Tag: urban ecology

What happens when the lights go out?

Royal Crescent in a rare peaceful moment

To be honest – apart from the tourist guides – this is not a typical moment in Georgian Bath; or at least not during daylight hours. Half a mile East and you might imagine you’re in Oxford street, London; the same distance to the north and south would see you at the end of the Cotswolds or across the river, deep fingers of countryside and Georgiana separated by large estates of social housing. This particular place, Royal Crescent – and no-one can deny its grace and beauty – is normally crowded with tourists.

We live in a similarly divided cultural world. Beggars and Big Issue sellers rub shoulders with tourists whilst we locals practice arcane navigations to cross the tides of tourists and traverse the city. We hardly know who we are. Anyone who comes here probably has a better idea of their true identity, whether it be Roman legionnaire or Regency Buck; Hello magazine bride-to-be or Emma Woodhouse practicing lip pursing in case they meet someone they fancy. We have as much cultural stability as a seaside resort in August. On Friday afternoons the pavements tremble to the sounds of wheelie suitcases – we call it the Barcelona rumble, and on Sunday afternoons they depart. Mondays are quieter. Speed limits are for the little people who change the sheets, flip burgers on minimum wage and pick up the litter. Yet we locals only have to walk a few hundred yards and pick the right time to find peace. You could throw a stick from Royal Crescent as far as three allotment sites, and walk in ten minutes down Cow Lane – whose sign has been stolen by a Jane Austen trophy hunter – to Victoria park and the Botanical Gardens. And whilst the Kennet and Avon canal towpath is busy for the first mile eastwards from the bus station, walking west along the riverside walk, apart from commuting cyclists and runners. you’ll have abundant time and space to check out the local weeds: well at least I do, and many of them turn out to be gratifyingly rare!

One of the unique joys of Bath is the fact that you can stand almost anywhere and see the countryside up on the surrounding hills. Notwithstanding the worst efforts of the riverside property developers, once you climb upwards by about 75 feet you can look across the grim tenements of the future into North Somerset, Wiltshire and South Gloucestershire. From the riverside the developments look more like bonded warehouses; uniformly dull and bleak and battered by their own architectural whirlwinds.

So let’s turn our attention to the parts of the city centre where the wild has infiltrated, We have otters and even beavers in the river now. Herons, sparrowhawks, peregrines, tawny owls, swifts, swallows, housemartins and the whole gamut of garden birds – although you might have to walk a way to find sparrows and starlings which are scarce. In early summer you can see dace sparkling in the river, and in some of the tributary streams there are signal crayfish which have displaced the locals. On our allotment we have even filmed deer, but more commonly it’s squirrels, badgers, foxes, cats and rats; lots of rats.

Mostly we don’t see the night visitors but we have a trail cam running continuously and we also find lots of characteristic signs of their presence. Last night we got an incredibly lucky shot of one of our resident foxes emerging from behind the polytunnel with a large rat in its mouth. We’ve had three traps set in the same run for two weeks now and never got a sniff of a rat, but the fox knows where they are and can crouch silently until a warm takeaway supper comes along. We have read about foxes predating on rats but this hard evidence was really exciting. Other than the fox, the only other taker for the peanut butter bait was a badger who shook and bashed one of the heavy duty box traps until it sprang shut without yielding the peanut. This almost redeems the foxes from their countryside capers – raiding our chickens when we lived on Severnside.

Aside from mammals, we have dragonflies, damselflies, ivy bees, hoverflies, wasps, spiders, beetles and butterflies all sharing the plot with us and this year we’ll be trapping moths to add to our knowledge of the night shift. You’d never believe the diversity of our wildlife if your only experience of Bath was gained from a weekend shopping expedition on Milsom Street. Our allotment is in the middle of the city and yet we probably have more wild diversity than a chemical drenched arable field in the countryside. You just have to learn to be very quiet and watch.

Here’s a video link of fox v rat- it’s too big to attach here but I hope you enjoy it. Nature red in tooth and claw!

https://photos.app.goo.gl/Kudr5fY5JMB89RXz7

Don’t it always seem to go – that you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone?

Black headed gull – St Ives 1st March 2016

I remember taking this photograph for two reasons; firstly because I was annoyed with myself for not knowing what what this seagull was called but more importantly, as it turned out, because it led me to make a stupidly hubristic promise to myself that I wouldn’t, any more, walk past anything I couldn’t name. With 20/20 retrospective vision I wish I’d left “walk on by” as a heading on my mental spreadsheet but in fact I immediately left the quayside at St Ives to find a bookshop to help end my personal dark age. So I ended up with the worst of all worlds – not knowing the proper names of most plants, birds, fungi, lichens, insects and mammals but feeling very troubled when I failed.

