Tag: ferns

Aaaargh! Spring – please slow down, just a bit!

Clockwise from top left- the canalside view with Pen y Fan in the background; then Common Dog Violet, Wood Sorrel, Maidenhair Spleenwort, Ramsons, Greater Stitchwort, Reflexed Stonecrop and what I think must be bracken growing very close to the water. There were many more – too many to list without annoying Madame!

The rewards of Spring are everywhere at the moment, notwithstanding the cold nights which are keeping our tender plants blocking the hallway as they harden off. There’s so much going on I hardly know where to begin. On the allotment – after the usual despairing survey of the weeds, the waterlogged ground and the mounting sense that nothing good will ever come of it; we got our heads down two or three weeks ago and felt instantly better. I’m a bit suspicious of the received wisdom that gardening is good for the soul. Couch grass and Bindweed could test the patience of a saint and I’m certainly not one of them. At the weekend while Madame sowed, I finally cleared the asparagus bed which had been on probation for ages and we knew it had to go because it was too far down in the frost pocket on our sloping site plus the asparagus had been weakened by repeated invasions of Asparagus beetle and couch grass from the unattended plot next door. Four barrow loads of weeds and feeble/floppy/extinct roots later I had a backache worthy of a third rate wrestler but a decent empty raised bed much enriched by previous additions of seaweed, compost and sand and with around 18″ depth of topsoil. We’ll grow carrots there this season. We’ve thrown so much money at the asparagus bed over the years, we could probably afford to buy fifty bundles of Chinn’s finest English and still be in pocket.

I was greatly assisted by two almost hand tame Robins who were obviously feeding chicks. Between them they took away many dozens of larvae, centipedes and other insects. Interestingly they weren’t very interested in worms; certainly not as keen as a blackbird would be. I was dazzled by their capacity to hold two wriggling bugs in their beaks and still pick up a third without dropping the first two; they were far better pest controllers than any chemical insecticide.

Inside the polytunnel the experimental crop of broad beans is thriving in the absence of any really hot weather, and the strawberries, all taken from runners in late summer, are flowering and setting fruit. Of course this means we’re already watering inside the tunnel; but the 12V water pump we bought last summer has already showed its worth and helped us avoid carrying heavy watering cans back and forth.

The photos above were all taken on a short trip to the Monmouth and Brecon canal near Brecon during the week. It was here, many years ago, that I saw my first Kingfisher – so beautiful in the sunshine that I thought I was hallucinating. We had hoped to go for a pub lunch with our friends who keep a smallholding almost 100o feet up on the hill, but they were in the middle of lambing so we had a picnic lunch there while they went outside every twenty minutes or so to keep an eye on a ewe in the midst of a long and difficult lambing. Fortunately the ewe and her twin lambs all made it through, although I think that will be her last time. Farming can be heartbreaking as well as hard work.

“A difficulty is a light, an insurmountable difficulty is a sun” – Paul Valéry

Is it too perverse to say that I love naming plants? and the harder they are the greater the reward when I finally get there. I’m exhilarated by the explosion of plants in the spring and early summer, and it’s agony having go forego plant hunting for allotment duties, but there’s no alternative so we just get on with it. I was pondering where this love of plants came from, and during one of my regular 2.00am wakeful sessions – it happens a lot – it occurred to me that I owe a huge amount to Henry Williamson (I’ll come to the reservations in a moment). Of course I read Tarka the Otter and the other nature books, but I also ploughed my way through four volumes of “The Flax of Dream” and fifteen volumes of “The Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight”. I was probably the only person who ever ordered them all up from Bristol Central Library in many years. Above all, I loved Williamson’s ability to describe wild plants in their landscapes; their names – English names – embedded themselves in my imagination and make the discovery of a plant in a hedgerow into a celebratory event, even fifty years later. Latin names and taxonomical exactitude; whilst essential for research, are feeble by comparison with the poetry of use and history.

But one of the greatest sadnesses of my life has been the discovery that so many of my literary and artistic heroes dabbled with and even collaborated in extreme right politics during the nineteen thirties and forties. TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis were all seduced by the big lie. Discovering that Williamson was an admirer of Adolph Hitler irrevocably shut down my relationship with him, and I’ve never read a page written by him since; but the influence of his natural history writing still remains – it’s just forever tainted by the association.

