Tag: spring flowers

A ‘crown of thorns’ moment in the Bannau Brycheiniog

A view through thorny branches and barbed wire, looking out onto green fields and distant buildings across the valley.

We’re here in Wales again; this time we’re 1000 feet up a hill and just on the edge of the treeline. We’re here because the builders have moved into our flat, finally to install some humidistat extractor fans and get the black mould permanently off the walls. It’s been a ten year battle with the landlords and we’re so relieved they’ve finally listened to us.

This time we’re above the small town of Talgarth beneath Waun Fach and very close to the Cambrian Way walk. It’s cold; extremely windy and we may even get some snow up here later on. There’s a small stream running very close which becomes larger as it tumbles down the hill and finally when it reaches the town, feeds a working water mill as the River Ennig. Its route takes it down a steep sided cwm where there is a partially open nature reserve called Pwll-y-wrach “witches pool” which – legend has it – was used for ducking suspected witches in a heads I win, tails you lose form of rough justice.

A view of a rocky landscape with flowing water and moss-covered stones, surrounded by trees and greenery.

Rough justice is a bit of a theme for this corner of God’s own country. We arrived too early to check in so we parked up and visited the nature reserve of the same name which is partly closed to visitors due to the epidemic of Ash dieback. The combination of emergency felling and wind damage give the valley a strangely gloomy air notwithstanding the emerging spring wildflowers which seem not to mind. There were even a couple of species of Bumble Bee mooching about to provide a soundtrack. The wildlife managers of the site have taken a decision not to remove all the ash trees, but just the dangerous ones and to leave a good deal of the brash in situ for the woodland residents.

I’ll come back to the more cheerful spring flowers, but when we first booked here and got the address “Hospital Road” I guessed instantly that we would be near the old Talgarth asylum which has fallen into dereliction and now is locked away from visitors apart from urban explorers who are prepared to take the (considerable) risks. We were walking down the road back to the car when we spotted it through the hedge below us and it truly is a melancholic ruin. I once worked as an art therapist in a similar hospital in Bristol which has now closed and is largely demolished. It was a dark place of historic injustice and suffering in spite of its origins as a safe and productive, self-sufficient colony. Overcrowding, underfunding and sheer lack of vision condemned thousands of guiltless men and women; many of the men shell-shocked after the cruelties of war and the women labelled as moral defectives because they had become pregnant. All crowded together with other violent and sometimes psychotic residents and nurses who acted more like prison warders, and who would punish those who got out of line with injections of paraldehyde which was so noxious it had to be administered with a steel and glass syringe because it ate through plastic as it ate through the skin of the unfortunates who called it “pollyeye”. Something went terribly wrong with the vision and a miasma of suffering still hangs over the buildings in which it was administered. Thank goodness those days are largely gone. A classic example (think of the present government) of what happens when policies fail but no-one has any inclination or clue how to mend the damage.

Anyway – enough – I wanted to write about spring as she’s manifesting herself here up in the hills where it’s colder and later. We only had a short walk, but we spotted primroses, common dog-violets and early dog-violets, lords and ladies, dandelions, wood anemones, barren strawberries, lesser celandines and soft shield ferns. The woodland floor had the early leaves of herb robert and wild garlic and there were large numbers of acorns on the ground in the process of germinating and opening their seed leaves like scarlet cloak – very pretty. I didn’t have time to make a detailed list, but there are some photos below.

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!

Fire, Brimstone and Global Heating

Looking South from Lizard Point

I’ve already written about our hasty decision to rent a cottage on The Lizard because we were both suffering from post COVID tristesse. We calculated – as we always do – what was the cheapest week we could get before the price doubles at Easter, and a phone call sealed the deal. After weeks and weeks of continuous rain and three weeks of COVID symptoms we were desperate to take advantage of what promised to be a dry week with occasional sunshine. Both of those qualities were abundant here but sadly we also had wickedly strong north-easterly winds which kept the temperature down to 4C but felt more like freezing. Cold enough to take your face off even with three layers of clothes, beanies and mittens. I don’t think we’ve ever known it colder here – as far South as it’s possible to be on mainland Britain. Still lovely as ever but the usually reliable signs of spring seem to have been stopped in their tracks.