The reason I’m writing this today is that after a talk at the Bath Natural History Society on Tuesday I was chatting to the speaker, Lucy Starling and she wondered aloud where all the black-headed gulls had gone. Back in 2016 by the time I’d figured out what they were; (complicated by the fact that they don’t have black heads at all during the winter but just a grey streak like a question mark behind the ear); I realized that there were dozens if not hundreds of them in Bath, flocking together on the green outside our flat in the mornings. They are lovely little birds – small seagulls – but they have declined so much that they’ve now been listed with an amber warning.

So why has this happened? Well, rather carelessly I attributed this to the theft by commercial foragers of thousands of their eggs from nesting sites on the South coast a few years ago for sale to high end restaurants; which is astonishing but true! But in any case the trend has been towards them living inland, and there are other factors – avian flu, lack of nesting space (the good people of Bath are highly intolerant of gulls, although their bird identification skills are no better than mine were). We have three species in Bath. The principal culprits when it comes to early morning noise, rubbish bag spreading and stealing ice creams would be herring gulls or less likely lesser black backed gulls. Herring gulls too are in decline. We don’t have greater black backed gulls here but they’re the ones with the terrifying eyes that could turn you to stone. They’ve all been affected by climate change; absence of food due to changing farming practices and loss of habitat. So below are – on the left a herring gull (pale grey wings and pink legs) and on the right a lesser black-backed gull (darker grey, almost black with yellow legs).

From my entirely non-scientific survey through the living room window, I’d say that aside from the odd stragglers up and down the river, the large gatherings of black headed gulls have gone, possibly for ever.

Two black-headed gulls chatting on a fence.

I didn’t mention one other contributor to the decline and that’s predation. The photo above was taken across the river from St John’s Church – which houses a pair of peregrine falcons for whom a small gull would barely amount to elevenses.

So just to make a more complete list of urban birds we’d have to add the three gulls; kingfishers near the Royal Mail sorting office; the well known Widcombe herons whose heronry is above the Honda dealership; plus the jackdaws, crows, magpies, and jays representing the corvids and there are cormorants fishing in the river. Then there are blackbirds and pigeons, robins but not, sadly, sparrows or starlings close to us. There are swifts in the summer, with swallows and house-martins and then rarer appearances from the avian odds and sods categories. The red kites don’t seem to cross the river but buzzards are often seen over the allotment. The first night after we moved in, we heard tawny owls calling, but never since – however our neighbour Charlie says he still hears them regularly. All in all – and this is just an off the top of my head list – simply knowing their names has given me enormous pleasure over the years. It creates a feeling of belonging when you know the locals by name.

I’ve written a lot about urban plants on this blog, and when I get the fungi organized I’ll be able to name many more of them. My point in banging on about urban wildlife is that it’s right outside the door and so walking to Sainsbury’s can be as much of a field-trip as a long drive to Cornwall (which we also do regularly of course). Possibly the best place to find wildlife is where you are. Of course I’m not saying that travelling to hotspots isn’t worth it because you’ll never learn more quickly than when you walk with an expert who’s also a good teacher. But an hour’s mild bewilderment followed by a couple of hours of research will drive the message home more. Both is best.

A quick trip to America

A further update to the is it/isn’t it? problem with a tree full of black apples on the allotment site. After a lot of searching online we think we’ve finally nailed it down to the Arkansas Black mainly due to its extraordinary, complex flavour. The perfume of the flesh eaten raw is – as I previously said – like apple and custard in one bite. Today Madame peeled and stewed a small number and they were equally delicious. Just like a Cox, they kept their texture very well and didn’t reduce to a pulp as would a bramley – so they’d be great for a French style open apple tart. The only problem is we can’t find a UK nursery who could provide it on a dwarfing or semi dwarfing rootstock. Madame is going to try growing it from a cutting but apparently it’s hard to do and it would take years to fruit. She could polish up on her grafting skills too! It’s a perfect tree for our frost prone allotment because it will grow in almost any zone, is self fertile and very disease resistant. Plus it stores well and harvests in November. What’s not to like? I could buy it from a nursery in Montana but I don’t think the car would get there.

Stewed Arkansas Black

The allotment in its winter clothes

We’ve been working hard to get the allotment ready for winter and – of course the spring which we hope will follow in due course. All of the water butts are full to overflowing , the pruning of the apples is finished and at the moment we’re mainly preoccupied with renewing paths, weeding and mulching although not all the fruit trees are pruned at this time. We’ve also been gathering strawberry runners to grow on in the greenhouse.

