House Circuit (10) A trip to New Zealand

Note: House Circuit posts are drawn from the many walks I make every day around our house.

There is a number of New Zealand plants in our garden, mostly from my old friend the late Graham Hutchins of County Park Nursery in Hornchurch, Essex.  In recent weeks two have been noticeable - Corokia cotoneaster and a Libertia.

The Libertia (above) produces its white flowers during May and June.  It is, I think, L. chilensis but may be L. grandiflora and there is great confusion in the nomenclature of this genus.  L. chilensis seems to be, as the name indicates, a Chilean species introduced to New Zealand where it joins several other native species from the genus.  It is known in New Zealand and elsewhere as the New Zealand Satin Flower and mikoikoi in Maori.  The genus was named after Marie-Anne Libert, a 19th century Belgian botanist.  Her own nomenclature appears to be somewhat confused too as she is sometimes known as Anne-Marie Libert.

Our plants came from a small clump I found many years ago on a rubbish dump in Devon and it has proved hardy and easy to grow here.  The flowers are attractive to a range of insects.  The linear leaves are very tough and make good plant ties.  It is said that this toughness made them resistant to grazing by moas, those huge, extinct New Zealand birds of the Dinornithiformes order.  This attribute would not perhaps be necessary in Chile, but may have protected them against grazing by rheas, flightless birds (ratites) related to ostriches.

The other new Zealand plant I want to mention today is the wire-netting bush, Corokia cotoneaster or, in Maori, korokio.  We have an old plant that flourishes in a south west corner outside the porch. It flowers every year, but has never produced its red berries.  It has been used for hedging as it has wiry, contorted twigs suitable for this.

The leaves are brownish green and spoon shaped and it has been claimed that if boiled they provide instant relief from stomach ache.  The wood contains beta-sitosterol, one of the compounds used to lower blood cholesterol.

House circuit (9).Foxglove & washing line

The winter before last we moved a bird table and a foxglove came up where the post had been.  This year, well-fertilized by bird droppings no doubt, it has grown vigorously and has overtopped the washing line.

Another plant smiling amid the junk is an unusual looking dandelion with very jagged leaves near the back door.  I have a copy of the BSBI's book for identifying microspecies dandelions, but find the prospect of running it down to species level somewhat daunting, so I shall leave it to a quieter time of year.

 

As the garden surges into its wonderful May and June brilliance, the little unplesaunce in the south west corner of the house looks increasingly dejected.  As Sellar & Yeatman wrote in what has been described as a frgrant book Garden Rubbish "Countrymen fear the Unpleasaunce.  They know that if it is not ruthlessly kept down and cut back it will encroach: putting out tentacles like an Octopus."  I remember when granddaughter Ellie used to ride the pink bicycle, her pride and joy, wildly around the summer garden.  Now parked rusting against the wall probably to move only to the skip leaving happy memories behind. The metal crate has a much longer history and we have had several in the garden for many years. Unlike old bicycles they are much used for covering vulnerable plants or study plots and even, on one occasion as a stand for boiling a kettle out of doors during a prolonged electricity cut.  The leaves in front of the bike are of hazel saplings.

House Circuit (8) Privet sawfly

In the hedge a couple of metres from our back door I have recently seen several examples of the rather handsome privet sawfly (Macrophya punctumalbum).  I have not come across this here or anywhere else and have been unable to find any previous records from Sussex.

There is a thin spread of records across the southern part of Britain and it is widespread in Surrey, so it is probably simply under-recorded in Sussex, though I am surprised I have not seen it here before. It may have cycles of relative abundance and scarcity.

The larvae feed on ash, privet, lilac and other members of the Oleaceae family and, rather unusually for insects of this kind, the adults browse on leaves of the same plants.  There is a characteristic grazed patch towards the top right of the picture above.  The picture is of a female and while males are found occasionally, the species is said to be mainly parthenogenetic.

This record, which may be a first for Sussex, shows the value of walking round the house several times a day and looking out for anything interesting.  It helps one to see things that would otherwise have been missed as elsewhere the eye is drawn on to more interesting looking sites.  The piece of hedge where these sawflies occur does not look a particularly promising spot though wild privet and ash grow together there.

House Circuit (7) White-flowering trees and shrubs

In mid-May the countryside is splashed with white as many of our native and exotic trees come into flower.  Round my circuit we have hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna), sour cherry (Prunus cerasus), Japanese snowball (Viburnum plicatum f. tomentosum 'Mariesii') and bird cherry (Prunus padus).

The hawthorn in the northern hedge (below left) flowers about 5 days earlier than those in the southern hedge and has differently shaped leaves, so it may have had a different, exotic origin (as is the case with so many hawthorns planted recently as hedges.)