My initial aim was to check out a pond. Here it is. Last year I’d come to believe that I’d failed to spot a little plant called Spring Quillwort – Isoetes echinospora – which sheds its fronds in the winter. It turned out I was wrong because if I’d taken the trouble to check I’d have seen that it’s never been recorded on the Lizard. Anyway one thing led to another and I discovered that there is another, even rarer, member of the same family which does grow here and attracts visiting botanists from all over the world. It’s an odd plant that grows in impoverished soil in temporary puddles during the winter and, in order to survive the constant drought, dies back in early summer. Our first expedition was compromised by sheer driving wind, but I managed to narrow our find down to one of two species and then decided to send a photo to the local Vice County Recorder for his opinion. He was right – I was wrong and it was Spring Squill but he’s a very encouraging kind of man and sent me a detailed map of where I could find the real deal. Short of coming and holding my hand he couldn’t have been more helpful.

So on Tuesday afternoon we set out once again, map in hand in the fierce wind to a place close to the car park to search again. They weren’t there but it’s a bit early in the year anyway. What we did notice was an enormous gorse fire running apparently out of control and very close to another potential group of plants. Cue for a strong email to the National Trust asking why on earth they were burning gorse so close to a nationally important site. To their credit the project manager emailed me back within the hour explaining what they were doing and describing “controlled burning” as one among many controls that were being trialled on the Lizard, to improve the life chances of around 20 nationally important species. “That’s great” – I thought, but the word controlled is a bit of a tricky one. You can control everything up to the point where you apply the match to the tinder but thereafter the wind will take over and from where we were standing it looked as if the flames were twenty feet into the air and travelling at speed in the direction of the footpath where the rare plants had a foothold. They wouldn’t have had the ghost of a chance of stopping it, if it got sufficiently close to the path to cause damage. Fire and flood are two of nature’s gifts that do not allow negotiation.

The project manager said that he had been present and he didn’t think it was out of control, but conceded that we might have had a better view of it. He also said that the burning had been carried out by contractors. From a contractor’s point of view a strong northeasterly, driving the fire towards the cliff would have done the job quickly and efficiently – which would have been fine if the purpose of the burning was merely to clear the ground of gorse. But the true purpose of the burn was to create a better environment for the rare plants and therefore speed and efficiency were – or should have been – subsidiary to their preservation!

My other objection would be the sheer amount of particulate (PM 2.5) matter released into the atmosphere along with Co2 and all the other noxious substances that bonfires emit, plus the release of phosphate and potash from ash into what needs to remain impoverished soil. Against that you might argue that if the contractors had waited for a southwesterly which would have taken the direction of travel of the fire away from the cliffs; Lizard village would have been inundated with choking smoke – so maybe cutting the gorse back would have been a more expensive, slower but greener alternative.

So after smoke – which we know to be a component of climate heating and lung disease – there comes ash, which is quite alkaline, quite mobile, and known to be fairly soluble in some cases; plus all of the the accumulated trace elements which – depending on the heat of the fire – can also be released. There’s an abundance of science on all this and it seems wise to err on the side of caution when it comes to these highly vulnerable sites. It’s never a good idea to let the perfect drive out the good but sometimes we need to look for a better kind of good.

Obviously, fire and overwintering insects aren’t a good mix. In a world of reliable abundance maybe the loss of a population of insects would be soon repaired. Eggs and pupae can’t get out of the way. The Project Manager wrote that expert surveys had been carried out before the policy had been adopted, but there is no denying the impact on insects and many species of bee overwintering in the earth beneath the gorse; and finally, Gorse, which flowers the year round, is a useful source of nectar at a time when there’s nothing much else around.

