Spindle Revisited

The fruits of the Spindle tree are hanging around and although I try to ignore them they are just too vibrant to pass by. Anyway we have had Sloes and Hawthorn on here loads of times, so why not more Spindle berries?

This tree caught my eye because it still had lots of green leaves on it (I will show you in a minute) and I thought that I could do a post on how to identify Spindle.

It will be a short post.

I don’t mean how to identify it when it is covered in pink and orange berries…. I was thinking more about identifying it in Winter.

It is still going to be a short post. Spindle has very distinctive bark.

So here are some photographs that I took in March of this year when the leaves were just starting to appear.

There isn’t anything else in the hedgerow that looks quite like this.

These are young shoots the older wood loses some of the distinctive ribbing and green colour but it will still be evident on parts of the tree.

The leaves, when they start to open, are quite distinctive in themselves but green stripy bark is a dead give away.

Although I could find these trees quite easily in the winter and early spring as soon as the hedgerow started to grow I lost them again. It wasn’t until the fruits appeared in the autumn that they came back. Now I have a much clearer picture of their locations and plan to photograph them throughout the summer next year.

So that is the “Identification in Winter” bit done, that was just an excuse really to post more pictures of berries.

Berries and green leaves.

Winter is coming

Heh heh 🙂 But it is not here yet.

I would love to have a cold winter. Hard frosts and clear blue skies, blizzards and deep snow. Fizz and I have never played snow balls or made snow angels or built a snow dog. That would all make for some memorable photographs.

I think that we are going to get mud. That’s what we had last year. Grey skies, rain and floods and mud on mud. It’s not so good.

It’s sunshine Fizz. You remember sunshine don’t you?

It’s warm and it makes you feel sleepy.

She can have a little cat-nap while I photograph some berries.

These are Sloe Berries, the fruit of the Blackthorn. They are traditionally used to flavour Sloe Gin but I like to eat them straight of the tree.

They do have a large pip but also a lot of flesh and they are very juicy. The have an astringent quality, they leave your mouth feeling dry and puckered, the only cure for this is to eat another one.

A lot of people find them too tart and they are just a nibble for me, I have never sat down and ate a bowlful. The flavour is supposed to sweeten after the first frosts but I can never wait and I have been eating them since the end of August.

This has been a very good year for Sloe berries.

Wakey wakey 🙂

Come on we have got sunshine to see.

It is nice out but recent rains have left the tracks a bit muddy. I suppose that it is time to get the old Wellies out of storage.

We shall look back and laugh at this soon.

Looking back at old photo’s I think that perhaps this year I should invest in waders or a full body wet suit. In this next picture she thinks that I am drowning and is trying to administer the kiss of life.

Come on it is not that wet yet. Well, not for me anyway 🙂

Our next berry is Black Bryony. This one is deadly poisonous of the painful blistering variety, you wouldn’t eat one. Now that leaves are falling from the trees this is becoming more evident as it scrambles about in the hedgerow.

You might want to clean yourself up a bit, I can’t really take you home like that.

Good Girl.

The Other Tree

Well, yes, okay, I have been seeing another tree. I see a lot of trees 🙂

For about a year now. I met her just across the road from the farm. She was just standing there, stark naked beside the road when I first arrived here…..

… and the moment I saw her something clicked (it may have been my camera)

We didn’t need leaves.

She had the most beautiful skin and I felt like I had known her all of my life.

I have been trying to find a good time to tell you, it just never seemed like the right time. So I decided to wait for the fruit.

Well the fruit is here now.

I  know that you are going to say, “Col, she is not right for you.”

Yes, I get it but let me explain.

I don’t like Sweet Chestnut coppice because it is a non-native monoculture with no benefit to wildlife and a thick toxic leaf litter that inhibits all other growth.

This is a Sweet Chestnut coppice the summer after it has been cut.

I know quite a lot about Sweet Chestnut coppice, I used to own one.

The picture above was taken on the 21st of August and that is a coppice in it’s first year of regrowth. On the same day I took this next picture of another coppice but this one is in it’s second year.

It is the same story, nothing grows here except Sweet Chestnut. The tree has a natural defence. It has toxins in the leaves which leech into the soil and inhibit other plant growth. It is the arboreal equivalent of Rhododendron.

This next picture is a Willow and Alder coppice just down the road and again taken on the same day and this is what freshly cut coppice should look like.

