Darkness all day

 

The first herb-robert flower is out – a white one as they all are in the garden. The medlar is flowering too, though there are still many unopened buds.

The Waste, Mice & Red and Volepasture are all grass stalk verticals like torrential green rain.

A queen hornet plunged into the grass behind Bramble Hedge.

In the hottest part of the day a moth flew round the Waste and the Square Metre.  I am pretty certain it was a small yellow underwing (Panemeria tenebrata) and, as the larvae feed on mouse-ear chickweed, there is plenty to attract it to Emthree.

This small yellow underwing has a wonderful scientific name, especially the 'tenebrata' part.  This is a word that reverberates like rasgueado played on a theorbo.  Our English equivalents like 'dark' and 'shadowy' have a soft sound recalling the oblivion of night, sleep or death, but 'tenebrata' gives simple blackness a complex, vibrant energy like that of the dark matter that pervades the universe (so they say). Use of this word makes darkness seem far from deadness; it denotes a living darkness full of mysterious sound and movement.

The generic name, Panemeria, means 'all day long' so Panemeria tenebrata can signify darkness all day, an apocalyptic vision encrypted in this small moth whose future, like that of so many invertebrates, is far from secure.

As St Augustine said quae peccato tenebrata non est (which sin is not dark) and I am sure he would have called trashing the planet a sin.

I know the real reason for the generic name is that the moth is day-flying and that  'tenebrata' refers to the dark shading of the forewings.  Nevertheless ....

May Day + 1

Really a quite flowery scene today. The forget-me-nots are at their best and there are about a dozen spikes of bugle, now well distributed from their original 2004 beachhead by Purbeck Slab. The photo shows those next to the fox poo - beauty and the beast.

In the yellow department there are some creeping buttercup and dandelion flowers, though the latter shut towards evening.

The sorrel stems are beginning to up-wind rapidly now and sweet vernal grass continues to advance towards anthesis.

It is amazing how quickly small plants can be overpowered during this May growth surge and I like watching the cat’s-ear rosettes flattening the surrounding vegetation like greedy green wide-armed starfish.

As it is the beginning of May I made the first cut of Submespilus Assart South, initially with scissors, then by hand-grazing. It reminded me of a remark on lawns by Timothy Morton in Ecology without Nature: “They are just a horizontal, mass-produced version of the wildernesses people visit to find peace and quiet and a sense of abstract nature.” He had previously written that “Wilderness can only exist as a reserve of unexploited capital.” Thus a lawn, as a kind of Mortonian wilderness, is a reserve of unexploited capital as the developers who are building houses on the lawns in people’s large back gardens have realised.

Metre as a mind mirror

I have read that some prefer to describe things from life, at the scene, while others like to recollect and write later, when back at home after am event.

Today I am doing the latter, recalling the choir of pink and blue forget-me-not flowers, the yellow of the dandelions, the violet-blue bugle pagodas and the white tipped sprays of bittercress.  In Medlar wood there is the drooping purple green hood of a wild arum (or cuckoopint).

As Timothy Morton (2007) says "Some nature writers think that they are receiving a direct transmission from nature, when in fact they are watching a mirror of the mind."

Morton, T. (2007)  Ecology without Nature.  Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics.  Harvard University Press, Cambridge Massachusetts and London, England

April notes

22 April 2008. There is a flower on a third dandelion plant now.

There are many wrinkled ants running about on the Lyon Stone and they appear to be building an earth particle nest in front of it, something I have not observed them doing before.

24 April 2008. Everything is doing well as the season advances. Springwatch (BBC TV) rang up today and want to re-show last year's session at Emthree and take the window box to Bill Oddie's garden in London.

Spikes of sweet vernal grass are starting to appear and are moving towards anthesis very quickly. The red campion in Submespilus Assart South has one, two, three four open flowers.

I am still struggling with the male ferns (Dryopteris spp.) and need to do more work on distinguishing D. filix-mas from D. affinis - all the fern books seem very misleading.

There are several tiny, self-sown forget-me-nots in flower a short distance from the original plant and I wonder why they are so small compared with their parent: not fertilised by snail juice and bird poo washing over the edge of Butterfly Rock maybe.

25 April 2008. Every day Emthree gets greener and greener and more grassy looking.

I have rediscovered the fleabane plant, but its first leaves are quite a long way from where they were last year, having travelled to the north east of Onelitre Pond, whereas last year it grew to the south of this water body.

The third year bramble - primocane, floricane 1, floricane 2 - will flower soon, well ahead of last year's floricanes.

Midsummer Pond is full of mosquito larvae and the wrinkled ants are ferreting about on Lyon Rock again.

26 April 2008. A lovely spring day. The creeping buttercup on Submespilus Assart North has an opened flower and a dandelion, mirabile dictu, is blooming in a very shady spot on the north side of Medlar Wood demonstrating how at least some dandelion microspecies will grow successfully in low light conditions.