While I was writing yesterday about the urban wildlife that surrounds us I completely forgot to mention that just as we were walking up the road a couple of weeks ago we saw a sparrowhawk – probably a female – dive on a pigeon, which seemed to escape her talons right in front of us. Later we heard her distinctive call.. However, the next morning as we left the house a rather sad and bedraggled pigeon crept out from behind the mini flower garden by the door. It was a completely unexpected joy for us to see a sparrowhawk outside the door, although probably not for the pigeon. We left the bird to its own devices and went on our way.

No finer view of Bath on a frosty December morning?

South Riverside development – not what the PR goons want you to see.

Bath, of course, thrives by stoking a whole cruise liner full of hype. This year it’s Jane Austen but the Georgian builders also get roped in to set the scene (please don’t mention the slave trade) and otherwise we have to make do with the Romans who turned a boggy hot spring into a R&R destination for grubby and probably smelly legionnaires who needed a soak after marching around subduing the natives. We do not talk about the brothels on London Road, the extra marital uses of the Sidney Gardens or, indeed the drinking dens and brothels of Kingsmead. We don’t talk about Bath’s industrial past; the pong of the dyeworks, the pioneering engineering, the digging of the Kennet and Avon canal which – when joined to the Somerset coal canal – provided an easy route for transporting coal from the North Somerset to what William Cobbett called the great wen (London). We don’t talk about the pollution of the river which was probably as bad then as it is today, or the Great Western railway which most of us can’t afford to travel on. We don’t talk about the Somerset and Dorset line (known as the S&D i.e. slow and dirty) or the twin tunnels which were so small in girth that engine drivers and firemen expected to pass out regularly in the carbon monoxide and smoke, praying that they didn’t do it at the same time.

Perhaps I’m being unfair. If you drive into any major European city; in France for example, it’s almost obligatory to pass a few cement works. Drive north from Barcelona and you’ll see an industrial landscape comparable with the finest of Middlesbrough or Wolverhampton – and they don’t brag about it either. But personally I’m glad that I can still walk along the riverside and the canal and find hundreds of interesting plants without the danger (apart from some cyclists) of meeting anyone wearing a voluminous dress and bonnet or a soldier sporting a skirt, hobnailed sandals and shaved legs. Bath is divided by the river into two utterly different psychogeographical regions. North of the river is the posh, Georgian architectural bit where the visitors come, and to the south where the industry used to be, we have student accommodation and the uncontrolled growth of hideously expensive retirement properties which are a very profitable way of extracting value from pension savings – and for anyone contemplating buying one I’d advise that finding a GP, an NHS dentist or an appointment with the NHS Hospital may be the quickest way to lose the rest of your savings. Private care is booming here.

But a quiet, early morning stroll along the riverside path reminds me that nature always manages to make an appearance regardless of the noise and dust of building sites and traffic. I’m a creature of habit and so my walks tend to concentrate on a few areas. If I was trying to impress I suppose I could call the walks transects – which is a natural history word for repeating a walk along a particular route and recording everything I see. When this is done over a period of years, it yields invaluable scientific information about climate change and its effect on wildlife. I can begin to see which unusual plants are the chancers with no chance of setting up home. I could see (but haven’t yet) both otters and beavers in the river and we have filmed mice, rats, deer, badgers, foxes squirrels and cats on our allotment; and I can also see newcomers settling down having found a new niche for themselves. Slow walking could be a thing just as slow cooking has, because everything becomes richer and more engaging as I learn more about the area. The wildlife of an area has a certain “thusness” and directness about it that the muddy pond of mediated experience – (can you see the word media barely hiding in there?) – just can’t match. Mediated Bath is like the worst of takeaway food – it always leaves you malnourished and hungry – but wild Bath is always at hand; in the pavement cracks, in basement walls, in unkempt verges and building sites and instead of scuttling along my walks like a rat, I can walk slowly and savour every moment as a kind of epiphany. So build on – you rubbish architects, greedy developers and landlords. You and your buildings as ephemeral as a hatching mosquito and less deserving of our deference.

As you may have noticed, I’ve been reading a lot about fungi, and it seems to me that if we’re taking the latest science at all seriously, we have to accept that a serious amount of mutuality goes on in nature. Plants and fungi almost universally exchange nutrients to their mutual benefit. Lichens have evolved an even closer togetherness by uniting bacteria and/or algae into an apparently singular life form. Plants rely on insects and larger animals for pollination and seed distribution; swapping pollen for nectar and taking seeds away in paws and fur and droppings. Even apex predators normally tend only to kill and eat when they’re hungry. In fact Nature seems to prefer a situation where every life form gets something out of the arrangement: all of nature except we humans who think we’ve got the right to take it all without regard to the needs of any other creature.