The morello cherry, or perhaps more correctly, the sour cherry has grown for many years in our southern hedge.  In the past there were many different cultivars in England and elsewhere, most of which now seem to have gone.

The name 'morello' seems to have been applied to one cultivar only but then became the name for all of them.  The word 'morello' is from the Italian and means 'small black', so true morello cherries should be very dark or black.  The fruit of ours is red, so it must derive from some other cultivar.

One of our most magnificent garden plants is the Japanese snowball 'Mariesii' (Viburnum plicatum f. tomentosum 'Mariesii)'.  The plant, which has an Award of Merit from the Royal Horticultural Society, was introduced by Charles Maries who collected in China and Japan in the late 19th century.  As well as fine flowers it has a lovely spreading tabular habit.

Finally among the white-flowering trees and shrubs is our old bird cherry (Prunus padus).  The word padus is ancient Latin for the river Po in Italy along whose banks many of the trees grow, but I found mine as a seedling in the Yorkshire Dales 40 years ago and it was planted to mark the grave of our cat called Big Bill.  He liked trying to catch birds, so a bird cherry seemed appropriate.  Its shape is such, with the first branches not much about ground level, that generations of children have had great enjoyment climbing it.  Often I have come home and heard, rather than seen, these youngsters chirruping away in the foliage like the singers I once saw in a tree in a performance of the Carmina burana by Carl Orff.  For many years the tree has flowered, often profusely, and when the wind blows the small white petals flutter onto the lawn like whirling snow. 

The 17th C  Flemish herbalist, Dodonaeus wrote that people planted them because "they were reputed to be highly effective in warding off sorcerers and malefactors", a sort of early Neighbourhood Watch.  Another source said that young girls who had been bewitched could stand under a tree before sunrise and shake it so that the dew fell on them.  Sounds like a good excuse for being out all night and getting wet.

The bird cherry is described as preferring moist woodland, scrub, stream sides and shaded rocky places, most frequently on damp calcareous or base-rich soils, while it avoids very dry or very acidic conditions.  Our tree, however, grows vigorously on a dry, acid, sandy soil.  I have often noted that plants which prefer specific habitats in the wild grow well in quite different conditions in the garden.  The explanation might be that there is a quite complicated limiting factor or factors. There might, for example, be a climatic phenomenon, or a disease every fifty or a hundred years or more that wipes out all examples except those growing in optimal conditions.  In other words the one in my garden might die due to 'growing in the wrong place', but those where mine originally came from survive.

There is a weevil Anthonomus rectirostris and an attractive little moth, the bird-cherry ermine (Yponomeuta evonymella), that both feed exclusively on bird cherry.  The gregarious larvae of the moth can completely defoliate a tree, as I once saw when we lived in the Peak District.  Neither species is found in Sussex as the tree is not considered a native species in the county, so we hope our bird cherry is safe from attack here.

House Circuit (6) Three carices

I have so found 3 sedge species (carices) on my round the house walks:  wood sedge (Carex sylvatica), pendulous sedge (C. pendula) and grey sedge (C. divulsa).

The top picture is of wood-sedge: an elegant little plant if set against bare soil and supposedly, like pendulous sedge an 'ancient woodland indicator'.

The picture below is of a fine pendulous sedge trying to add a touch of elegance to the slummy north side of the house.  This is another plant said to be an ancient woodland indicator though it comes up everywhere, even well within urban areas.

Grey sedge (Carex divulsa)

House Circuit (5). Kamuro-zasa

There are various walking routes round the house: minimum (i.e. the closest easily walked circuit) and maximum (the widest circuit possible); shortest (which is not the same as minimum as this cuts corners).  All these and other variants can be walked clockwise and anticlockwise.

The route is clear at present, though all kinds of vegetation cutting will soon be necessary.  The only pruning I have had to do so far is of an errant bramble cane and a few leaning stems of a variegated bamboo Pleioblastus viridistriatus (see right). The leaves of these have been described as "bright yellow with random avocado green stripes".

 It is known as 'kamuro-zasa' in its native Japan but I have not been entirely able to unscramble the meaning of this apart from 'kamuro' having something to do with baldness, though no reason for this was put forward.  Maybe it was regarded as a cure for baldness. 'Zasa' I think is just a word for bamboo.

House Circuit (4). The Fernery.

Outside the kitchen window in a north facing corner I have a collection of mostly native ferns grown both in pots and in the soil.  Ferns can be quite difficult to identify, so having a collection which I see every day makes the different species more easy to pick out when looking in woods and hedgerows. Many are also distinctive when the fronds unfurl in spring, but grow to look much more like one another as the season goes on.