Now I have the greatest of respect for the National Trust and for Natural England and I’m quite sure that a good deal of discussion was expended on the variables in all this, but “The best laid plans of mice and men” …… etc are always liable to be upended by the facts on the ground, and a little humility, when the plan literally turns to dust and ashes, goes a long way. Nature conservation demands a fleet footed and occasionally improvisational approach and the problems come thick and fast when institutional inertia gets in the way. If this is an experimental project this may be a time when one part of it should be abandoned in the light of events.

First list of the year

We come down here most years for a break – usually around three weeks later than this year so we can look for spring plants.As the years go by it’s more like checking out on old friends; but there’s more than an element of looking for signs of spring – like fields of flowering daffodils near Culdrose, as they are this year. But the weeks of rain followed by this extreme cold snap has certainly held things back. I’ve come to appreciate the exuberant beauty of plants as they burst through the soil. The rosettes of Wild Radish leaves are probably as lovely as the plant gets, for instance. In particular we were looking for some small populations of Babington’s Leek that we’d recorded for the first time last year, and a wireplant that must have travelled from New Zealand via the isles of Scilly; both of which were in or near the ruined serpentine works at Poltesco. So we parked the car at Ruan Minor and set off down the steep valley, past a restored but apparently abandoned water mill and on to the ruined mill on the sea shore. What’s not to like? industrial ruins and rare plants – paradise.

So with the two boxes ticked we also looked for plants in flower and found twelve.

  • Celandine
  • Winter Heliotrope
  • Hogweed (unexpectedly)
  • Perennial Sowthistle
  • Dandelion
  • Ivy Leaved Toadflax (white form)
  • Primrose
  • Snowdrop
  • Violet
  • Red Campion
  • Gorse
  • Daisy

Admittedly we’re talking about single specimens in some cases, but that’ll do for a harbinger of better times, we need some good news. I’m not sleeping well and tormented by dreams of violence. Last night I dreamed about children in a war zone. I won’t bother you with the details. Here are some pictures of the mill and some of the plants, taken by Madame.

Postscript

The gorse burning has continued for several days, with the Fire Brigade called out at least once. Photographs on social media on Sunday showed that the plume of smoke could be seen from Penzance. It seems to me that in an age when we’re thinking twice about wood burning stoves and garden bonfires, it’s a bit rich when a state sponsored organisation (Natural England) is burning acres of gorse for any reason at all. It may be perfectly legal, but that doesn’t mean it’s sensible or ethical. One obvious possible solution is to cut the gorse back, shred it on site to reduce the volume and then compost it and/or use it for mulch. More expensive? Well who’s paying the bill for the environmental cost of the fires?

“Wait your turn, Sir!”

The first Celandine of spring – or at least the first we’ve seen.

A great friend and mentor of mine; a parish priest like me, was leading the graveside prayers at a burial service when he lost his footing and very nearly went down with the coffin. He was held firmly by one of the pall bearers who whispered in his ear “Wait your turn, Sir – wait your turn!”.

It would be comforting to think of nature as a basically static display of plants that come up in the spring and die in the autumn. Except it isn’t like that at all. The emergence of the first spring flowers depends on a whole heap of factors like ambient temperature, day length, amounts of sunshine and space to grow. This year, for example, the first Celandine we saw was here on the Lizard exactly as it was last year, but 13 days later. That was it – the only Celandine in flower in a five mile walk. Look closely at the photograph and you’ll see that there’s another plant there that’s growing fast enough to steal its sunlight in a week or two. Cleavers is an extremely vigorous climber – you’ll know it from the burrs that stick firmly to most clothes by way of the tiny hooks which were the inspiration for Velcro.

Look closely at the hedgerows around this time and you’ll see the first leaves of many plants which follow in strict succession right through to late autumn, and all timed like a glorious firework display to flower and fruit in their unique optimal conditions. Not all buttercups are buttercups and not all dandelions are dandelions (in fact they’re so complicated they can’t even make their own minds up). Some will flower for weeks and with others you can blink and they’re gone. Nothing stands still for a moment in nature and for me the first Celandine is both a joy and a warning that from now on it’s an unstoppable torrent of flowering and fruiting that will change the whole appearance of fields and hedgerows every couple of weeks. The succession of the plants ensures that each one has its own space. Cow Parsley gives way to Hogweed and so forth. It can be exhausting trying to keep up, especially for Madame who will beg me to leave the notebook and hand lens behind and just go for a walk . I note, however that she always takes her binoculars out – “just in case”.

