, may be relatively free of their pests and diseases since these have had little or nothing on which to subsist.  Indeed in a Danish study (which might have given rise to the frequently heard comment that Denmark is particularly badly affected by ash die back) it has been shown that different strains of ash have different levels of resistance.

Unless the disease mysteriously dies out naturally in nearby mainland Europe and where it has appeared in the UK, which seems unlikely, might it not be better to let things run their course?  In good natural selection style, the fittest would survive and repopulate our countryside with resistant strains.

An abundance of red admirals

A mainly sunny day after the recent heavy rain and winds.

Halfway down our garden we have a bush of Colletia hystrix ( often listed as Colletia armata in catalogues) that produces masses of white, honey scented flowers at this time of year attractive to a wide range of insects, late butterflies being the most obvious.

Today here were literally dozens of visiting red admirals, Vanessa atalanta (above), maybe 30 or 40 of them, and I have never seen so many as this together.  There were also a few commas, Polygonia c-album, and a couple of southern hawker dragonflies trying to pick off some of the smaller insects attracted to the flowers.

Colletia hystrix, a member of the Buckthorn Family, comes from Chile where it is known as espino negro (i.e. blackthorn) or yaqui.  It is a very spiny plant and can be used, like gorse as a stock fence.  Ours is now about 4 or 5 metres tall and makes an impenetrable, but attractive, thicket.  It seems perfectly hardy in Sussex.

Woodchurch clay

Went for a walk today at on the south east side of Woodchurch between Tenterden and Ashford in Kent.  The only cross-country path suitable runs from Lower Road to the Appledore Road across the Weald Clay and partly on an area of alluvium.

However, there was a fine view back towards the village and the church (looking north north west from TQ949339).

The stubble is the remains of oil seed rape and the dark green along the footpath is made by thousands of young plants grown from fallen seed.  In winter the pigeons will love it.

King snake in Hastings

A friend who lives in the Bohemia Road area of Hastings phoned yesterday evening to say that I might not believe this but a yellow, black spotted snake had appeared in their kitchen sink.

 

They had covered the sink with a board, but lifted it long enough to take the photo above which they texted to me.  After various phone calls and emails they managed to find a local vet with an interest in snakes to come and take the unexpected visitor to more congenial quarters.  He also confirmed its identity as a king snake.

I think it is a hybrid between the desert king snake, Lampropeltis getula splendida, and the speckled king snake, Lampropeltis getula holbrooki.  Various forms of these snakes are popular among reptile enthusiasts and www.thekingsnake.co.uk says "They have a relatively docile temperament and can be easily tamed. They are energetic and inquisitive and make very interesting pets. They are easy and safe to handle, growing to a manageable size and make a good choice for people who are new to snake keeping."

However, I doubt whether the Hastings climate is suitable for them to make a permanent home in the town outside captivity.

How big is a hazel nut?

As the season wends its wet and weary way towards autumn, some of the berries and nuts in field and hedge are ripening.  Our rowan berries have already turned red and I noticed these hazel nuts before the grey squirrels did:

How different they are from the tiny flowers with their crimson stamens from which they develop and, of course, from the male catkins.  How, I wonder, do the genes decide to  code for a either a catkin or a nut, or indeed a leaf, and then proceed to produce these intricate structures that each has a set form but are never, I suppose, identical.  The mysteries of morphogenesis.

Maybe Julian of Norwich in the 14th century was on to something when she wrote:

• He shewed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball.  I looked thereupon with eye of my understanding, and thought: What may this be? And it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made.  I marvelled how it might last, for methought it might suddenly have fallen to naught for little.  And I was answered in my understanding: It lasteth, and ever shall for that God loveth it. And so All-thing hath the Being by the love of God.

• In this Little Thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it, the second is that God loveth it, the third, that God keepeth it. But what is to me verily the Maker, the Keeper, and the Lover, — I cannot tell; for till I am Substantially oned to Him, I may never have full rest nor very bliss: that is to say, till I be so fastened to Him, that there is right nought that is made betwixt my God and me.

These days she would probably be a particle physicist working at the Large Hadron Collider (but maybe she is!) .

Effects of the rain?

Many of the wild plants in our beautifully tidy garden have grown much taller than usual, perhaps as a result of the very wet last three and a half months.

I am about 1.8 metres tall and the marsh thistles, ragwort and hogweed behind and to the left of me are as tall or taller.

Behind me, in the distance, the berries on the rowan tree are starting to turn red.  I always take this as a sign that summer is moving into autumn, but at least it is happening at the usual time this year.

The wool carder bees (Anthidium manicatum) are on the wing again and, as usual, seem particularly fond of my houseleeks.  We have provided them with plenty of woolly leaved plants for the females to ;card' and line their nests.

Hastings fennel

Coming out of Hastings station car park today I caught sight of a fine stand of fennel (Foeniculum vulgare) and stopped to take a snap out of the car window.

The flowers are very attractive to a wide range of insects (grow them with one of the taller varieties of mint in a herb garden and you will have a wonderful insect party on sunny days when both are in flower).