Ants were hustling about on Lyon Rock again, but as soon as I come on the scene they disappear. They are definitely interested in the fox's poo, but just clamber about on it like mountaineers rather than searching for something to eat.

The red campion in The Waste is sending up what looks very much like a flowering stem. There seem to be two forms of this plant: one that is fairly bushy and another, often paler green, that sends up solitary, upright flowering shoots.

I think my tiny, rabbit-bitten holly seedling in The Waste going to survive as it has produced some tiny, toffee-green blimps, new buds near the shoot tip.

28 April 2008. I am beginning to believe we have only one scaly male firm, at the western end of Medlar Wood. The other three have much less of a golden cast as they unfrond and are probably Dryopteris filix-mas. But if so the books are wildly wrong.

I pinched off one of the shoot tips of the perforate St John's wort today as the plant is supposed to contain red juice called, in Germany, Balder's blood. It does not have red juice, only the normal, greenish sap. However, I did find a larva of the St John's wort beetle Chrysolina hyperici on top of one of the shoots, so the species has overwintered successfully (I found one adult beetle in Emthree last May).

There is a young plant in Great Plantain Desert which looks like hoary willowherb (Epilobium parviflorum) while halfway along North Wall in Mice & Red there are a couple of leaves that look like betony (Stachys officinalis), which would be quite a turn up (but it might be leggy ragwort).

The rabbit-bitten holly in The Waste is unquestionably producing new leaves. I am very pleased about this as I thought I had lost it.

Ecomimetic kitsch

The first dandelion flower came out yesterday - a veritable sun, an Apollo of a flower, heaven fallen to the grass. It moves me to write what Timothy Morton would probably describe as ecomimetic kitsch. Dandelions may often be regarded as weeds, but they are the opposite of a problem in Emthree. And they have an escort of dainty white wavy bittercress. Two salads together. Today I am a dandelion.

Scarce leaf beetle drowns

The buds on the ash and oak saplings are breaking now: the first a smoky ginger, the second rich red.

Planet Terracotta, which is full of water again after heavy overnight rain, operates as a good beetle trap.  There were two species today, one - the scarce leaf beetle, Longitarsus dorsalis - is regarded as Nationally Scarce (Notable B), though I seem to come across it fairly frequently.  The beetle is one of many a ragwort-eaters and there is an excellent account of the plant and its insect associates on the Buglife website here.

Brer fox's return

Another cold. wet day but there is now a pretty display of blue and pink flowers from the field forget-me-not (Myosotis arvensis).

One of the buds on last year's seedling dandelions to the west of Butterfly Rock is showing yellow and should be fully open tomorrow.  The flower stalks extend very quickly once they decide to go, which must help to reduce the extent to which they are grazed, especially as after flowering they lie flat on the ground again until the seeds are ripe.  This will be the first Emthree dandelion to flower this year and they are behind those in the Windowbox project where the microclimate appears much harsher, with the soil often frozen right through.

On Lion Rock there is a large fox poo, the first I have seen in Emthree.  It will be interesting to witness it dwindle in its own sweet way and to try and discover what insects might be attracted to it.

The silver sand, after rain, has settled down to a dull, damp mound - smooth and featureless.  Planet Terracotta once again has a small pool of water: an intermittent rather than a temporary water body.

Ragwort on an April morning

An early visit to Emthree on a bright April morning - everything looks in great shape. 

I have not cut Submespilus Assart South yet this year because the sward has been growing so slowly.  However, I will make the first cut on May Day, then continue on a monthly basis until growth stops in late autumn or winter.  Submespilus Assart North will be left to turn into a hayfield and I will make a judgement on when to cut it (probably late July or early August).

It is quite noticeable that our ragwort plants grow particularly vigorously early in the year and they currently look like so many bunches of curly kale resting on the ground.  This vigour gives them a head start and considerable competitive advantage over other plants.  Thank heavens I don't suffer from ragwort hysteria but look forward to their summer flowering and all the insect life this will foster.

As a society our perception of biodiversity as being "a good thing", looks insincere when we are prepared to condemn a native plant and all its associates, a plant with which we have lived ever since our arrival in these islands, but apparently cannot do so any longer.

Hoverflies and sand heaps

With the arrival of warmer weather insects have once again come into their own.  Today there were many hoverflies, like the Syrphus ribesii in the toppicture above, sunning themselves and nectaring on the diminutive flowers of wavy bittercress.  Another hoverfly, Melanostoma scalare, was also common these plants and a bee fly, Bombylius major, also visited them briefly.  The flowers are so tiny one would not imagine they held significant amounts of nectar or pollen.

I  bought a packet of silver sand and unloaded it on the western branch of Troy Track - I saw a man on television doing this for the benefit of mining bees and other insects.  It will also be interesting to see how it develops both in terms of fauna and flora.