Today we started on the Lizard Green and walked down the lane to Church Cove and then took the coast path as far as Housel Bay and then turned off to avoid a monumental flight of steps and took the easier path to the back of Lizard Lighthouse stopping for some food and then back to the car park. Ten years ago we’d have bounded up those steps without a care, but one of the less talked about advantages of getting quite old is that we walk rather slower and so we see much more. This was a walk we tried to do on Saturday but the coast path was rammed with runners doing a 100 mile ultra marathon. I bet they’ll be walking slowly with ultra knackered knees long before their 70’s.

Anyway, the short cut was marvellous because we caught sight of a very big Buzzard eating his/her kill on a Cornish wall. Within ten feet of the Buzzard there sat a lovely Carrion Crow waiting apparently unafraid until the superior hunter got bored with lunch and flew off – whereupon the crow hopped sideways along the wall and polished off the remains. That was surprising enough, but half a mile later we saw the same two birds repeating exactly the same routine. It was clearly a relationship of more significance to the Crow than the Buzzard but I suppose the crow – Corvids are among the smartest birds – probably reasoned that it was best to keep your friends close and your enemies closer. There was no way that the Buzzard could launch a surprise attack from ten feet. But whatever the rationale it looked as if both birds were in fine health and as fat as butchers’ dogs – which is the closest I could get to an appropriate metaphor.

Ulex europaeus

There was another surprise on the walk because I’ve been spending some time trying to identify a species of Gorse called Western Gorse – Ulex gallii. It’s one of the plants that are plentiful around the Lizard and Kynance Cove but rare everywhere else; but which is very similar to its larger cousin Gorse – Ulex europaeus. The difference between the two comes down to size – ordinary Gorse is bigger; its thorns are longer and deeply grooved, like the one in the picture. But the clincher was (note the past tense) the fact that Gorse ordinaire flowers all year round, but Western Gorse flowers in summer. Or at least that’s what the books say, but unfortunately plants don’t read textbooks and today we found hundreds of Western Gorse plants around the coast path, and many of them were in flower.

Ulex gallii

The Lizard peninsula has two things going for it. One is its unique geology which gives a home to hundreds of wildflowers some of which are only found here. The other thing derives from its geography. It’s the furthest southerly point in the UK and it enjoys a unique climate as well. It’s warm. On first seeing it many years ago it looked completely wild and windswept – and indeed it is, but its warm microclimate means that some wild plants better suited to better to warmer places actually thrive here.

Good news too on the recording front because the County Recorder emailed yesterday and accepted both records I’d submitted. I’ve already posted a picture of the little perennial Leek – Babington’s Leek yesterday. He was kind enough to say that I’d found two sites where it hasn’t previously been seen. The other plant was a real outrider – Wireplant, Muehlenbeckia complexa a New Zealand visitor and that one passed as well. Three more little red squares on the national map.

Approaching retirement I often wondered what I would do to fill my time. The idea of voluntary work often came to mind but I never fancied any of the options because many of them felt like not retiring at all. But this combination of allotmenteering and field botany have turned out to be my happy place. Spring? Bring it on!

Once again, walking down to Percuil, our hearts are lifted.

Potwell Inn regulars will know that I get a bit grumpy when people take the therapeutic powers of nature as the fixed and immutable reward for stepping outside the door. Hand on heart I suspect I’m a victim of the protestant work ethic that guarantees there’s no gain without plenty of pain. I lay the blame for that disposition squarely on the Primitive Methodists who were rather keen on rewards but much more on punishments. Then, like today, we occasionally go for a gentle stroll with no particular quarry in mind, and we return almost breathless with joy.

