Tag: Google Photos

Laying up treasures – the farmer’s boot is the best fertilizer.

I think these are Apple Ermine moth caterpillars. The black dots are the scat – droppings

I hesitated for a while before writing the first part of the title because I’m very aware that scripture quotations have a very high cringe factor for many readers; so I’ll summarise and say that rust – or perhaps rot, moths and thieves – play a very real and challenging role in running a garden or allotment. The second part of the title is a traditional saying which reminds us that just being on the allotment, walking around slowly and taking everything in means that invasive weeds get pulled up and pests are identified long before they become a threat. So basically, stuff grows better and stronger when it’s well looked after. Dousing plants with chemicals when the problem’s escalated out of hand is a poor substitute for attention to detail. In gardening terms, “laying up your treasures” often means waiting for seasons – even many seasons – before gaining your reward. A deep understanding of your patch of dirt is both the precondition and the fruit of all that attention to detail. Calling it Green Fingers rather misses the point.

So today Madame found the caterpillars on our apple trees and carefully removed them to stop them from sapping their energy by chomping on the leaves. Later on I’ll be spraying the asparagus plants with a nematode mixture to kill off the asparagus beetle larvae – they’re completely harmless to other pollinating insects and other creatures. As for today I was using the thumb and finger technique which is only about 50% effective because the moment you kill one of them the others all drop to the ground. I wrote on Monday that he asparagus is dining in the last chance saloon, but we’ve decided to leave it for another couple of seasons while we prepare and plant up a new bed with what we hope will be a more productive variety.

All these tough decisions are a reminder that we live on a challenging earth. Our upstairs neighbour texted today asking what to do about a pigeon which had somehow got into his flat, built a nest and even laid eggs in it. How on earth they came not to notice all that home preparation escapes even my imagination, but I could see that there was an ethical dimension to destroying the nest, the eggs and possibly the pair of pigeons as well. All I could think of was to drive out the pigeons, remove the nest and leave the eggs out on the green where the magpies would soon find and eat them. For me it’s always better to do the tough work yourself than to farm it out to others and try to forget it ever happened.

Not everyone agrees of course. Later on we were chatting to a fellow allotmenteer who’s a vegan and Madame mentioned that we were using sheep’s fleece in the fruit cage to deter weeds and to mulch around the stems (very successfully). She was horrified at the very idea of using fleece even though it would otherwise be discarded as valueless. For her it seemed desirable and possible to avoid all these moral difficulties but I’m not so sure. I recall that she was happy to catch and kill slugs when they attacked her vegetables. Somehow it seems to me that a virtuous life is better lived by embracing the hard choices than by avoiding ever having to make them.

Anyway, yesterday was also momentous for rather different reasons. Our neighbour is a distinguished South African botanist who once ran a national botanical garden. He’s also very good company and so we were gossiping in his garden when he brought out a plant which – being unfamiliar with British plants, he couldn’t name; giving me the chance to show off just a bit. I perhaps failed to mention that it was one I’d often looked for unsuccessfully so that was a find– not on a rocky outcrop in a remote place but on a wall next to the dentist in the centre of Bath. Then he brought out a Rock Geranium growing in a pot which explained in a glimpse why it’s called Geranium macrorrhizum – fat root. Another first for me. Finally, at my first Council meeting of the Bath Nats the local recorder mentioned that she’d seen a Sea Spleenwort growing in the city centre . We’d spent hours looking for it along the cliffs when we were last in Cornwall and because I now know where to find it, I can claim three ticks in a day. In return I showed off even more by showing her how to use Google Photos as a searchable database. Cue for a date to give one of the indoor talks to the society this winter. Good day!

Sea Spleenwort – Asplenium marinum in the centre of Bath

Google Photos as a natural history resource.