Anyway, turning with relief to spring again, some flowers that you’d think were easy to identify – are more than a bit fiendish; not least the violet which comes with seven close cousins six of which you could easily bump into in the South West. No alternative, then, but to turn to the books or the apps. But when it comes to fiendishness, nothing comes close to ferns and for me, at the very beginning of this love affair, a chance encounter across a crowded room can lead to hours of agonising – just like the real thing (I’m told!).

As you’ll know if you’re a regular reader, I’m exploring the dizzy world of Artificial Intelligence in wildlife apps, and particularly in identifying plants. If you’re fortunate enough to know what a data point is – I wasn’t – it’s a single unit/dollop of data. If you’re still attached to pencils and paper, your notebook might contain a few hundred data points. A field guide could hold tens of thousands, but AI robots, though are voracious readers and can consume and store billions of them. Not only that, they can index and arrange them in pretty much any way you like.

So before we all get carried away by the idea of wildlife AI apps remember that the whole industry is based on text. I’ve been playing with Google Gemini but other flavours are available. These text engines can be based on anything up to (I believe) 8 billion data points – that’s a lot of text and a huge fund of examples to work from. The existing wildlife apps are still wallowing in the relative shallows and so they can be unreliable at the moment. I had three obviously wrong fern identifications (back to the books) while we were up on the Mon and Brec. They’ll get better very soon I’m sure. The Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland have access to over 50 million full records, and Kew Gardens are digitizing their entire herbarium records. iNaturalist also has something huge like 50 million although not all of them are verified, but even if all these records are verified and scanned in – which would be a huge volunteer operation – they would still be far fewer in number than the mighty text warehouses. Machine learning can achieve seemingly miraculous results but I don’t think we’ll be making human identification redundant any time soon, so don’t throw those field guides away!

Just to finish, though, I thought I’d wile away an hour asking Google Gemini to do some silly things for me. Question one – what are the distinguishing features of Dryopteris ferns? after ten seconds a very sensible answer. Then I asked it to write a sonnet on the subject of dust and once again a technically perfect but aesthetically clunky, sub Tennysonian sonnet emerged. Then finally I asked if it would re-write one of these posts in the style of Phillip Marlowe. The result was hilariously funny but quite unprintable here, being vulgar, deeply sexist and full of bad language.

Thank your lucky stars it’s just me writing this one!

Camino 15: Decazeville, by the rivers of Babylon

30th May 2010

Woke to pissing rain – so glad we’d ordered breakfast for 7.30.  Packed tent wet and put on all our waterproofs to leave at 9.00am.  We’d inadvertently exchanged trousers so I was wearing M’s extra large ones and his looked extremely slim and tight!  Flogged up awesome track out of Conques so we were wet with sweat by the time we reached the top. Miserable cold, windy and very wet.  Hard walking all the way.  Decazeville looked like Blaenavon on mogadon.  Dropped down 300m and the straight back up the other side. Arrived at Livinhac le Haut at about 3.00pm, knackered again.  Found campsite on river but couldn’t face wet tent so we rented a caravan for the night and paid 60€ for dinner bed and breakfast. So we could dry out all our stuff in the caravan.  My rucksack leaked badly at the bottom so my shoes were wet through.  Slept on a bed this afternoon – bliss! Own shower own toilet.  Bed 8.45

31st May 2010

Still cold, windy and pissing down at 6.30 so we discussed our options.  Me very pessimistic.  M (as so often) practical and positive. Shower out of gas too – so got cold and wet while I struggled with the controls and then gave up. We were the only customers at breakfast.  I think the campsite has fallen on hard times.  Only about 8 diners from the nearby gîte d’etape last night.  Onion soup (I was so hungry I ate it)  Salad of grated carrots (that’s all)  chips,  duck and the ubiquitous haricots verts – the French cook these with real hatred like my mum used to cook sprouts.  M noticed a burned out caravan and a similar tent just left there.  I expect if you looked in the orchard you’d probably find the previous owner’s body still hanging there.   Anyway I negotiated with the owner and he offered to drive us to Figeac for 50€ –  so 118€ for bed breakfast evening meal and transport for 2 – deal!