Cornish lanes are never lovelier than they are in Spring and the footpath down to Percuil from Gerrans was as lovely as any lane ever has been.

We walked this way six weeks ago and the change has been astonishing. One of the most intriguing features of our walks is to see the successional drifts of flowers following one after another. You can no more hold back the emergence of the next wave of plants than you can hold an eel in your bare hands. I took this photograph because the combination of colours: the pink of the Campions, the white of the Stitchworts and the blue of the bluebells looked so beautiful in the sunshine against the green vegetation. You don’t even have to know the names of the plants to appreciate their beauty. Looking more closely you can spot Navelwort, Dock, Herb Robert and Hogweed. Further down the path we spotted a patch of Early Purple orchids – some with spotted leaves and others without; plants don’t read textbooks.

As we went down the path we could see the successions working out. Six weeks ago there was a mass of Winter Heliotrope, mostly finished flowering. with Alexanders emerging through them. Today the Alexanders were almost finished and the Cow Parsley has thrust through them, closely followed by Hogweed. Already the Cleavers (Goosegrass if you prefer) is threading up through the competition and even showing some tiny white flowers. There’s something wildly, needlessly extravagant about nature – like a Sufi dance – that can lead, (I say grudgingly), into direct awareness of the Power, the Spirit, the Tao; whatever you want to call it.

Percuil harbour

Down at the harbour we perched on the concrete wall of the chandlery come boatyard and laughed about the time we got beaten by the tide and the wind as we paddled back in our kayak and had to be towed in by the instructor. One of the boatyard workers drove past us on a tractor and as he walked back I asked if they were busy. “Yes,” he said, “The season always takes you by surprise”, and he graced us with a friendly smile. Behind the wall an invisible woman was having a loud conversation on a mobile and a hundred yards away the sound of a conversation on the verandah of a holiday let, skimmed across the hard sand towards us. We’d hoped for the sounds of Curlew or Cuckoo but today we were content to listen to a whole choir of other species. Upstream on the creek, a Heron and an Egret eyed each other cautiously over a patch of territory.

We walked back up the road with Madame’s rucksack stuffed with Corsican Pine cones for her to draw. I think she’d scaled the fence of a rather grand house to snaffle them under the gaze of a dog walker who she’d confused with me. That’s the joy of a meandering stroll with no particular purpose in mind.

On the other hand there’s serious work to be done and I’d spotted a couple of plants of what I think is Smith’s Pepperwort – Lepidium heterophyllum on a footpath. I checked on the BSBI database and although it’s been recorded all around us on the map, it’s not been seen here. Distribution maps can sometimes tell you more about the distribution of field botanists than they can about the private life of plants. Anyway, with the prospect of filling the last missing square in the jigsaw I was like a dog with a bone and sent a preliminary enquiry with a couple of poor photos to the local Vice County Recorder. That cost me £35 because in all conscience I couldn’t continue relying on the BSBI, (Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland), for help without at least joining. And so I proudly present the evidence below with very little expectation that anyone else will be interested. Little things please little minds.

This little lot cost me four visits, one of which was to sniff a crushed leaf. The fact that it didn’t smell foetid or of garlic turned out to be important. So were the hairy leaves and the tough old perennial rhizome, not forgetting the purple stamens.

If there isn’t a tradition for this we should invent it!

Looking up Perquil river with Polingey Creek off to the right.

Winter always does this; luring us into dreams of long warm days before slamming the door shut with icy fingers. The clue was in the wind all along. As it moved around from southwest, the rainy quarter, a finger of high pressure on the map brought first the sunshine – but before we could rejoice, it carried on cycling through northwest, north and northeast until finally today it blew hard and freezing cold from due east. We dressed up like deep sea divers and waddled down to Portscatho to get some supplies; but once we were back at the van we got itchy feet and put on our boots and down jackets and walked the track down alongside the Percuil river and after mooching about for a bit near the boatyard we retraced our steps. We once paddled up the river on a rising tide in the kayak, but mistimed the tide and forgot a fierce onshore wind; paddling back all but spent. At one point it started to hammer down with rain and we laid in the boat and laughed ourselves silly; much to the consternation of our guide who clearly thought we were a pair of geriatric escapees.