Most of these photographs were taken on what turned out to be a life changing trip to Dartmoor in March 2016. The Potwell Inn didn’t exist; we’d been through retirement and a major family crisis when our second grandchild was born with a still undiagnosed genetic disorder; we’d moved from a large vicarage to a small flat in Bath and the allotment was yet to come. Christmas had been a write-off and we had taken ourselves off to St Ives in the campervan in search of some respite – in the dog days of the old year just as a major Atlantic storm reached the south west.

January 1st 2016 – a stupidly hubristic resolution

The key photograph here is the one of the (at the time) unidentified little seagull. We were leaning on the railings above the harbour just down from St Ives lifeboat station and watching the gulls when I realized that this gull was very different from some of the other gulls and I had no idea what species it was. I remember feeling faintly annoyed with myself and later that day we went into the bookshop and bought the first bird guide we’d ever owned. It was about then that quite the stupidest resolution I’ve ever made began to form in my head. I would not – I resolved – pass by any plant or animal, without naming it. The picture I took that day was completely hopeless in terms of identification, even with an 80mm lens there was no detail that had any significance so far as I could see. Just for the record I now know perfectly well that the dark smudge behind the bird’s ear is all that remains of the Black Headed Gulls’ distinctive summer plumage on December 29th.

Before we retired (i.e when we had a bit more money), I bought an iPhone and a Macbook. Madame had already settled into the Apple ecosystem because she was teaching photography at the time and it made sense for us to share resources. For the first time I owned a mobile that would add location data to the EXIF file. At roughly the same time I started keeping a private journal using Day One software and this integrated seamlessly between the iPhone, the Macbook and a big desktop. But it wasn’t so long before we came up against Apple’s policy of abandoning their products by making it impossible to upgrade the software. Day One suddenly stopped talking to my Macbook and when I complained I was told that it was my fault for not upgrading. We struggled on for several years, but applications like Photoshop and Lightroom were less and less easy to run on our aging machines and in any case their memory hogging features were far beyond my own needs. I was using Microsoft Windows for work and so we landed up in the worst of all worlds, moving photographs between incompatible software. Heaven knows how much data was lost; but in the end I began a long process of ditching Apple and moved as much data as I could find into Dropbox as a security for the future.

It was our oldest son who broke the impasse by giving me an old Pixel 3 phone after an upgrade and I started using Google Photos. To be honest there was nothing about the iPhone that I particularly missed, and when – a couple of years later – he gave me a basic HP Chromebook that he’d acquired during another upgrade, and after he helped me with a fast and pretty seamless setup and data transfer, I put my agonisingly slow Macbook on a shelf and started enjoying an entirely new and fast cloud-based ecosystem.

Anyway, to get back to the photographs at the top of this post, they represent something of a sea change. My ludicrous resolution to try to name things brought about a move towards much more purposeful photography. As my interest in plants moved up a step, I discovered that well composed photographs of plants I didn’t recognise, meant I didn’t have to dig them up and take them home which is at best inconsiderate and at worst illegal. It’s taken ever since to refine the technique so that I remember to photograph the sometimes apparently insignificant details that make the difference between a correct and a wrong identification.

None of this particularly mattered, of course, as long as I was the only person ever to see the record. But then, as I wrote in a post last week, I began sending them for verification by the local BSBI East Cornwall recorder – which is when it dawned on me that my photographs were more akin to archaeological compost than a filing system. Looking for old photos meant trawling through thousands of them in the hope of alighting upon the right one.

By now I’d got myself a powerful little Pixelbook and I was beginning to understand that the originally utilitarian Google Photos has a few new tricks up its sleeve. One of Google’s most useful – although much feared – attributes is its formidable artificial intelligence software. If you’ve ever used Google Lens on the phone you’ll know that. It can be a curse as well as a blessing – this morning I had an email from someone asking what was the launching fee at Percuil. We were on holiday for the last two weeks and I mentioned Percuil several times in the blog and the odd request must have flowed from a bit of AI that was too clever for its own good.