All coppice woodland is not the same. You need native trees to make it work.

All of that is history, let’s not dwell on the negative.

No tree has much wildlife value when it is young, not even an Oak and coppicing keeps trees in a state of eternal youth. To reach it’s full potential a tree has got to mature.

As it grows the smooth bark begins to crack and peel and it starts to provide homes for insects and food for birds. It produces fruits and flowers and parts of it die providing dead wood habitat for insects.

Even so, no Sweet Chestnut is ever going to be a great wildlife tree, not in the UK but as she stands here surrounded by Oak and Birch, Ash and Beech she is contributing. She is producing flowers and fruit that wouldn’t otherwise be here and she is adding to the biodiversity of the area and not detracting from it.

I do like this one. 🙂

Our Spot:

This is where I first saw her, it has become like our “special place” and it is where we always come for our clandestine little rendezvous. It is our spot.

Isn’t she wonderful?

She flowers in July.

The pictures that I am going to show you of the flowers are all male flowers. The tree does also produce female flowers. I actually wrote this post yesterday and deleted it when I got to this point and realised that I somehow didn’t have pictures of the female flowers. You are just going to have to trust me, I can’t wait until next July to get this off my chest, I have already waited too long 🙂

(Male buds, sorry 🙂 )

Then we get to the good bit.

Everyone knows roasted chestnuts. They must be one of the most delicious fruits to come off a tree (Sorry I was forgetting Apples)

This is the reason that we need to have relationships with this tree and to welcome it into our broad leaf forests to live amongst all of the other trees.

The fruits today are still a bit small but there are plenty more still on the tree and it won’t be long now and I will be roasting them over my little camp stove.

Free food and very good food. Thank you tree 🙂

Conkers

This is a post about a Horse Chestnut Tree and things that fall off it and there is a reason for this post.

I was having trouble getting inspired today.

I took Fizz up to the Badger cam and collected another card, put some more bait down. There were some lovely videos of the animals, I am very fond of wild animals but I didn’t really want to do another Badger post just yet. A Pheasant spent two hours in front of my camera (at first I was a bit peeved but as I watched the videos I started to like him, we might yet have pheasant for supper). There has been a development. The farmer who rents the fields has put sheep in there. That could make leaving my camera in that spot untenable. Sheep could just trigger the camera constantly and the batteries will die before nightfall (We will have a hundred and twenty vids of sheep) but I have left it there today, maybe there will be some interaction between Badger/Fox/Sheep in the night, I love interaction.

I had three interesting interactions with Humans today. The first was with Margaret, Fizz’s owner. The local shops don’t sell balls for Fizz to play with and I have been struggling with supply. I decided to order her some from the internet. 50 used tennis balls £25. Now some dog owners don’t like their dogs to play with tennis balls. They used to use lead in the dye for them and they are pressurised with nitrogen (They don’t use lead any more and nitrogen is harmless and part of the air that we breathe), before I lumbered myself with fifty tennis balls I just thought that I should check that she didn’t mind Fizz playing with them. Margaret said that was fine and she would give me something toward them when she had some change and I told her not to worry about that.

When I got back from walking Fizz today there was an envelope for me with £25 and I dig it. It has nothing to do with money, she owns a farm, land and house and can easily afford it, I had already afforded it and didn’t expect anything in return. Margaret was just saying thank you. I get it. I accepted the gift graciously and felt the love.

I met a fellow sitting on a stool outside of a small terraced house. It was a beautiful sunny evening and he was looking intently at a book in his lap and he was singing. He had a wonderful rich voice but was singing quite quietly and so I stood and listened for a while. I wasn’t sure that he had noticed me but after a bit he looked up and smiled and said, “Hello, I am singing.”

Finally I met a fellow beside a busy road, picking stuff off trees. “Hello,” I said, “What are you doing?” He told me that his wife had sent him out to collect conkers. I showed him where there were some better trees. That was my inspiration. I spent some time looking at this tree before deciding to photograph it.

I think that it is a beautiful tree, you decide.

 

A lot of love passed by today and I got conkers.

Blue

Blue is for Sloes. Blackthorn is the most wonderfully photogenic tree.

Blackthorn flowers appear before the leaves. Hawthorn, which looks very similar from a distance, gets it’s leaves first and then flowers. So when the hedgerow first turns white in March, that’s the Blackthorn and when it does it again in May that’s the Hawthorn.