I have a correction – or perhaps an addition to my piece yesterday which mentioned a black apple which I was told was French in origin and called L’Abri. The apple tree on the allotment site matched the description of an American apple called Arkansas Black very closely especially in its perfumed flavour of apple and custard; but today in a bit of further exploration on the National Fruit Collection website – which is brilliant – I came up with a Belgian apple called Abi Noir which looks almost identical to the American is much cheaper – £14 as opposed to a greedy £350 for the bare root tree.

This morning we worked in frost and sunshine on the allotment and it was lovely to be outside in the winter weather. Our son phoned to ask about presents at Christmas and said he’d be happy to buy us a portable moth trap if we’d like it. Well yes we would, rather!! trying not to sound too excited. There’s more wildlife around in city centres than you’d ever imagine. Below are a few photos of bits of the wild that caught my eye as I walked back from the garage, all within sight and sound of the building site across the river. They are, clockwise, an abandoned bird’s nest, the riverside path, the last bloom on a dog rose and the river bathed in mist. If you look carefully at the nest it includes bits of wool, bindweed, insulation mat, grass and twigs. You see, nature is even better than we are at recycling. The nest, by the way, was right next door to the recycling depot.

Charlie’s radical garden

Impatiens taymonii in Charlie’s garden

Before you sigh and turn away for a bit more doomscrolling because I used a bit of latin at the top – be assured that this post is guaranteed to make you happy, so happy that I can’t imagine why I’m not charging you to read it!

So a long time ago we moved to Stoke on Trent to run a small but doomed pottery that lasted all of six months before it fell to earth. We were there at the same time the last bottle kilns were being demolished just down the road at Price’s teapot factory and one of our team was a wonderfully skilled, but recently redundant mouldmaker who’d helped to unpack the last kiln load as the factory shut down. It’s true he had a bit of a drink problem, and once came in from a 48 hour binge and mistakenly cleaned his beloved Triumph 2000 with kitchen scourer but I never met anyone else who could look at a complex sculpture, turning it one way and another and plan exactly how to make a twenty piece plaster mould from it.

Anyway, the local pubs had not then evolved to the point where Madame could drink in the public bar, and we were always directed to the snug where foul language and boy’s banter were banned. The snug in our local sported a lovely Busy Lizzie in a pot. It was huge, and when Madame mentioned what a lovely plant it was the landlady simply picked it up and gave it to her with a big smile. A couple of months later it travelled back to Bristol with us in our overloaded Morris 1000 pickup and it spent the next couple of years following us around in our peripatetic existence. We were often surprised by the kindness of people we hardly knew.

The Busy Lizzie is a member of the fairly large family known as Impatiens, one of which is a bit of a rogue and causes all manner of problems in this country where, since it escaped from gardens in the mid 1800’s has spread rapidly across the country with the help of its explosive seed pods which can fire their contents twenty feet. Its name, of course is Himalayan Balsam. There are four members of the family listed in my go-to list of British and Irish wildflowers, and two of them grow on the Kennet and Avon canal – on the left Orange Balsam and on the right Himalayan Balsam – the plant that the Daily Express loves to hate.

There’s another member of the family charmingly known as Touch me not Balsam that’s much rarer and only a couple of days ago I was wondering how I could lure Madame into the campervan for a quick trip to mid-Wales where it grows wild. I claim not to be a trainspotter but I can confess to getting a bit over obsessed with photographing whole families of plants. There’s another family I’ve got (Madame might say) overfamiliar with; they’re the Fleabanes and so far I’ve found four of them growing locally but five and six are harder to find.

So with this in mind, I must introduce our friend Charlie who is a taxonomist (but I forgive him), a retired professor, no less, who has worked in some very high-profile positions which I won’t mention to protect his privacy. He lives about four doors down from us and we meet up weekly to chat and for Madame to blag plants from his unusual garden. Charlie and I share a bit of a passion for the plants that eke out an existence on the walls and pavements and waste ground that surrounds us in Bath. They have a classification all of their own; ruderals, aliens and survivors – like most of our neighbours here. In fact we agreed yesterday that it would be fun to work together on as comprehensive a list of local bruisers as we can manage given our arthritic knees and hips. I’m getting used to people stopping and asking if I’m alright as I struggle to stand after getting down and dirty with my phone, photographing a pavement specimen.

There are rules about recording plants on the national database, but plants rarely pay any attention to rules and so seeds attach themselves to car tyres and shoes and travel distances from their proper places before dropping off and starting a new life on the streets. Other seeds blow in on the wind and fall out of window boxes or get a new start in life outside a pub where someone had too much to drink and – need I continue? The tomato is a favourite addition to the local flora. The rules are quite clear. “Thou shalt not record a plant growing in a garden.” By chance both Charlie and I were inspired in the last few weeks by reading Trevor Dines new book “Urban Plants” which is one of the few botanical textbooks either of us have read from cover to cover and I’ve also been reading Clive Stace and Michael Crawley’s “Alien Plants” , and we both came to the same conclusion – that the word “wild” is so poorly defined as to be almost impossible to use. Field botanists have a whole lexicon to separate different classes of wildness, but gardens – especially Charlie’s garden – present some proper challenges.