The Rabbit, the cat and the fox

Today as I sat peacefully contemplating a red campion flower in the spring sunshine, there was a commotion in the bushes behind the Square Metre.  Then out rushed our cat, Spooky, with a young rabbit firmly clamped in his chops.  He ran full tilt through Medlar Wood closely followed by a fine red fox.  When the fox nearly had him the cat dropped the rabbit, which lay twitching on the ground and cat and fox vanished into the neighbour's garden.

I was inspecting the rabbit through my binoculars when the fox sneaked back and clamped his teeth firmly round the rabbit's midriff.  Suddenly he became aware of me and, with his head lowered he looked at me with brown eyes shining from his foxy face in a way that only wild animals can; a baleful half fear, half aggression stare.  Then he was off with his dinner, his smart black legs trotting back through the hedge.

Another milestone

On Monday I was seventy. I feel quite pleased that I have made it to my threescore years and ten, but otherwise not much different. I recall my thirteenth birthday and trying to feel different then, but I didn't, nor did I feel different on my 21st. Perhaps this just demonstrates how artificial these milestones are: I rather envy those people who have not counted the years and do not know how old they are. I went down to the Square Metre of course and told it that it was my birthday, but the earth did not shake, it just continued to sit there in its annoying March way. February and March are always the dullest months with the least movement - starvation months when grass and flowers are in short supply and it seems always to be cold. The picture is taken from the place I sit and the fabric on the right hand side is part of my jacket - the shadowy observer altering things like a quantum ghost.

First flowers in 2008

Fittingly for the month when spring begins, two flowers have come out in Emthree. The white ones are wavy bittercress (Cardamine flexuosa) - the whole plant makes a good salad. The other is a half-opened creeping buttercup (Ranunculus repens). This plant is a common weed and often grows in thick masses in damp spots, but it does not seem to like it much in Emthree and usually does not do well. It mostly grows on the earth, but there is one plant trailing across the water in Midsummer Pond like an aquatic.

Yellow Meadow Ants (Lasius flavus) & friends

Today I prised up Purbeck Slab, a piece of local limestone brought home many years ago from Brightling a few miles west. It was gradually being covered by vegetation moving in from the sides, so I thought if I lifted it up and put it down again it could spend another four and a half years settling.

Underneath there was a colony of yellow meadow ants - not a mound building tribe in this case. The pictures show, from bottom to top, an ant with what looks like a pupa, a Cyphoderus springtail (probably Cyphoderus albinus) a tiny, fast running species almost always found in ants' nests and another very pale springtail that looks pretty subterranean.

These creatures give me an excuse to quote a passage about meadow ants from Charles Elton's splendid book The Pattern of Animal Communities (Chapman and Hall Ltd, London, 1966): “The yellow ant survives ... quite well in subterranean nests that do not have mounds accumulated above them .... The population of workers in a nest may be anything between 2000 and nearly 25,000 .... This dense army .... is engaged both in nest duties (which include transport of soil on to the mounds, tending young and such things as licking the eggs of aphids to keep them healthy for the later planting on roots), and in travelling along tunnels within a territory beneath the turf to collect food for the nest. Various small preys are captured including some of the aphid species that are farmed on the roots of plants. On one small patch about 20 yards across, in a mixture of open and meadow within the shelter of trees, a dense mixture of Lasius flavus and L. niger nest populations were found by Pontin to be farming 16 species of aphids and one coccid on the roots of various limestone grasses and herbs. At Silwood Park the mound-making populations were farming about 7 kinds of aphids on roots of 4 species of grass and 1 composite.”

Fern eggs

The 'eggs' at the base of one of the golden-scaled male ferns (Dryopteris affinis) are already swelling, though they will not unfurl into fronds until well after those of the the evergreen male fern (Dryopteris felix-mas) which also grows in Medlar Wood.

Two new insects today from the square metre itself: the fly Heteromyza rotundicornis and the rove beetle Anotylus rugosus. It really is spring in winter.

Map of the project area

People have, from time to time, asked for a map of the Square Metre and its surrounds, including all the names that I have given the various places. So here it is (I think it looks like a Jamie Oliver recipe page). The original square is marked in yellow and the 'penumbra' stretches more or less as far as Troy Track. The part to the west was added for a second project, now defunct, but I keep it going because I can manage to do so. Medlar Wood, under a large medlar tree, more or less looks after itself, but I am interested in what goes on there as it is in shade for much of the day. I may, from time time, try to make improvements to this map (which is only roughly in scale).

Mystery seedling

While managing Bittercress Heath today, I discovered a small shrubby plant that I have not noticed before growing among the heathers. It looks a bit like privet or periwinkle, but I don' think it is either of these. The leaf edges have some very slight crimps, so it could be a Hebe but I am not holding my breath. Whatever it is, I suspect it is not a native British plant.