Figeac on a wet Monday made Haverfordwest look cosmopolitan. Everything shut except a couple of rainswept cafés.  Thought for a moment the whole town had a crack cocaine problem – certainly saw some edgy looking people around.  Just about lost the will to live when we noticed 2 bedraggled pilgrims carrying shopping bags so we went back into the centre of town and found a LeClerc open and several other signs of life (3.00pm) Bought food and a Guardian Weekly went back to the campsite, nicked a couple of chairs from an empty chalet and read.

Journal

Of course anyone with a grain of common sense will be asking me how I have the nerve, after all I’ve written about the church, to put on a frock and say things I’ve apparently long since stopped believing. My answer would be that I have always believed that Christianity can only be accepted as a practise rather than a rosary of written propositions about unfathomable mysteries. My biggest difficulty with the day was taking on the persona – Rev Dave – even for a few hours – after laying him to rest for eight years. I don’t believe for a moment that my blessings would twist the arm of any conceivable non material being; but I do believe in grace

13 years later

I swore I’d never do it, but when Harry’s daughter asked me I couldn’t say no; and so yesterday, for one day only, I came out of retirement and agreed to bless his grand daughter’s marriage. I owe him too much to do any other; however I named my price – that I would insist on wearing trainers – and the deal was done. It was – as I’d always known it would be, totally exhausting – but spending a few hours with Harry (96) and his family was pure joy. A haircut and beard trim were obligatory on my part- Harry is an ex soldier and retired surgeon and the man I’ve looked up to for more than thirty years; a true role model and inspiration. He was also my Churchwarden for much of that time and saved my skin more than once from a small contingent of members who wanted me out/dead/whatever …..

Of course I was absolutely running on empty by the time we drove home, and all I could think of was a glass of wine – but having poured it out I took a sip and flaked out in an armchair. I woke almost ten hours later dreaming about David Attenborough driving children off the beach at Severn Beach (where there isn’t one) – waving a radio handset and shouting dark threats against trespassers. I’ll leave you to work that one out because I haven’t a clue. I was, however feeling unsettled and flat because I knew I was about to write about Decazeville. But Madame had a cunning plan, and – as ever – it was a good one. “Do you fancy driving up to Mendip” she asked casually after a very late breakfast.

The sun was shining, it was unusually warm and we walked in T shirts around Stockhill Plantation where last year we found dozens of species of fungi but today almost none. All of the mycology websites have been lamenting the late start of the autumn flush of fungi and they are entirely correct. It was spookily fungus free – BUT – today I found one I’ve been looking for, for ages. It’s beautiful, delicate and unusual for a fungus with a cap it lives up trees – particularly beech trees. Here it is: Pleased welcome the Porcelain fungus – Oudemansiella mucida

But there’s an irony in this excursion on to the Mendip Plateau but although I grumble about the depressing ugliness of Decazeville it shares an origin with high Mendip because they are both former mining areas and still bear the scars. Mendip was mined for lead and copper, and Decazeville for coal – an industry concurrent with the industrial revolution. I can think of walks nearer home where you experience the same disjunction between two adjoining landscapes; empty hillscapes and semi derelict industrial areas. Walking south from the Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) you might take the Beaufort road and, crossing the empty hills, walk downhill past an opencast coal mine and into the Welsh valleys which once powered the industrial revolution here. The same slightly depressed feeling hangs like a miasma over these post industrial towns. Our walk yesterday was through a plantation that has now pretty much covered about 24 acres (12 hectares) of what’s known locally as gruffy ground; covered in shallow exploratory pits where miners from Roman times onwards have prospected and mined surface deposits of lead ore.

The great advantage of writing up the Camino journal is that these parallels constantly crop up. Obviously being wet and miserable I failed to do justice to a little town that has fallen on hard times. I just checked the local statistics and discovered that the town has only existed for 150 years; the sole raison d’etre being the extraction of coal which ended in the 1960’s . Population about 1500, just 26 two star hotel rooms (and no others at all) and no campsite – so by inference, the Pelegrins don’t stop and spend their money here. The Transit vans and crew buses full of paying pilgrims pass quickly by to more attractive places. My strongest memory of Decazeville is the smell of dog poo wetted by the rain and the continuous procession of gigantic Renault lorries – oh and one of those very thin pilgrim ponchos abandoned in a hedge like a giant pink condom.