The leaves and seeds can, of course, be used in a wide range of recipes and herbal teas.

Fennel is not a native British plant but hails from the Mediterranean.  However, it has been happily established here probably since Roman times.

I have read that it inhibits the growth of other plants, but there is clearly a large number of perfectly healthy plants growing next to it here, so I take it that it does not normally, if ever, have this quality.

It seems a fitting sort of plant to have seen on the day the Olympic torch arrives in Hastings.  A stately species originating from the Mediterranean and mixing well with other plants.  It even seems to be approaching the fence as a kind of high jump.  Apropos of the Olympics, our eight year old granddaughter on being told that the Olympic flame was transported by coach from place to place, was concerned that the vehicle might go on fire.  A blazing bus would certainly be a newsworthy story.

Hedge woundwort

Standing idly in the garden in a rare sunny moment, I noticed a bank of flowering hedge woundwort (Stachys sylvatica) was attracting many hive and bumble bees to its flowers.

The plant is common and widespread in our area and elsewhere in Britain and has a solid reputation as a bee plant.

It also has, or had, medicinal virtues.  Nicholas Culpeper, the renowned 17th C herbalist wrote that this plant "stamped with vinegar and applied in manner of a pultis, taketh away wens and hard swellings, and inflammation of the kernels under the eares and jawes."

Thomas Green (1832) in The Universal Herbal says "Toads are thought to be fond of living under its shade" which, coupled with its attraction to bees and its curative properties, gives me a good excuse not to cut the plant down.  Even more so as the Ecological Flora of the British Isles lists 56 insect species associated with the plant, including 5 that are monophagous as well as (snap) 56 fungi, mostly rusts, moulds and the like.

If my arithmetic is right that is 112 species but this does not include visitors to the flowers.  In contrast, Anne Pratt in her book Wild Flowers (1860) writes "no animal is known to eat it, save the snail" but I take it that (apart from molluscs) she was referring to mammals.

Return to Shirley Moor

Back on the Moor again today,  Bit warmer, but still not exactly 'flaming June'.

I ventured a little further down the footpath leading due east from just beyond New Bridge, past marsh mallow and waving false oat grass along the dyke side.

At the end (TQ9450132026) I found a plant of swinecress, Coronopus squamatus, growing in the corner of the field and looking like a vegetable starfish.  It is a species I have come across from time to time before, but never growing quite so flat as this.

A little further on was a rickety bridge and the path continued up the hill through a wheat field towards Appledore.  I think anyone would have been reminded of the lines from Rudyard Kipling's poem Puck's Song.

See you the dimpled track that runs
All hollow through the wheat?
O that was where they hauled the guns
That smote King Philip's fleet!

Though I hope no one had been hauling guns up the hill with the intention of smiting anyone here.

To the south another series of ditches snaked away towards the rising ground picked out the lacy white flowers of hemlock water-dropwort, Oenanthe crocata.

The plant is poisonous in all its parts.  Indeed, the 18th century botanical illustrator Georg Dionysius Ehret, claimed that he was nearly overcome by its fumes when he was drawing the plant in a poorly ventilated studio.  I hope the combine harvester doesn't gather it along with the wheat.

Urban grasslands

Perceptive readers will note that this post was written out of sequence. Several sections in the overall colloquy have been compiled before this one. This because I only today finished checking on the names of some of the plants I found, but more of that later.

This is about a very short walk taken from the upper car park at the Tesco superstore in Church Wood Drive to Ingleside, a road lying some 80 metres to the west beyond the houses and the woods.

‘Ingleside’ is a curious name that has been much used in Britain and America for hotels, rest homes and street and road names rather than full-blown settlements, though there is a village in Illinois called ‘Ingleside’ and also a suburb of Sydney in Australia. The word mainly seems to be a Scots term for a fireside, rather like ‘inglenook’ and ‘ingle’ is said to derive from Scottish Gaelic aingeal meaning in one of its senses fire, light or sunshine.

Although the word was often used in the past in various contexts, it was brought into greater prominence by children’s author Lucy Maud Montgomery who wrote Anne of Green Gables. Two of her later books were Rilla of Ingleside (1921) and Anne of Ingleside (1939). Ingleside was the name of the house in these novels which were set in North America and, for those familiar with the books, the word is full of the kind of romantic associations that might help to promote a new housing estate. Chapter 2 of Rilla opens:

Outside, the Ingleside lawn was full of golden pools of sunshine and plots of alluring shadows. Rilla Blythe was swinging in the hammock under the big Scotch pine, Gertrude Oliver sat at its roots beside her, and Walter was stretched at full length on the grass, lost in a romance of chivalry wherein old heroes and beauties of dead and gone centuries lived vividly again for him.

In Anne of Ingleside Montgomery wrote:

I love the name Ingleside. It's such a nice, homey name. That's what Gilbert said. We had quite a time deciding on a name. We tried out several but they didn't seem to belong.  But when we thought of Ingleside we knew it was the right one.