But this isn’t Spring this is Autumn and today we have berries. There is no confusion at this time of year. The fruits of the Blackthorn are big and plentiful and very beautiful.

Red

The Hawthorn is such a beautiful tree. Remember the blossom?

Plus it has it’s own Bug.

The Hawthorn Shield Bug.

But this is a post about Red.

These are pictures of the fruit of the Hawthorn tree that you may download and use as you wish but I would not use them on Christmas cards, I will give you Holly and Mistletoe for that, these are more pagan and sultry.

I would not describe the Hawthorn as a sexy tree but it is very warm and sensuous, I would describe it as more like a mother and a giver. It is pagan and it needs to be loved.

Affliction

I have decided to write this post because other people may be suffering similar problems. They may not know what it is or may just be too embarrassed to talk about it, so we need to bring it out into the open.

Cameraria ohridella or Horse Chestnut leaf miner.

This is a relatively new pest of the Horse Chestnut. It was first seen in Greece in the 1970’s and it made it’s way across Europe arriving here in 2002.

It was first observed in Wimbledon, London and since then it has been spreading outward at a rate of about 25 to 40 miles a year. There may still be parts of Wales, Cornwall and the North that remain unaffected but it is coming.

I haven’t checked all of the Horse Chestnut around here but in the area where I first noticed it every single Horse Chestnut is affected.

It is caused by the larvae of a moth and the key to identifying this particular pest is to hold the leaf up to the light, you should be able to see through the dark areas.

The “good news” is that it doesn’t do any harm to the tree. The larvae only become active quite late in the season and the leaves have already done what is most needed of them.

It is just an eyesore. A blight on an otherwise beautiful tree.

There is a much more serious threat to the Horse Chestnut called “Bleeding Canker” and that is what raised my concern in the first place but that is characterised by stains which look like bleeding on the trunk of the tree. That one can kill trees.

Still I think that it is pretty serious if all of our beautiful Horse Chestnuts are going to be disfigured like this.

The Best Things In Life Are Free

This post may be a little bit nutty.

Do you remember these beautiful little flowers that decorated the Hazel tree at the beginning of the year?

Well they have gone completely nuts!

Stark raving bonkers!

Hazel nuts are the most fantastic thing. If you are going to forage anything then forage for Hazel nuts. They are extremely good for you. They are horrendously expensive and they keep well.

Also some of my animals absolutely love them.

I have been watching the Hazel trees for weeks looking for signs of fruit and not finding anything and today I am finding trees loaded with them.

The best things in life are free, you just have to know the right tree.

Ulmus

Have you ever asked yourself which came first, the Badger or the Elm? No? Well anyway the answer is the Elm because you have to go past the Elm trees to get to the Badger sett that I am watching.

These are Elms and the Badger sett is right in the corner of the field on the left. The very last trees are actually a Hazel and I don’t think that you can see it but there is a Hawthorn on the very end of the row, the rest are Elm.Elm trees are probably the hardest of all trees to get to species and so I can not be sure exactly which species these are but the most likely option is Wych Elm, the only Elm that we are certain is native to Britain.

English Elm is thought to be an introduced species. Of all the Elm species English Elm was the one with least resistance to Dutch Elm Disease and there are very few of them left.

There are about forty other Elm species, nobody can actually agree on how many species there are because they hybridise freely, (two different species produce a tree that is neither of it’s parents) and it is a very confusing genus. To make matters worse since the outbreak of Dutch Elm Disease men have created hundreds of cultivars whilst trying to make a disease resistant one.

These are just Elm Trees and we are very lucky to have them.

I only saw these trees in April and that is a pity because they had already flowered and I missed that. By the time I found them they were in fruit and young leaves were opening up

The fruits are pretty distinctive.

They are called Samara and that just means a winged seed, the little helicopter seeds that fall from Maples are also samara. Their design is meant to carry them far from the tree but with the weather we were having in April most of them seemed to be falling straight down to the floor.

I think that the Elm is probably a magical tree, I haven’t looked that up but it feels like a magical tree.

If you see it in fruit identifying a tree as Elm is pretty easy, if you miss the fruit this is what the leaves look like.