My Mum would carry a large and larcenous handbag marked swag in which she would carry away thumb and finger cuttings of any plants she liked without regard for their rightful owners. Charlie’s garden does the same but with an international range, which makes it a lovely place to sit and drink tea,or coffee and yesterday – tragically – I spotted two of my hoped for “wild” flowers growing right in front of me. The first, which is the photograph at the top of this post, turned out not to be the hoped for Touch-me-not balsam but the Chinese species daymonii which is a proper garden plant that shouldn’t be recorded because it doesn’t grow in the wild and hasn’t been recorded even as a garden chuckout survivor in this country. But isn’t it beautiful? such lovely markings on the petals and a worthy posh cousin to the others. Good news, then, the Mid Wales trip is still on but don’t tell Madame.

However the next plant to catch my eye was a nice specimen of Tall Fleabane (Fleabane number five) which has never been recorded close to Bath and, in any case was growing in a pot. But at least I’ve photographed it and I’ll keep it for reference until I find a genuine wild version.

Tall Fleabane in Charlie’s garden.
Buckwheat,

There was also a rather nice Buckwheat plant which could easily have blown in on the wind, or been hiding in some garden compost – again not one for the record, but then – just as we were leaving – my eye caught a very small member of the carrot family which I vaguely remembered because I’d seen it twice before, growing in a newly planted municipal border and again wild near a stream south of Bath. It was almost hidden below its more showy neighbours but I had to check it out and when I did it brilliantly demonstrated the dilemma for those of us who like to make records. Here it was growing just inside a garden – so it shouldn’t be recorded – but on the other hand it’s hard to imagine why Charlie would have sown it deliberately in such an unsuitable position. The plant is Fools’ parsley and it’s short, not remotely beautiful (apart from to me) and extremely poisonous. One for the record then because I’ll call it a weed – and thanks for the coffee Charlie. See you next week.

Fools Parsley -Aethusa cynapium –poisonous!

Railway sidings, docksides, canals? I’m taken back into the past.

It’s a Mullein – can’t officially say which one until it’s been verified, but our local Country Recorder says that if I’m right it would be a great find.

I’m indebted to Clive Stace and Michael Crawley’s marvellous book “Alien Plants” for much of the historical perspective in what follows.

I don’t suppose anyone knows what a Lamp Boy did, getting on for a century ago; but back in the age of steam it was what we now call a gateway job into being a railway worker. Much of the menial and repetitive work on the railway was done by young people who would, today, be described as children. My dad – born in 1916, left school at 14 and among his first jobs he was a lamp boy. After a series of disastrous railway accidents; safety measures became part of the life-blood of the industry. I remember my Dad sitting at the dining table memorising every signal between Bristol and London or Derby (he changed regions several times). So polishing the lamps and lenses, replenishing the oil and trimming the wicks of the red and white lamps that were mounted front and rear of every train and all the points and signals across the country was the beginning of many a career on the railways; a high status job back in the day.

But of course there were plenty of other menial jobs that occupied young men and kept the country in profit in all our colonial pomp. International trade brought ships and their cargoes from around the world and sailors needed feeding. Most cargo ships carried supplies of food “on the hoof” as it were. Cattle, chickens and such like were often kept on ships and slaughtered to feed crews (or perhaps just the officers) on long journeys. The ships were loaded with fodder before they left and by the time they returned across the oceans they needed to be restocked with grain, hay and straw which, in those days before farm machinery, carried their burden of weed seeds back from abroad. When these ships docked – in Bristol, for instance, they were unloaded and then the holds were swept and all the manure was removed to the dockside where it would be sold off to local farms. The cargo would be loaded onto wagons or railway trucks and narrow boats for transportation to further places. The dockside, canal and railway sidings were a happy hunting ground for botanists like James White. These days we still find unexpected plants which are spread by passing lorries on roadside verges which, it seems, are especially attractive to salt-loving stowaways.

So drawing all those threads together we have James White publishing his invaluable 1912 book “The Bristol Flora” after hunting for all those casuals in the places they were spilled or blown; and one of the biggest railway sidings in Bristol was at St Phillips Marsh where my Dad polished his first lamps before a long career with the Great Western and London Midland and Scottish – still separate companies in those days. For all I know, he may have stepped over my plant or one of its nine cousins as he crossed the lines at work as a child. He once told me about a mass migration of rats from the stables when he said they were so many it felt like a moving sea. Freight trains were loaded at the dockside and passed through the sidings which were almost alongside the Feeder Canal which connected via a navigation section along the River Avon, into the Kennet and Avon canal flowing east towards London past our flat and just up the road from where the plant, mentioned by White, is (possibly) now growing over a century later.