It is always possible, of course, that a road name refers to a person rather than a place. Ingleside does not, however, appear to be in use as a personal name in the United Kingdom though a book by E. V. Lucas called Mr Ingleside and set in England was published in 1910. Indeed, it may have been this that consciously or subconsciously inspired Lucy Maud Montgomery to use the house name in her novels. There may also, of course, have been a house in the vicinity of Tesco called ‘Ingleside’ and it further strikes me that ‘Dingleside’, ‘dingle’ meaning a small wooded valley, might have been a more appropriate name.

Having written all that I discovered that a small estate west of Tesco and accessed from Ingleside is called ‘Inglewood Gardens’ making ‘Ingleside’ a reasonable choice for the name of nearby main road. However, since the main road was there before the housing estate, it would seem that the gardens was named as an allusion to the main road, leaving us exactly as we were before. Interestingly, to me at any rate, ‘Inglewood’ as in Inglewood Forest, Cumbria, means ‘wood of the Angles (or English)’ and therefore is of a completely different linguistic origin than ‘Ingleside’.

Taxonomic considerations not quite aside, Ingleside runs through the ancient Church Wood and it is ironic that one of the roads carved out of this precious and irreplaceable habitat is called Cubitt Way, presumably as an acknowledgement of the role the housing company Cubitt & West had in the development of this estate.

My walk took me along a twitten between the back gardens of Coneyburrow and Inglewood Gardens and a short stretch of woodland before reaching the road. Despite some accumulation of rubbish, the woodland still maintained some of its earlier character with celandines, anemones, yellow archangel, wood spurge and other plants characteristic of ancient woodland under a canopy of hornbeam and ash.

On the way back to the car park, my eye was caught by a triangle of grass on the south eastern corner of the Coneyburrow Gardens estate. The quite closely mown and rather sparse sward had a remarkable variety of plant species: annual meadow-grass, bird’s-foot trefoil, buck's-horn plantain, cat's-ear, changing forget-me-not, common fleabane, common mouse-ear, common ragwort, common stork's-bill, creeping buttercup, curled dock, cut-leaved crane's-bill, daisy, dandelion, field madder, gold-of-pleasure, groundsel, hairy bitter-cress, lesser stitchwort, lesser trefoil, meadow buttercup, narrow-leaved vetch, red clover, ribwort plantain, sorrel, sweet vernal-grass, wall barley, wall speedwell, white clover, wood dock and many which I am sure I will have missed.

One of the more interesting species is wild madder, Sherardia arvensis. Despite scouring my books and the Internet I can find nothing medicinal about it and concur with F. E. Hulme in his Familiar Wild Flowers (1906) who wrote “It is indeed a curious fact that this Sherardia is one of the very few plants that the mediaeval herbalists and simple-mongers seem to have found no healing virtue in.” (I like the idea of being a ‘simple-monger’) . However, it seems rather unlikely that it would have been given the name of ‘madder’ if it had not had some connection with dyeing and in a Manual of Weeds by Ada E. Georgia (1914) the author writes “The fleshy roots, though much inferior to the true Madder, are sometimes used for the production of a red dye.”

Other areas of sward in the vicinity were much less diverse and I am sure the soil for this triangle must have been imported from a not too far distant chalky location near the sea. From the car park there were two ways up to it, one a flight of steps, the other a long path with a hairpin bend to make access possible by wheel chair. Near the bend someone had earlier spilt a tin of sweet corn on the asphalt, decorating the path with what looked like a rash of septic pustules, or maybe a scatter of gigantic pollen grains.

Coda

On 9 June I walked round Inglewood Gardens, a strangely small and isolated modern estate. It was very quiet, I saw only one human being in the middle of a Saturday afternoon and there were few sounds of traffic or people.

Much of the estate was embellished by areas of lightly mown grass and many of these were quite similar to the species rich triangle just to the north. Ecologically interesting, but out of place in an area that used to be ancient woodland. Indeed a remnant of this woodland can be seen in the background of this picture of Inglewood Gardens below.

A little snipefly

This morning I found a little snipefly, Chrysopilus asiliformis, in our garden.  A very colourful insect which seems not uncommon in Sussex.

Stubbs & Drake in British Soldierflies and their allies (2001) say "Adults may be seen sitting on leaves", certainly the case with this one as it spent some time on a leaf of one of my houseleeks.

Its life history is still, I believe, unknown, but other members of the family are largely carnivorous and occur in decaying wood and soil.

Shirley Moor, Kent.

Today I explored Shirley Moor via Moor Lane (OS grid ref: TQ9382432035). A thin post-heatwave mist dulled the early summer air on either side of the scything tarmac fringed with cow parsley, buttercups and the rising wands of false oat-grass. There were little clumps of trees dotted about: oak with an understorey of blackthorn, ivy and sallow, sheltering a myriad of noisy birds undeterred from their spring business by the coolness of the day.

At one point the ground rose as the lane ascended the small hill on which Glover Farm and Shirley Farm are situated. Once this was probably an island in the marshy water world of the Moor, like Red Hill and Chapel Bank to the south. A red-legged partridge ran across the road and, from a gateway, I could see over the green barley to the rolling fleeces, darker green, of the distant Heron Woods. It was so still there was no shaking of the barley by the wind.