The leaves are beautifully green but that alone isn’t always enough for a positive identification, you should pay attention to the shape and particularly the way the two sides of the leaf don’t meet the stalk evenly, they are slightly offset and that is a feature of Elm trees.My plan when I came up to look at the Badger sett was to climb one of these trees to watch the Badgers, I was thinking of them as still being quite bare.

You can shut up. I can see you  well enough.

It is not really possible to write about Elm trees without mentioning Dutch Elm Disease. It didn’t come from The Netherlands (They identified it) and it is not specific to Dutch Elms, it attacks all Elm species. It came from the USA in the 1960’s although I should mention that they caught it, a weaker strain, from us 30 years earlier.

It is a fungus introduced into the trees by Elm Bark Beetles. In the first decade it killed twenty million trees about 75% of our Elm trees today it is estimated to have killed 25-30 million trees and there are not many left.

Small trees like this remain in hedgerows because the disease doesn’t kill the tree roots and they can regrow but they don’t get much bigger than this. These trees are not very likely to be immune or especially resistant.

The disease is still rife and spreading into Scotland and there was a major outbreak here again in 2010, it hasn’t gone away.

Still it is lovely to have them here on the farm.

This tree has grown around and engulfed an old iron fence that is now a part of the tree.

And this is when I realise that it is now half past ten and I have to be up at four (I saw rabbits in the garden this morning) I need to wind this up. There is much more to this beautiful tree but then I have to write about it again when I see it in flower.

Ulmus the Elm

Lamb’s Tails (Part two) and Lady Bits

Well, that last post was a lot of kerfuffle just to get us round to the important subject of lamb’s tails. Or more correctly the flowers of the Hazel tree. The male catkins are very nice and appear before any other sign that spring might be on it’s way.

It is good to see them dangling in the hedgerow when there really isn’t much else to look at and it is still cold out.

But when I see the Hazel catkins I am really waiting for something else. For me the absolute exquisite beauty of the Hazel lies in the female flowers. Every year I photograph them and then when they are gone I wish that I had spent more time with them and taken more pictures.

It is a long wait. The female flowers don’t appear until the male catkins are almost spent. I have read that there is a good reason for that. The Hazel tree has both male and female flowers and to avoid self pollination the female flowers wait until the tree’s own male catkins have spent their pollen.

I have tested this theory on a tree with plenty of female flowers and a little flick of the finger tells me that the catkins are still full of pollen.

Here are some of my best picture from this year and next year I will do better. The flowers are very small and many people don’t even know that they are there, they are so busy admiring the catkins that they miss the real beauty.

That is one of my favourite wild flowers. It is very difficult for me to photograph it on the tree though. Next year I will do better.

Coming soon… Nuts!

 

 

 

Animal Magic

“Just like that”

It’s your destiny

The Swallows have fledged, or at least they are fledging. They are still in the nest today but they have been out and they can fly.

It has taken me a few days watching and all that you get are a couple of short video’s but for me, my understanding and the pleasure that I got from watching them makes a few days just a drop in the ocean. It was time well spent.

Anyway you should be glad that you don’t have to watch the whole twenty hours of video, that I now have to sort and delete from my machine to free up space.

Here are the best bits.

Yesterday morning there were five birds on the nest, there were five birds on the nest and then there were four birds on the nest. I had missed the very first flight and only realised when number five returned to the nest.

This first video starts with the mother calling for them to leave the nest, there is a little comic interlude of the way that they follow flies, their little heads bobbing in unison and in the last bit the second bird to approach the nest is the returning chick. Does he bring food back or do the others just think that he has?

This next video shows them leaving the nest and returning. They spent most of the day fluttering around inside the little alley way that has become their home and by the end of the day they were all settled back on the nest but this is fledging. Today I think that they have ventured outside and seen the blue sky but they still return to the nest.

These birds have made me think a lot about nature as a whole thing and about life and death in the wild. The caterpillars that I am trying to raise are falling to the parasitoid flies that these Swallows depend on for food and survival. The parents have done a really good job of raising them given the wet weather we have been having. I have often looked out in the pouring rain and wondered how they are managing to raise a brood and now this, flight.

I am so in in love and in awe of them and so damned jealous.

I am jealous because they get to eat those delicious crunchy flies, or perhaps because they can raise offspring in a matter of weeks and not the 26 years it usually takes us. Maybe I am jealous of something else altogether…..