So is my solitary plant a sighting or a history lesson? I like to think it’s both. Even so-called scientific disciplines are set within a broader culture

If you were to do a word search on this blog for “canal” (please feel free, it’s great fun) you would find many mentions of the Kennet and Avon because it’s now a significant part of the life of the Potwell Inn. We walk one section of the bank at least once a week and it never fails to deliver plants that I’ve not seen before. Some of them are medicinal herbs, probably planted by boaters in the past, who had little access to medical care. There is the usual brigade of thugs, vagabonds and chancers brought in by the wind, by birds, on the tyres of push bikes and the boots of generations of walkers. Some of them flower a couple of times and move on, or die in an unsuitable environment. Some set up permanent residence and some – Himalayan Balsam for instance – think to themselves whoopee! and raise families of thousands and tens of thousands. Lazy fly tipping by overtidy gardeners has led to Elijah’s revenge and we are whipped with scorpions. Then there are obvious garden escapes and plenty of native plants that just are – in all their beauty.

Then of course plants associate with insects and many other forms of wildlife and what we get – passing intact through many industrial, post-industrial and suburban areas are linear nature reserves of real significance. Abandoned railway lines; derelict docksides; old gasworks (too expensive to develop); post industrial sites polluted with heavy metals and land rendered unusable through flooding – they’re not pretty but in this age of industrial farming they probably furnish many of the richest wildlife habitats we can enjoy. Forget the SUV – you can probably walk out of your front door and abandon yourself to the wild in a walk of a couple of miles.

The lowdown on city centre streetlife

A local blogger posted a couple of pictures today rather like the ones above except that the left hand picture showed a pavement lined and ennobled by plants and the right hand saw the same picture with all the plant life taken out by the moaners and scrapers employed to humour tidy minded citizens. These two plants are respectively Knotgrass and Procumbent Yellow Sorrel, both eking out a living barely two centimetres above the pavement and inconspicuous with it – like all successful squatters; and you know how it is when someone passes a deeply upsetting remark without even realizing they’re being annoying. Like one of our neighbours who thought I’d be impressed by his decision to vote Reform in the recent election. I don’t think our blogger – one I follow and who is normally very sensible – thought for a moment that anyone would disagree with his settled opinion that “weeds” make the pavement look bad and upset the tourists. But urban plants are fascinating and I’d venture that they’ll get even more fascinating as the climate heats up and we all start to wonder what will survive global climate change. What lives on air, dust and heat ? What is it in their DNA that makes them such great survivors, and can we borrow a bit of it? Here are some more weeds.

So – left to right, Rue Leaved Saxifrage, Coltsfoot and the old Charles Street Telephone Exchange – all growing together. So tell me which of these three is the ugliest thing you’ve ever seen? I’m all for uprooting the building which was built facing the end of a lovely Georgian street under crown privilege and therefore bypassing planning regulations. Our backyard – an old builders yard – featured 47 species of weed last time I counted. Every year a council employee comes along the street scraping them all off – he used to spray with glyphosate; then they tried rocksalt and now it’s down to a sharp hoe. For the sake of setting the record straight, the plants all regrow in roughly the same time whatever the council do. In Oxford a rogue urban botany group started to label the “weeds” so that passers-by could see that they had names and often uses too. Brilliant idea but I daresay by now they’re all banged up in prison for discussing writing plant labels on a zoom call intercepted by GCHQ.

Of course you might find the mean streets of central Bath so upsetting that you can only traverse them by blotting out the noise with headphones and adopting that curious mobile phone walk, head down with the phone held out ahead like the prow of a ship breasting hostile waves. The other day we were in Great Stanhope Street and we saw a Lesser Black Backed gull attempting to swallow a rat whole, shaking it around to try and align it into a suitable position; an operation which caused the rat’s tail to wave around rather upsettingly in the sunshine. On the same morning we saw a pair of pigeon’s feet on the pavement – pretty clearly the remains of the local Peregrine Falcon’s recent meal finished off by a fox or a carrion crow.

Throw away the mobile distraction unit along with the headphones and you too could enjoy nature red in tooth and claw; share the outrageous joy of the carousing teenagers on the green and talk to the flowers whose worldly experience as survivors exceeds all expectations. The countryside isn’t a nature reserve somewhere outside the city boundary, nature is right here and we’re part of it.

Sea Spleenwort – living off Pepsi can, crisp packet, dog ends and McDonalds tray.
NB – no sea!