Yellow remnants of oil-seed rape blossomed round the edges of fields. An old blue pickup vehicle full of men appeared and bumped slowly away down an unmade, arrow-straight farm road. After it had gone I moved on to New Bridge that carries Moor Lane across the Cradlebridge Sewer (the small streams that meander across the flat lands around Romney Marsh and the lower parts of the Wealden river systems are widely named ‘sewers’ though they are no more polluted than any other English river. The word is ultimately descended, via Norman French from Vulgar Latin exaquāria meaning simply a drain for carrying water off).

The views from this spot could hardly have been more variable. To the north the lane ran straight as an arrow towards my newly discovered ‘island’. Southward a curving screen of tall white willow above a band of lacy cow parsley followed the line of the lane which was of two-tone grey asphalt, darker in the centre where wheels did not run, verged by bright green grass – a five-banded landscape.

To the west were bare, flat fields ultimately broken by a line of dead and dying trees bordering a distant dyke.

To the east, in total contrast, was a magical composition of England in early summer. A swan, a haughty swan, rested on its reflection in the black and silver water of the Cradlebridge Sewer, just in front of a thick pollarded willow and between banks whitened by billowing stands of hemlock water-dropwort with, at one place, a cluster of the flowers of yellow flag caught in the sallow and reed. The only sound was from the small birds in the bushes and the endless lark song embroidering the upper air; the only smell that of fading, falling hawthorn blossom, the small petals turning from white to pink when their work was done.

I found a feather here, of a partridge I think, beautifully and strikingly patterned with at least six shades of brown, the darkest making tiger stripes along the central rachis. I wished I had had a Tyrolean hat to put it in.

Somewhere towards the Isle of Oxney a cuckoo called.

The bird on the wall

I was in Waterworks Road, Hastings and I noticed this mural phenomenon.

The plant is a rather fine example of ivy-leaved toadflax (Cymbalaria muralis) but I thought the splash of white paint was also very striking, looking rather like the head of a slavering wolf.

It was only after I got home that I noticed the black bird in the position of the wolf's eye.  Quite plainly this has been drawn here as it is not the same colour as the bricks (you can also see the 'wolf's head' on Google's Street View and the bird is not there).

I suspect it has something to do with the Hastings & Bexhill Wood Recycling Project which has a workshop a few yards up the road where they make, among other things, nest boxes and wooden seagulls.  Or maybe it is a Banksy miniature: he has, after all, worked in the Hastings area.

A circumnavigation

There is something grand and philosophical about a circumnavigation. It suggests that, via a certain trajectory to a farthest point, a wanderer can return through different ways to a place that is by definition where she started from.

There are heroic orbits around the earth, the solar system, the British Isles and modest ones around the park or the boot fair or, though not usually classified as species of circumnavigation, a passage through a selected tangle of streets on a local perambulation. I once took a circuitous route along lanes encompassing numerous Gloucestershire farms in the Forest of Dean by walking from Coleford through Millend and Clearwell and Newland and Lower Cross back to Coleford.

The conquest of a supermarket car park may be classified as a collection of one of the rarer taxa in the circumnavigation genus since, perhaps, it is not perceived as terribly interesting. Nevertheless it was my project for the day and one that could make a modest but valuable contribution to psychogeography. And one never knows what any circumambulation might reveal.

Today my field of study was Morrison’s car park adjacent to Queens Road in Hastings. I set off from the main entrance heading north and immediately my eye was caught by a baby’s dummy in colourless plastic lying on the ground. It evoked an image of an obstreperous infant propelling the article over the side of the pram like a trainee hammer thrower.

Around the corner I could see the embankment where the trains ran, their engines sending an echoing Whee–e-e in crescendo or decrescendo as they left or approached the station. Underneath the trains a red banner on the wall proclaimed “We buy direct from 5,000 British livestock farmers.” Takes a lot of farms to feed Hastings.

Semi-mature trees were growing from gravelly, brick-edged rectangles of the car park leafing in reddish or green ochre while in the corners of this area there were dense billows of clipped, evergreen laurustinus with some groundsel and annual meadow grass flowering hopefully underneath. On the other side of the main entrance road was an ancient, low sandstone wall adjacent to a small lawn with a whitebeam tree. The wall must be a survivor from a time when this area was completely different. Part of a house perhaps along the Old Roar stream now safely culverted below the modern town. Elder was growing by the wall and on the opposite side of the lawn questing trails of goosegrass pushed through dense cotoneaster bushes.

There was a large buddleia by the recycling point: huge metal boxes for glass, shoes, plastic bottles, newspapers, electrical items. Behind a curious, almost secret, concrete path led in a curve to a closed brown door. There was ivy on the ground, under the bushes, climbing the walls. The plant evidently likes it here and tries to escape the ivy police who are forever pulling it down.