Percuil – especially at this time of the year – is preternaturally quiet. The boats are all laid up for the winter and the summer sailors have gone. As we walked along the river we stopped frequently just to immerse ourselves in the silence. The deep sided valley sheltered us from the wind and even the rigging on the few boats left at anchor in the water was listless. All I could hope for was the song of a curlew, but we were denied that thrill until later in the walk when we were almost home. We did, however see a little egret feeding in the low tide shallows on the far side. We are the only campers on the site at the moment. Two others left this morning which was just as well because the cold weather and the fact that the days are still shorter than the nights has meant we’ve hammered the leisure batteries without which there’s no light or heat. So as the last van pulled out, we ran the engine for an hour to pump some juice back in.

But there was a surprise as we walk the last hundred yards to the boatyard because the blackthorn bushes there have started to blossom. Today there were only a handful of flowers but in a couple of weeks the abundant thorns will look as if they are covered in snow. For me they’re the real sign of winter’s ending and – as I’ve argued before – it’s more likely to coincide with the equinox than the first day of March. The couple of gallons of sloe gin we make; (for overseas readers it might help to know that sloes are the fruit of the blackthorn; tiny, hard and bitter as gall) – so the couple of gallons of sloe gin we make in the autumn have been steeping for almost exactly six months. The sloes go into the freezer for a week or so and are steeped in a mixture of gin and sugar. The skins break and the clear liquid becomes the richest purple. Initially the sloe gin is undrinkable and bitter. But after six months – like today, for instance, you can have a first taste. Fortunately for us – because we’re enjoying a period of abstinence at the moment – sloe gin goes on getting better and better for the next three or four years, So I suggest we invent a totally spurious tradition which, for the sake of making it sound truly authentic, we could call “Wettings”, and all get jolly and hammered at the equinox and share our plans for the summer. The person who brags the most gets thrown into the pond and has to say cuckoo instead of hello until the autumn equinox – for which I haven’t thought of a suitable ritual yet.

So it’s been a quiet but lovely day under grey skies and true to recent form I idly picked a stalk of grass that caught my eye on a stone gatepost and it turned out yet again to be a difficult one that hasn’t been seen hereabouts for maybe thirty years. So I dutifully took the diagnostic photos, filled in the record and paused for an hour before I pressed send – wondering if I really did want to make a fool of myself again.

So here are some more pictures I took today and one a couple of years ago to show the glory of full-on blackthorn flowering. The other two are the male and female flowers from a row of Corsican Pines above Percuil harbour. They certainly know how to strut their stuff!

Blackthorn in full flower – April 2021

Some silver linings

Well we’d better make a start with these early risers – just a dozen of the wildflowers – don’t say weeds – flowering this morning on the riverbank footpath.  We took ourselves out for an hour in the fresh air today, fairly certain that we were maintaining our social distances in the required fashion.  The only downside seems to be an increasing tendency for young people to look rather suspiciously at us as if we were causing the problem rather than being the principle victims.  You can’t blame them I suppose, they’ve been repeatedly told that we stole their pensions – a bit of larceny I don’t remember at all – someone else must have taken my share! On the other hand the sight of a man crouching amongst the weeds may have led them to conclude I was about to expire and reminded them of the admirable advice in the parable of the good Samaritan, that’s to say – to pass by on the other side.

So this year I fear my botanising will be largely confined to these local wild and weedy thugs – aside from a trip to Whitefield meadow at Dyrham Park where with a bit of luck we’ll find the elusive orchid whose name I’m not even going to mention. The riverbank was reseeded with wildflower mix a couple of seasons ago, following flood prevention works, and although it looked quite pretty for a while is just didn’t look right.  It was a jumble of wildflowers from quite different habitats including a few poppies. As I’ve mentioned several times I’m reading George Peterken’s marvellous book “Meadows”, (£35.00 and worth every penny), anyway he mentions in passing something that demonstrates exactly why the wildflower mix looked so wrong – there were poppies in it and poppies are arable weeds.  In fact he says that there are no red flowers in flower meadows at all. I’m in no position to verify that nugget, but it sounds exactly right and completely underlined why the riverbank attempt at flower meadow flora was a bit – well, out of tune.