An old friend – the Widcombe Heron

Not being a birder of any merit, I couldn’t tell you which of the Widcombe herons this is. There’s a substantial heronry just up the road from Prior Park nursery and it’s not unusual to see one anywhere along the Kennet and Avon Canal between Deep Lock and – let’s say – Dundas aqueduct. I’ve never forgotten seeing my first heron take off unexpectedly from just behind a hedge. My heart almost froze as it cranked itself into the air like a pterodactyl entering my world through some kind of worm hole into the past. Today’s creature was less impressive as it perched on the rope bumper waiting for us to leave and toppled into the canal after a half-hearted attempt to fly away. Later it flew away down the canal in that nonchalant way that we humans adopt when we’ve done something really stupid.

I think Madame and me both needed a break from weeding on the allotment – I mean I quite enjoy hand weeding but hour after hour of its punishing effect on our backs and knees makes the prospect of a straightforward walk all the more attractive. This particular walk is one we’ve done many times because we developed it during the COVID lockdown; a circular walk of almost exactly 10,000 steps using the river and the canal towpaths and passing through Sydney Gardens and Henrietta Park and back through Widcombe.

The advantage of repeatedly following the same walk is the way we get to know the plants and birds. I suppose you could over-egg it by calling it a transect but it’s really much more informal than that and we include sinking boats among our objects of interest along the way. The regular floods we’ve been experiencing wreak havoc with moored boats which – if their mooring lines are too short – turn turtle and sink. Here’s one from September 2022

-and the same boat today:

You may notice that the Buddleia has now been joined by a big group of Purple Loosestrife and the wreck is gradually turning into a small nature reserve as the cabin roof gradually rots away. On the far side of the bridge pier a sunken narrow boat rests dangerously beneath the surface, the roof rail with which it was obviously hitched has torn off and is all that’s now visible except for a big yellow buoy to warn passing boat traffic. At least it makes a pleasant change from stolen pushbikes and supermarket trolleys, but you have to wonder whether there’s a rusting fuel tank hidden inside, waiting to leak into the already polluted river. It costs thousands of pounds to remove these sunken boats.

I was on the lookout for a Soapwort that usually shows itself on the canalside, but it was a tad too early I think. I was so absorbed in photographing narrowboats that I passed a site where Marsh Figwort grows. I’ve always wondered where the name Figwort comes from and I’m indebted to my new favourite book for telling me that figs is one of the names the herbalists gave to piles – which judging from the herbals was an extremely common affliction in the past.

Our last find was a group of Musk Mallow growing in a little wildflower area at the end of Widcombe High Street. Unlike many such little created reserves, this one has nothing but native plants in it, and they seem to be enjoying themselves. I think they’re really beautiful.

You know the one – where the princess kisses a frog ….

Coltsfoot again – in the centre of Bath

It’s been a while, I know, but following the demolition of the Avon Street car park, many of us have wondered which building will take its place as the ugliest and most ill-advised building in Bath, and I’m delighted to announce that the top place (of my long list) goes to the old telephone exchange on the corner of Monmouth Street and Princes Street, built in the days when Crown buildings were not subject to planning permission. It’s always been a bit of a shady place as to its purposes, and it’s about to be anointed as Bath’s new police station – plus ĉa change etc.

Anyway, we were in the centre of town yesterday and as we passed the building I noticed this redemptive clump of Coltsfoot growing through the cracks in the neglected paving. As ever, Nature is quick to reclaim any neglected spot and I suppose we should record and enjoy this brief moment before it’s designated as a weed and summarily removed. Bath deserves its John Clare and I’m holding the place open until somebody better qualified turns up to celebrate the invisible residents of the city. In 2020, during the lockdown, I listed 26 wild plants growing in and around our car park – once a builders yard – and there are probably as many again waiting for someone to notice.

I know I write a lot about Cornwall and Wales and their wildflowers; but when push comes to shove there’s plenty going on in our own backyard – it’s just that the sunsets aren’t as good! As it happens it’s been a bumper year for Coltsfoot now I’ve got my eye in for likely spots. Their technical name is “ruderal” which means, well …… rude I suppose, in the sense of unkempt rather than wild; neglected rather than protected, and scarred rather than ploughed or dug. It’s the botanical equivalent of the favela or the refugee camp and it’s a great environment for dodgy characters to melt into the background. We even had a Sea Spleenwort hiding on the basement wall of the Guildhall – all washed up I suppose.