Above is an unfurling frond of hard shield-fern, one of the scarcest species in our area.  The backward curve of the frond tip is easy to pick out at this time of year and is very similar to the frond of soft shield-fern, though this plant tends to a rather lighter green and with a less spread out shuttlecock shape.

Another interesting pteridophytic feature is at about 4pm on the circuit where a plant of alexanders has seemingly grown from the shuttlecock of broad buckler-fern.  

House Circuit (3). Primrose x Cowslip

The central plant above is a primrose/cowslip hybrid, Primula x polyantha.  It grows right beside the House Circuit near the corner of the old porch and has been there in robust health for several years.

Primroses are common in the area, but not cowslips.  We have, however, grown cowslips in the garden from time to time and I am pretty certain that this was the source of one of the parents  The variously coloured garden polyanthus are also primrose/polyanthus hybrids and these do grow locally in gardens and hedgerows as 'escapes', but in my experience they do not produce flowers like the one above with cowslip-like clusters of small 'primroses' on each stalk.

This hybrid is sometimes known as the false oxlip.  The true oxlip, Primula elatior, is a species in its own right, but found in the wild in Britain only in East Anglia.  It differs in several ways from the primrose/cowslip hybrid, but a characteristic feature is that its flowers are held to one side rather than symmetrically round the supporting stalk.  There is more on primroses, cowslips and oxlips on the Westfield Wildlife blog:
https://westfieldwildlife.wordpress.com/2012/04/20/primrose-cowslip-and-a-hybrid/

The white flowers to the right in the picture above are three-cornered leeks (Allium triquetrum).  More of them in future posts.

House Circuit (2). Where we are.

Our house, round which the house circuit runs, is a small bungalow now around 90 years old, built originally in a hop garden (aka hop field) a kilometre or so north of the village of Sedlescombe, East Sussex (UK).  It is in the High Weald Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and covered administratively by Rother District Council.  The Ordnance Survey Grid Reference is TQ78241883 or 50.94 latitude, 0.54 longitude.

The garden round the house has been developed without much specific planning since the house was built.  After World War II my wife's parents bought it as a second home then came to live here.  We have some roses from that period and probably some of the plants in the hedges have been there a very long time.  The one to the west was probably in situ long before the house was built.

Our own interventions go back some 42 years and we still have many introduced plant species flourishing from each of the decades since 1970 as well as numerous wildlings that have found their own way here.  It is untidy, delightful and home.

House Circuit (1)

In order to get a little more regular excercise, I have taken to walking round the outside of the house, from backdoor to backdoor several times a day if possible.  The distance is just over 50 metres and I travel at about 1km per hour, often stopping to look at things.  The photo below shows the start.

The journey is more complex than one would imagine and is another example of how much pleasure and interest can be gained by focussing on the detail of a relatively small area.  the other day, for example, I found a glow worm crossing the path in full sunshine and a brimstone butterfly was laying eggs on the uppermost shoots of the alder buckthorn.

Highlights at the moment include the small, pink-flowered camellia 'Spring festival'.  I planted this on my wife Cynthia's 50th birthday, 8th February 1986 and it has always grown and flowered well.  A cuspidata/japonica hybrid, it has an Award of Garden Merit from the Royal Horticultural Society.

There is also a primrose/cowslip hybrid in full flower (we did once grow some cowslips in this part of the garden and primroses are ubiquitous); 'morello' cherries in white swags all along the southern hedge; pink Clematis montana scrambling over the northern hedge; scarlet japonica and Carolina allspice (Calycanthus floridus) with its strange, scented maroon flowers.  A hornet was hovering around the north west corner of the shed, possibly looking for a nest site (unless it has already found one there).

The blue tits are nesting in the bird box (as they do every year) on the south east corner of the house, but are under threat from the cats.  One jumped up and got his paw through the nest box hole the other day, so our granddaughter garlanded it with a wreath of holly and furze, which seems to have worked without scaring the birds away.

The first hawthorn flowers have appeared in the north hedge, seemingly overnight.  They are common hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna) and not Midland hawthorn (C. laevigata) or the hybrid between the two, both of which usually flower up to a fortnight earlier in this area.  The leaves on this plant are, however, not quite the usual shape for common hawthorn, so I wonder if some different genes have somehow got into the mix locally.

Recorders of wildlife are often asked to note the date when hawthorn starts to flower and the phenologists use this among other information to say whether the season is early or late and then speculate as to whether this is due to global warming, El Niño or these in combination with other phenomena.  However, they should be clear on which of the two British hawthorns and their hybrid they have seen in flower.

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).