In the north east corner by Queens Road a lonely birch spreads its elegant figure above a chewed up mat of shredded bark and wood, perhaps the start of a shrubbery reconstruction. There was more cotoneaster by the parking bays: undulating cushions of dark green foliage spattered with pinkish white flowers aiming to greet a spring that hadn’t really arrived.

At the garage the ground changed. Red brick paviors for the pedestrian areas, brown with white speckles in the area intended for refuelling cars. By the entry sign to this refuelling area a large gorse bush was in flower. Difficult to believe this was planted, especially as it seemed to be a one off, so it must have found its way in as a seed on a car or a bird and now tries to hide among the alien ornamentals. On the south garage corner a hybrid whitebeam, a few shoots of travellers joy and two herring gulls with a wary look that said “is he a threat or a food provider.” Beyond this were extensive low-growing beds of grey-leaved brachyglottis shrubs extending like urban chaparral through a gap between buildings to Brook Street and the Prince Albert pub, though one would have had to walk round through the car park pedestrian entrance to reach either of these two places.

By the far wall Prunus laurocerasus ‘Otto Luyken’ was already in flower below a brick wall and a fine complex of moss-covered roofs sloping at different angles. Above these windblown muddled clouds in infinite shades of grey sweeping eastwards. May is the season of white petals: their falling can be mistaken for snow when the weather is cold.

Squirrel in the houseleeks

It has been cold so far this May, but yesterday the sun shone for a while and the grey squirrel that skitters round our garden took a sunbathing nap on a wooden shelf where I keep some of my houseleeks.  I see squirrels every day, but this is the first time I have seen one basking.

The Sempervivums behind are, from right to left, Black Mountain, Green Ice, Blood Tip and S. atlanticum.  The plant in the pot at the rear is a Deptford pink, Dianthus armeria, put on the shelf to stop the rabbits eating it.

Hastings steps

Hastings in East Sussex UK has many flights of steps ascending the various hills around the town.

Noonan’s Steps climbs like a waterless cascade up the flank of the West Hill.

The walls and crevices support many different plants, wet and shiny after the overnight rain. There are ivy-leaved toadflax and trailing bellflower; elder and sycamore bushes; shepherd's purse, goosegrass and clumps of moss casually thrown off neighbouring roofs by insect hunting birds.  The photo below is of some alexanders, Smyrnium olusatrum, hanging over a wall:

At one spot there was a battered typewriter lying in a doorway next to an empty can of Red Bull. Maybe an aspiring writer had thrown it and the empty can from an upper window in frustration when the muse would not visit. Whatever the case, no novels, or poems, or letters were going to emerge from its keys again. It seemed strange though that it had survived for so long in this computer age.

For typewriter aficionados it is a Commodore, probably made in Canada.  Taxonomy has got me!

I walked back down Gas Works Steps and up Stonefield Road. 

Here, as in lots of other place, were some good examples of a sprawling  Cerastium.  It is, I think, sea mouse-ear, C. diffusum but I will have to do a bit more work on that as it a difficult genus.

I also found a spray of oak-leaved honeysuckle, I think just a juvenile form of our ordinary wild honeysuckle, Lonicera periclymenum.

By the Tesco superstore, Hollington, Hastings.

On the eastern side of Tescos superstore there is an asphalt path running uphill over mown grass to the streets and houses on the Tilekiln estate. To the west is ancient woodland, a northern extension of Church Wood still with yellow archangel peeping under the chestnut post and rail fence and with plenty of bluebells beneath the leafing hornbeams and other trees.

On the other side of the path it is mostly mown grass up to the fence round the Tesco buildings, but in the middle of this is a deep gully that was once the bed of a stream running into the lower part of Church Wood but now culverted for much of its length (Grid Ref. TQ7861311733). It is rather encouragingly full of a very varied scrub and I imagine the species count would be high if an extended ecological survey were undertaken.

There were fresh green brambles, white ball-bearing buds of hawthorn, oak and ash entwined with honeysuckle and flowering sedge while, in the distance, a woodpigeon was cooing persistently.

On the edge of the gully I found a fine plant of spotted medick (Medicago arabica) with tiny, yellow flowers.  I is native in southern Britain that is said to be expanding its range for reasons that are not entirely clear. It seems to be widespread in Sussex.

 

In several other places were plants of ribwort plantain (Plantago lanceolata) with their rough, pod-like flower heads already developed (see behind the medick above). I saw some being used in a masterchef salad on television the other day and the authors of the Walk around Britain website say “The fresh seeds of both species make a very good protein nibble, tasting rather like mushrooms.” I tried a flower head. It didn’t taste bad, but had a rough, chaff-like quality making it difficult to swallow.

Two teenage girls and a boy were wandering about clearly trying to think of something to do. They chattered loudly and talked a bit about me, a stranger, but were good humoured and cheerful when I made some irrelevant reply. They made no further remarks after they had seen me eating ribwort plantain flowers – I can’t think why.

St George's mushrooms

Driving round our lane I noticed a couple of flashes of white in the grass verge and, upon investigation, discovered they were St George's mushrooms, Calocybe gambosa.