Google Photos uses AI to do a lot of basic sorting and indexing of photos behind the scenes; so I can search on months and years, faces and places. But last week I wanted to start indexing keywords like genera, species, English and Latin names and various other bits of searchable data. I’d contemplated using some third party software but after hours of searching I couldn’t find anything I liked better. Any records I’d submitted or had accepted would be somewhere in one of a number of vast external databases, but I wouldn’t be able to access them in a simple personal list.

So here’s the exciting thing. After a bit of experimentation it seems that contrary to what I read on the internet, I can do keyword searches on terms that I type into the “details” column at the head of all the EXIF data. The only downside is that the AI facilities remain in play, so a keyword search on primrose might yield a few lookalikes as well – not the end of the world in my view. My guess is that some of the AI used in Google Lens is already being built into Google Photos. The software connects seamlessly to WordPress, so I can use my photographs in this blog; and I can easily forward diagnostic photographs to the referees for acceptance.

When we go out plant hunting I take the phone with a macro lens so I can take the necessary photos. I’ve got stacks of useful apps on the phone as well, including OS mapping, accurate National Grid references, altitude, and shortcuts to the BSBI plant distribution database. I’ve also got iRecord, I Naturalist and a link to the local list of plants which I download as a PDF before leaving home. Google Lens is surprisingly helpful in steering me in the right direction but it’s not infallible. Of course I will take a book along with me but I always take photographs because I can use them with my library of plant books at leisure when I get home. It doesn’t always work, and I often have to go back, look more closely and take more photos in order to do a full ID.

The upshot is that the more of this kind of intense work I do, the more my plant ID skills improve. Typing details into the software drills the English and Latin names into my memory very effectively too. I think the take-home point is that while for some people, staggering across a bog with a large camera and tripod, an expensive GPS unit and a copy of Stace 4 weighing in at well over a kilogramme is the only way forward. But for my purposes I can get it all into a pocket without my trousers falling down. I take a 6″ ruler, I use my walking pole as a 1.5 metre measuring stick. I take a plastic zip bag, just in case; a Rite in the Rain waterproof notebook and a pen that writes on it underwater and upside down – who knows when that might be needed! a scalpel and a couple of hand lenses. Total weight around 500g.

Maybe I’ll be forced to eat my words one day, but this seems to me to be the simplest and cheapest way – it’s free – of creating a searchable, automatically backed up photographic database for plant recording. No good at all, of course for insects, mammals and birds because they all race around too far away for a phone camera. But my subjects stand still – unless it’s very windy – and best of all the photos escape the dangers of being lost forever in my fallible memory. What’s not to like?

At home with the fungi

Well, not really – but I found the tiny Coprinus (bottom right) growing down in the dark in the compost heap today. I don’t know why but it surprised me because the heap, being full of green waste, was rather hot and the reason I was scratching around in there was to add a barrow load of dead leaves to bump up the brown waste proportion. I’ve learned that if I can smell the heap it’s going (or gone) anaerobic and needs turning along with more brown waste. The effect of the two actions is often surprisingly quick as the heap heats up so quickly.

It was whilst looking for a photo of fully grown member of the species (Lawyers Wig in old money) I randomly typed “fungus” into the Google Photos search line and after a brief interval, hundreds – and I mean hundreds of my photos of fungi going back over a decade suddenly appeared. I’d heard that the search engine had been improved, but this was wonderful because I usually spend ages searching manually through the thumbnails to get the picture I need. It’s a blogger’s dream because I almost always use the photos I’ve just taken because the prospect of searching is so long winded.

Anyway, this is yet another serendipitous moment (synchronistic if you’re a Jungian) because I’m halfway through reading Merlin Sheldrake’s book “Entangled Life” and it falls neatly within a current line of science that’s rewriting our whole view of ecology. For me the most impressive learning point is how well it supports the view that all life is – at its most fruitful – collaborative and cooperative. If ever an idea needed to be born today it’s that one!

After a day working on the allotment in the rain we were glad to get back home. Complete with a meal of the first tiny potatoes and a bag of broad bean tops. There’s tomorrow’s food sorted,

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