But why should pilgrimage be an endless sequence of more or less beautiful places and memorable stops. Life really isn’t like that and I guess I’ve waited 13 years to allow that thought to emerge into the light of day. I feel slightly ashamed of my negative reaction to Decazeville. On a sunny day and with time to explore more fully I’d probably be praising it as I regularly praise all sorts of heritage industrial remains. I don’t think Madame will be wanting to join me on that expedition, though!

Finally – to complete our afternoon on Mendip a few shots of a very beautiful Scaly Male Fern, Dryopteris affinis and a tiny lichen, British Soldiers Cladonia cristatella. Maybe the Rivers of Babylon aren’t so bad after all?

Velvet Bottom again

Hazel catkins in Longwood Valley – spring is on the way!!!

After a couple of weeks when we spent half our time catching up with old friends face to face – at last – and most of the rest preparing the campervan for a new season; we finally got out for a decent walk today on the Mendips, beginning at Charterhouse and walking down Velvet Bottom and then following the West Mendip way up and along the top of the Longwood valley – passing several nature reserves before completing the circuit back at Charterhouse.

It’s a bit early for any of the flowering plants to show themselves – there are some really quite rare plants up there – but we left the flat thinking about the implications of a recently published paper by Belgian scientists that demonstrated how dogs – and more particularly their faeces and urine – add potentially dangerous amounts of phosphates and nitrates which would be illegal if produced by farms. We’re very used to notices imploring dog owners to keep their animals on leads on farms, and it’s true that some careful owners pick up the poo and dispose of it properly, but the urine stays put. The point is that the finest shows of rare wildflowers need poor soil to flourish – that’s why we sow yellow rattle, a parasitic plant on grasses, on potential wildflower meadows, and remove the hay when they’re cut. The Mendips are rich in these sorts of habitats, and you have to wonder whether the sheer quantities of dog poo alongside and on the tracks, presents a threat to rare plants.

Apart from all that pooch flop (I thank the late Richard Boston for that one!) the absence of flowers focuses the eyes on much smaller targets; the bryophytes – mosses and liverworts and the lichens – none of which I know a great deal about. I did lash out on the ultimate field guide, published by the British Bryological Society a couple of years ago; but it’s so densely packed with identical looking plants, my heart sank and today it still smelt like a new book. We have a couple of real experts in the Bath Nats, and it’s always a pleasure to go on field trips with them, but bryophytes demand a bit of an apprenticeship. I should really try harder because unlike wildflowers, most of them are available for head scratching and book banging the year round. Occasionally the Google Lens app on my phone gives a useful steer for identifying all sorts of plants, but that’s my secret vice! I slipped in the wild thyme on the right because there’s a lot growing here and it’s a food plant, in a complicated sort of way, for the large blue butterfly which has been reintroduced in Somerset. The association is down to the fact that the larva are parasitic on the grubs of a species of red ant that associates with wild thyme. Who knows? the large blue may be breeding here already! The other photos show common polypody on the left, a thick mat of unidentified bryophytes in second place, and a lovely maidenhair spleenwort in third place. Honestly, the walk was brimming with interest

Lonk sheep? I’m no expert – does anyone know?

Further walking found a field full of what I think were either pure Lonk sheep or a crossbred variety; perfectly suited to this high country. They looked as if they were all in lamb, but there were a couple of tups still in the field and glowing with a liberal coating of luminous green spray. Later as we walked towards the road down away from Tynings Farm we saw someone making a lovely job of laying a hedge. Further along the way we saw he’d been busy in other places as well. I took several photographs of his work because hedge laying was one of my favourite jobs when I was working as a groundman and it’s a highly skilled and rewarding job; it’s brilliant for wildlife and it could provide work for many people who’d much rather lay hedges than work in call centres! Just to emphasise my point I also photographed a typical stretch of mechanically flailed hedge which offers none of those benefits; looks horrible and barely functions in keeping stock in the right place.