Interesting to see toadstools among anemone and wild strawberry leaves.

This is an edible species that regularly appears along these lane verges and named after St George because it is a spring fruiting fungus that often appears around St George's day, 23 April.

I have eaten them in the past and they are quite popular in many parts of mainland Europe, but I don't really care for them.  Maybe I'll see what flies I can breed out and whether they differ from those that burrow about in our autumn fungi.

Beware Ceanothuses crossing!

This photo of a lonely flowering Ceanothus bush escaping from Tescos in St. Leonard's-on-Sea came out of my camera today.

Ceanothus is a North American plant belonging to the family Rhamnaceae.  The buckthorns, the only foodplants of our British brimstone butterfly larvae, also belong to this plant family.  The adult butterflies are known to visit Ceanothus flowers in this country and I wonder if anyone has looked for caterpillars on this plant, or tried to feed them on the leaves.

Rats!

I was asked recently by a friend if there was anything he could do about the rats that had turned up on the ground under his bird table.

Cats, terriers, traps, guns, poison, ultrasonic devices- there a plenty of options, most of them with drawbacks. And, of course, he could stop feeding the birds.

The rodents there are brown rats (Rattus norvegicus) which, despite the specific name, did not reach Britain from Norway. They arrived here and elsewhere in Europe, from their native home in the Far East, probably in the early 18th century and have spread to most of the world apart from the Arctic and Antarctic and a few islands.

In Britain some reckon there are 81 million of them, more than the human population and many, of course, live in urban areas. They have a bad reputation because they steal our food (as well as that of the birds), forage in smelly places and can transmit various diseases, especially when they live in sewers. They do, however, have a plus side. Some people think the decline of bubonic plague was due to the arrival of brown rats since, like us, they can apparently catch plague but not transmit it. Transmission was normally accomplished by fleas on the black rat and other rodents and the displacement of the black rat (Rattus rattus) by the brown rat has been equated with a decline in the plague (aka black death).

Rats have also contributed much to medicine through their role as laboratory animals and in many countries they are popular pets.

The disgust felt for these animals by many people seems to be a culturally derived habit and not one like a fear of things that can be genuinely harmful like venomous snakes. Their name has also been used as a widespread insult -"You dirty rat" etc. Maybe they are too much like us. Many people do have a sort of general fear of wild animals, even mice and spiders, but the rat is in a class of its own.

Robert Browning in the Pied Piper of Hamelin didn't do much for their image:

They fought the dogs and killed the cats,
And bit the babies in the cradles,
And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
And licked the soup from the cooks' own ladles,
Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
Made nests inside men's Sunday hats

But the puppet Roland Rat, created by David Claridge, has had a spectacular career as a TV character since the 1980s and his markedly ratty personality and home in a ratcave under Kings Cross station seems to make him more rather than less popular. It is us that are peculiar creatures rather than rats. Still, we both go in for bruxing (the sound made by grinding one's teeth), a new addition to my vocabulary.

Winter sunset

For 12 days the night time temperature has fallen below freezing with over a week of unbroken snow cover. In the garden on several days it has reached -6 degrees C, and once -8, unusually cold for our area. It was snowing again this morning, but a thaw is forecast so hopefully it will feel a little warmer next week.

Yesterday evening the temperature fell very rapidly as the sun went down. There was an Irish tradition of a small ‘western room’ in the house where mementoes of members of the family that had passed on were kept so that one was reminded of them as one faced the setting sun, the direction the dead followed on their journey to the Otherworld.

The coldness and stillness of the subzero winter world echoed this mood as I watched the sun set over the churchyard across the valley from our garden. However, the dark 'sunspot' of a rook's nest silhouetted against our life giving star reminded me that spring is not far away.

Galls in the grass

Strolling yesterday on the fringes of St. Leonard's-on-Sea I noticed some of the fading grasses dangling through a wire mesh fence were swollen and distorted at the tips where the flowering spike might have been.

Further investigation showed that the grass was common couch grass (Elytrigia repens) and that the galls were caused by the small Eurytomid wasp Tetramesa hyalipennis.  The books and papers on galls indicate that this is a widespread and common species but there are no records on the Sussex Biodiversity Record Centre database and the National Biodiversity Network has records only from Merseyside and Northern Scotland.  It has also been recorded from Cornwall and I am sure it has simply been overlooked elsewhere.

Now is the time to get out and see if you can find any.

I have brought those in the picture home to see what hatches out.  It will not necessarily be T. hyalipennis as various parasites and squatters have been recorded from these galls and the child or children of the original gall causer may have been consumed in its prime.

Moth from alder buckthorn

A few weeks ago I found some leaves spun together on the alder buckthorn (Frangula alnus) in our garden and managed to raise the moth from the caterpillar it contained.

I had hope it might be an alder buckthorn specialist, but it turned out to be the common light brown apple moth (Epiphyas postvittana).

It is an introduced species from Australia that was first found in the UK in Cornwall in the 1930s Apparently the larvae will eat almost anything, though they are an apple orchard pest in their home country.  There they also feed on a wide range of native species as well as introduced fruit trees.