What’s more to the point, though, is that these expensive usurpers didn’t, probably couldn’t, last the course.  They arrived in an alien environment; out came whatever passes for banjos and shotguns in the plant world, and the locals simply shouldered them out of the way as if they were old people in the queue for toilet rolls. The burdock that I was so sad to lose to the bulldozers and excavators has reasserted itself in its old home and the whole stretch of the river bank is restored to pretty much the way it used to be. Weeds!  How long, I wonder, before public pressure is brought to bear on the council to get the strimmers out?

More silver linings for the family.  The almost complete disappearance of tourists has led to a crisis in the holiday rental market and so suddenly, overnight, there are flats available for short term rent and our youngest son has found somewhere to live. Our middle son has just heard that the government is subsidising wages up to 80% – which will be a lifesaver in the catering industry where thousands have been laid off already.

But yesterday I spoke to our oldest, who is a teacher, and he was able to tell me about the traumas that students and teachers are experiencing when relationships that have taken years to nurture are suddenly ruptured. Young people have no idea how they will cope with the postponement of public examinations and they are quite properly distraught at being cut adrift at this crucial time in their lives, not knowing what lies before them.  So he’s going to be working harder than ever to make sure they’re safe, properly fed and cared for. When you read about the schools being closed, remember that teachers aren’t going to be enjoying ‘garden leave’ but struggling to keep the show on the road. My advice is not to crack jokes about the ‘long holiday’ if you want to continue to enjoy your own!

There were crowds up at the allotment today. We were too emotionally exhausted to do much but the weather looks fine for tomorrow so we’ll have a day with as little stress as possible. To adapt a quote from Churchill, who seems to be on everyone’s’ lips at the moment –

The government can always be relied upon to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else!

The Lost Gardeners of Heligan (ctd:)

I should probably have called this posting further travails or further adventures – or something of that nature because we were woken in the middle of the night by the sound of the heater powering down and an acrid smell. Generally speaking this is a bad sign, but when we woke up freezing cold and discovered there was just one warm place – under the bed where the batteries are situated – it became a different kind of bad news.  Exploding lead acid batteries under the bed are best avoided, and half of today was spent with me trying to fit into extremely confined spaces with a multimeter and Googling to see who or what might be able to help. After a endless amount of deliberation we decided that the knackered batteries had deteriorated to the point where they had partially shorted and kept calling for more current from the charger, thereby heating them up until I pressed the off button on the charger – which turned the camper van into a tin tent – which, in turn,  is why I am typing this in the dark, wearing a head torch and three jumpers. We’ll replace the batteries first thing tomorrow. More money – aaaagh

Meanwhile we managed a walk around Heligan and there are some photos above. The reason I called this post the “Lost Gardeners of Heligan” is that there are little memorials to the mostly young gardeners who died in the First World War all over the place, each accompanied by a flower display or arrangement. It’s very affecting, and of course the reason the gardens were abandoned was that so many were killed, there were no longer enough workers to keep the gardens going.  The then owner was too affected by grief and memories to live here any longer, and moved away.

Strangely there’s no sense of melancholy around, especially on such a sunny day when even the icy northwesterly wind couldn’t dampen our spirits. Plants are never more perfect than when they’re first emerging.  They spring from the earth untouched by insects and diseases and full of vigour. It can be tricky identifying them from their new leaves, but we get better at it. Todays crop of fungi and bryophytes was a good reason for getting a bit more knowledgeable about them. They just carry on continuously all year round so there’s always something to look for. But the primroses, dandelions, snowdrops and daffodils somehow seemed just a bit more beautiful than the camellias in the formal gardens. Spring is coming – you can smell it!