We’ve got a few guerilla gardeners in our neighbourhood too. Last summer we put some large compost filled pots outside the block and planted them up. This spring we see that invisible hands have planted tulip bulbs and even a bay cutting which seems to tolerate the extreme environment. The same invisible hands watered the pots when we were away in the campervan. Every year a solitary council employee hacks off the pavement squatters and sprinkles rock salt over the remains. Every year they return undiminished and sing their colourful madrigals to those with ears to hear and eyes to see them. It’s a dog eat dog existence for the rough sleepers of the plant world, but they seem miraculously to get by, and until you learn to distinguish one from t’other you won’t be able to understand their colorful histories. Railway trucks loaded with grain, bird seed imports, wool, and poorly tended compost heaps; even winter salted roads and lorry tyres all add their pennyworth to the diversity of the neglected environment. Old factories, mills and dyeworks cast off their workforce and their raw materials. These plants are evolutionary heroes, rapidly adapting to the new, often tricky places, where their better heeled cousins deign to set up home; on slag heaps, coal tips and mineworks; quarries, gasworks, docksides and railway sidings not to mention empty buildings like the old telephone exchange. Sadly, no-one is going to block the road marching for Whitlowgrass or Wall Barley, but they’re all part of the vast interconnected network of living things we call Nature – capitalizing the word although we have no idea if it really is a thing at all.

Still, we felt blessed by the Coltsfoot yesterday and celebrated with a pint at the Grapes; two old people drawing energy and hope from the crowd of young bar staff beginning their shift. We wish them the greatest happiness knowing, (as they have yet to discover), that in the end we’re all pavement dwellers.

Rue Leaved Saxifrage growing on the telephone exchange wall

Rewilding the pavement

North Somerset is a very wildlife rich county. We can easily walk to half a dozen outstandingly diverse habitats which – because we have both a river and a canal – reach like green fingers to the centre of the city. Otters are often seen within a quarter of a mile of our flat, and in summer we can lean over the riverside and see Dace swimming in the shallows. It’s a joy. The tourist guide writers love to swoon over the honey coloured stone at sunset and we not only have parks but also a botanical garden, riverside walks and a cycle path linking us with Bristol and into the National Network that could take you to London on a bike or in a kayak. I don’t want to oversell the beauties because we’re already stuffed with tourists but living in a beautiful city with a local authority which has declared the environmental emergency feels like a step in the right direction.

This year – finally – the City Council took the brave decision to stop spraying our streets and pavements with Glyphosate. The policy seems to have met with less resistance than the clean air zone – or CAZ -which has provoked venomous opposition from those who think parking their SUV’s outside on the pavement next to their favourite shop is some kind of human right. The pollution here has not only been persistent, it’s been illegal and the Council have struggled to impose a policy that would actually work. Exempting all private cars including the Range Rovers and Discoveries was a sop to the most vocal opponents but the policy is working – although much more slowly than it might have done. The providential closure of a major HGV route through the centre of Bath during bridge repairs may have had a lot to do with the results so far.

The routine spraying of pavements was a different issue. Through traffic has been a problem for more than fifty years, but the removal of any plants from the pavements seems to be a hangover from another age; an age in which weeds were treated as an enemy that needed to be vanquished every year – as if the pavements were a war zone. The consequences of weeds were never clearly specified but unknown horrors such as pensioners tripping over were gravely hinted at. In truth, generations of municipal grounds people (I was one of them) were raised within the ancient hostilities and killing weeds gave a kind of atavistic pleasure.

So this is the first year of the new policy and we’re just beginning to see the results. Truth to tell, Glyphosate is a rubbish weedkiller in any case because more and more so-called weeds are developing resistance to it. The plants just died back and played possum for a month or two and then sprang into new life as if nothing had happened. The consequences for the rest of us were less benign, and rivers and their associated water tables have been saturated with poison which has been finding its way into our water supplies and into us. Bayer/Monsanto will claim it’s all a myth but then – they would, wouldn’t they?

The photos at the top could not have been taken on the same day and month in any year within the last decades because by now they would have gone. So it’s a complete joy to report all of these modest beauties growing within fifteen paces of our front door. There are many more, but the street is lined with Mexican Fleabane – that’s the pretty daisy looking plant. Then there’s Canadian Fleabane growing rapidly, Ivy Leaved Toadflax, Broad Leaved Plantain, Cat’s Ear, Smooth Sows’ Ear, Prickly Sows’ Ear, Dandelion, Wall Lettuce, Nipplewort, and Pineapple Weed. There’s Annual Meadow Grass and Wall Barley. At the back there’s Herb Robert, Great Lettuce and many other species. I suppose it was a matter of mindset rather than moral deficiency that kept us killing them off every year – culture eats strategy for breakfast after all and in time, I hope, more and more people will come to appreciate these miniature nature reserves on our doorsteps – after all it’s faintly miraculous that anything can survive in this hot, dry, waterless and polluted hostile environment. It’s a tribute to the persistence and adaptability of nature that these ancient residents and relative newcomers can emerge, seemingly from nowhere, miles from their natural habitats in fields and hedgerows.