I wonder if this might be the first record of the moth using alder buckthorn.

Wool-carder bee

A welcome resident in our garden is the wool-carder bee (Anthidium manicatum).  There is a male that defends a territory around some of my houseleek (Sempervivum) collection.  Both males and females seem particularly fond of the flowers and there is a nest in the corner of one of the pots.

The picture above is of a male sitting on a plastic watering can.  Quite often he will take to the wing, fly round the area and hover in front of the houseleek flowers, occasionally settling on them.

The male is, unusually for insects, larger and more aggressive than the female depicted below.

The name 'wool-carder-bee' derives from the fact that the female strips hair from wooly plants, rolls them into a ball and flies off with this tucked between her chin and her forelegs.  She uses this wool to line her nest hole and then constructs cells which she fills with a mixture of pollen and honey for her brood.

Gilbert White of Selborne wrote about this species in his journals: "There is a sort of wild bee frequenting the garden-campion for the sake of its tomentum, which probably it turns to some purpose in the business of nidification.  It is very pleasant to see with what address it strips off the pubes, running from the top to the bottom of the branch, & shaving it bare with all the dexterity of a hoop-shaver."

I imagine the 'garden-campion' was the  rose campion (Lychnis coronaria).  Hoop-shaving was the woodland craft of cutting hoops (for binding barrels and so on) from hazel poles.

White oak midget

A week ago I found a mine in the folded edge of an oak leaf on a tree growing near the end of Billingham Lane, Udimore (first field trip of the new Udimore Wildlife Society).

I identified it tentatively as being caused by the white oak midget moth (Phyllonorycter harrisella) and kept it in a box to see if anything emerged.  I was rewarded today by this tiny but beautiful insect hardly bigger than a grass seed.  Its pupal case can be seen in the top photo.

Like many insects, the eye spots at the end of the wings create a false head which is more likely to be attacked by a predator allowing the moth to escape relatively unharmed.  The wing stripes also seem to make it point in the wrong direction.

Leaf miners like this usually appear only in very small numbers on their host plants, an I wonder why this should be when there is so much food available.  The infamous horse-chestnut leaf miner (Cameraria ohridella) which is a species of about the same size and in the same family - Gracillariidae - was first recorded in Britain in 2002 having spread rapidly from the Balkans.  Although it was described as a new species only in 1986, specimens in herbarium collections of horse-chestnut date back to 1879 but it was well-behaved until very recently.  Cameraria now seems unstoppable and every single leaf on every horse-chestnut is often infected with several mines.  Why do our long-standing native species like the white oak midget show such commendable restraint?  Is it due to parasites, predators or pathogens that Cameraria does not yet have?  Some believe it is and that the current massive infestations of horse-chestnut will decline as the years go by.

Of course, the relative scarcity of the white oak midget with, say, only a few mines per oak tree may be an advantage inasmuch as it makes it quite difficult for predators and parasites to find it and hardly worth the energy-wasting search for such a small morsel.  That makes me wonder about the dynamics and practicality of remaining at a low-level without being wiped out altogether.

Beetle bug (Issus coleoptratus)

I have again been running one of my log pile traps at the  end of the garden.  There was quite a good haul of invertebrates today and I took a photo of this little beetle bug sitting on top of the pile.

This species is common everywhere and often found on ivy.  I always see it around rotten logs and am still trying to work out what it eats.

Woodpecker & tortoiseshell

We see all sorts of things in the garden from our sitting room window: rabbits, foxes, weasels, badgers and all manner of birds and insects.

Today we were given two special treats.  First a green woodpecker spent some time on our small lawn, pecking with evident relish at something in the grass.

It was not possible to see what the bird found so tasty, but there were some light showers overnight, and this may have brought a few insects to the surface in these drought-stricken days.

The other treat was a small tortoiseshell butterfly (Aglais urticae) enjoying the nectar in a large flowered clematis.

Such highly engineered blossoms don not, generally, seem to be much visited by insects, but the butterfly returned repeatedly and, as far as I could see, visited no other flowers.

The small tortoiseshell has suffered a massive decline in recent years and it is thought this is due to a parasitic tachinid fly called Sturmia bella, first recorded in  Britain in the late 1990s.  However, the butterfly seems to be making a comeback and several were seen in this area last year after a period of total absence.  I wonder how it has managed to outwit the parasite, if that is what was causing the problem.  perhaps like the holly blue and its parasitic wasp, the large number of caterpillars affected means that eventually the parasite almost runs out of hosts and becomes scarce, only to return in force as the abundance of the butterfly increases.

Blue tits away

The blue tits in the nest box just outside our bedroom window are now fully fledged.  One of the young ones poked his head through the hole to explore the possibilities of the outside world.

He seemed to like the look of what he saw, pulled his wings out and flew off into the bushes by the hedge.  No practice, no licence, just instinct.

Edward T. Connold - an appreciation

Recently, while compiling some notes on the mites of Sussex, I was made aware of the detailed observations made by Edward Connold on the gall mites of the area around Hastings where he lived in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Many of these still stand as the only recorded observation of a particular species in Sussex, though most are probably widely distributed. Connold seemed an interesting man, so I thought I would find a little more out about him.

Edward Thomas Connold was born in Castle Street, Hastings in June 1862 and died in St Leonards-on-Sea in January 1910 aged 47. Although he moved about to various schools and in various jobs as a child and a young man, he returned permanently to St. Leonards in 1885. His son, Edward Thomas Connold, was a professional photographer who did much work in Sussex.

Connold, an amateur (he earned his living as a grocer), had a very wide interest in natural history as is borne out by his various observations in The Hastings and East Sussex Naturalist. He was especially interested in shells, wasps, caterpillars, wildflowers and marine life but his major contribution nationally and internationally was in the study of plant galls and Margaret Redfern in her New Naturalist book Plant Galls (2011) suggest he was the discoverer of galls on the roots of plants.

Detailed notes on the galls Connold found are published in his books British Vegetable Galls (1901), British Oak Galls (1908) and Plant Galls of Great Britain (1909). He also made a valuable contribution to the study of marine life by editing his friend Philip Rufford’s book Notes of British Hydroid Zoophytes (1902). (Hydroid Zoophytes are now included in the phylum Bryozoa, or moss animals. They are small, mainly marine animals often similar to corals with creatures like small sea anemones inside a colonial, skeletal covering of their own construction. Many colonies look more like plants than animals. Rufford and Connold often obtained their specimens of these and other marine life from the Hastings trawlers.)

In 1907 Connold also described and photographed the colony of ‘larger wintergreen’ (now round-leaved wintergreen) that then flourished “in the Hastings District” (Connold, 1908). This was presumably the plant from the Icklesham railway cutting (TQ856174) discovered by a Mrs. Wood in 1901. He was also one of several people who claimed that the smooth snake (Coronella austriaca) occurred in the Hastings area along with adders and grass snakes and something he referred to as the ‘small red viper’. Once formally named Vipera rubra, these are now known simply to be young adders that are often of a reddish colour (Beebee & Griffiths, 2000).

Something of Connold’s personality and character emerge from his book of essays Gleanings from the Fields of Nature which he describes thus:

The studies are from copious notes, mental and written, made during very many enjoyable rambles along the shore, and through woods and by-paths of rural districts around Hastings and St. Leonards-on-Sea; and from careful examination of the objects under the microscope.

He had a soft spot for spiders:

While it is admitted that spiders about the house are not welcome, and that they also suggest neglect, by spinning their snares in nooks and crannies, they often rid the occupants of the home of many troublesome flies.

But decidedly old-fashioned attitudes towards the digging up of primroses:

The primrose is a hardy plant, and will not suffer from being properly removed from its native haunt, and placed in a garden or rockery.

Connold, like the rest of us, made the occasional mistake (he described wild service leaves as guelder rose, for example) but he was a first class recorder who in his short life left us an important legacy on species in the Hastings area over 100 years ago. In one of his obituaries The Gardeners’ Chronicle said “his work on Vegetable Galls is a valuable contribution to the advancement of science.”

His writing was clear and usually to the point, though sometimes he would allow himself an engaging Edwardian conceit:

And perhaps some frisky little billow flings itself upon a large boulder nearby, and laughs with glee as it suddenly breaks into countless beads of spray, and showers them upon you like liquid pearls. (Connold, 1908b.)

REFERENCES

Anon. (1910a) Mr. Edward T. Connold (obituary). Gardeners’ Chronicle XLVII, January 15 1910: p. 47

Anon. (1910b) Edward Thomas Connold (obituary). Hastings and East Sussex Naturalist 1 (5) 16 May 1910: 197-199.

Beebee, T. & Griffiths, R. (2000) Amphibians and Reptiles. Harper Collins (New Naturalist series), London.

Connold, Edward T. (n.d.) Conchological notes : a description by Edward Connold of some shells collected by Philip James Rufford...with a note on pelecypoda by P.J. Rufford. Hastings Museum publication 4, Hastings Museum, Hastings.

Connold, Edward T. (1894) Wasps and how they live. Burfield & Pennells, Hastings.

Connold, Edward T. (1901) British Vegetable Galls. An introduction to their study. Hutchinson & Co., London.

Connold, Edward T. (1908a) Notes on the Occurrence of the Larger Wintergreen, Pyrola rotundifolia, Linn. Near Hastings. Hastings & East Sussex Naturalist 1(3): 123.

Connold, Edward T. (1908b) Gleanings from the Fields of Nature. The Religious Tract Society, London.

Connold, Edward T. (1908c) British Oak Galls. Adlard and Son, London.

Connold, Edward T. (1909) Plant Galls of Great Britain: A Nature Study Handbook. Hutchinson, London.

Redfern, Margaret (2011) Plant Galls. Collins (New Naturalist series), London.

Rufford, Philip James. Ed. Connold, Edward T. (1902) Notes of British Hydroid Zoophytes. Burfield & Pennells, Hastings.

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