We have now had two weeks of frost at night, with the temperature falling, at the coldest, to -8 Celsius. Nine days ago it snowed and, while the temperature is now rising towards the seasonal normal, there is still much of the white stuff on the ground.
Weak December sunshine from a washed out sky. There have been one or two frosts, but it is generally mild.
Emthree, in the open areas, has a covering of densely matted grass and I have started reducing this with a small pair of shears so that it does not prevent weaker plants from coming through.
Midsummer Pond is full again after some heavy rain during the week and the ground is getting squelchy with mud underfoot.
Despite the now decidedly autumnal weather, there is still plenty to enjoy in Emthree. After a bit of sifting among dead leaves and general detritus, I found a few fallen box leaves colonised by the microfungus Sesquicillium buxi, a whitish powdering on the underside of the leaf:
The St. John's Wort plants have many mines of the tiny hypericum pigmy moth (Ectoedemia septembrella). It seems quite common in Emthree, and practically every leaf in the picture below appears to occupied.
Although it has turned quite cold and grey, there is still plenty to stimulate the imagination and I cannot agree with Thomas Hood:
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member--
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds,
November!
I am warm and cheerful; at least some of my members are comfortable; insect life is at a low ebb but there are plenty of fruits, birds and even a few flowers.
Yesterday I was gazing (for no good reason) at the bilateral chains of heath speedwell (Veronica officinalis) leaves that spread across the Square Metre. They seem to stand out at this time of year as the grass dies back.
Then on one leaf I noticed a dark track along the left hand edge. This turned out to be a mine made by a larva of the fly Phytomyza crassiseta. I once found an adult of this species in Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex, but this would appear to be a first record for the species in East Sussex.
The JNC database list 11 species associated with this plant, but it is extremely unlikely that all of those would occur in Emthree. I'll keep looking though, in case I can find some more and there is also a microfungus associated with this plant.
I also gathered up some of the medlars and have put them in a flower pot to see if they attract anything, animal or vegetable. Today there was one female winter gnat (Trichocera) resting inside the pot, possibly interested in the fruit.
Coda
So much of each day is taken up with small things.
I watch a pen gliding over paper leaving its black, twisted trails like drawings of leaf mines. These word trails represent some sort of reality but only a partial account of what goes on in the brain.
The luminous multichrome internal fantasia that never ceases while we are awake cannot be replicated, or even approximated, in words. Words are a faint music heard from the distant mountains of the nervous system, the Sierra Nervosa. So much of what we feel and experience will never be expressed.
Emthree is scattered with fallen leaves: yellow hornbeam, brown oak and sallow, pink spindle. I am starting to visit more regularly and have been looking for microfungi, mines and galls on the dead leaves, but have not found much yet.
Still, I can tidy the area by picking up a small boxful of leaves and then have the pleasure of sorting through them, lens in hand, in the warmth of the sitting room.
I have just read (at one sitting) Peter Medawar's The Limitations of Science published in 1984. He ends with the famous line from Voltaire's Candide: "We must cultivate our garden." (Il faut cultiver notre jardin.). I suppose my long involvement with Emthree has been one kind of example of that. It is my 'garden', though whether what I do can be construed as cultivation or not is a question.
My aim is not to generate produce to feed or clothe the body, or to manufacture artefacts (though I am currently using medlars from the area for some recipes) but material to feed the mind. It is a privilege to watch the ebb and flow of this small area's teeming life with all its beauty and wonder, from neatly coiled snails with their regularly etched shells under bits of dead wood, to the fluttering yellow leaves hanging on the sky-bound top of the seven year old birch tree.
Emthree is a vortex of life and sometimes I fancy I can see through the kind of glass St. Paul saw through darkly that Emthree is in a sense the entire universe enfolded, with myself in its loving embrace, into a small flake of biosphere on the surface of Planet Earth.
This project entered its 9th year on 15 September and today I had a find worthy of the event. In the north west corner of the Square Metre itself was a fine example of the brown birch bolete (Leccinum scabrum).
The top of this fungus was wet with rain, justifying the name of penny bun toadstool, but the underneath and stipe were characteristic of the species.
Today, in the cold and the damp most untypical of early September, I found several leaves of bugle (Ajuga reptans) that had been affected by the microfungus Ramularia ajugae. According to the NBN this has been recorded from several places in West Sussex by I can find none for East Sussex.
The fungus makes purplish bordered patches in the leaves that turn into perforations.
I also noted that one of the ragwort leaves was being mined by Liriomyza strigata, a fly I last recorded in Emthree in 2003.
Emthree, not surprisingly, has an air of neglect about it, partly because it is the end of summer and partly due to the fact that I have not been paying it the close attention it deserves through much of this year. Yet it has remained important in my mind, it is just that sometimes my energy levels seem too low even to walk down the garden. I was 65 in 2003 when I started this project, but now I am 73 ....
Anyway, all the usual things are still in place and mostly doing well. Flowers out include ragwort, fleabane, smooth hawksbeard, herb-robert, knapweed and square-stalked St. Johnswort.
The trees are increasing shade levels and the large birch now has whitening bark at its base while the ash, now about one metre tall, looks as vigorous as it has ever done. The sallow though is indeed sallow with prematurely yellow and rather unhealthy looking leaves.
The mine of S. splendidissimella (above) is of characteristic shape which makes it distinguishable from that of S. aurella which is very common on bramble leaves.
A cool, damp September day, and I was bitten on the back of my hand between the thumb and the index finger by a mosquito, Anopheles plumbeus.
My current preoccupation with evolution makes me feel a bit like Don Quixote tilting at windmills: the egregious eccentric fretting about debates on the unknowable.
So far as ecology is concerned David Deutsch (2011) summed up one of my own feelings when he wrote “if you fill a kettle with water and switch it on, all the supercomputers on Earth working for the age of the universe could not solve the equations that predict what all those water molecules will do – even if we could somehow determine their initial state and that of all the outside influences on them, which is itself an intractable task.” Substitute the molecules in Emthree for those in the kettle and the task becomes even more intractable. I cannot predict what Emthree will do. And even if I knew all the biological and physical variables, I cannot predict what I will do.
I also liked Gordon Rattray Taylor’s remark in 1983: “within one square metre of ground, a score of species of snail may be found. What advantage can any one of them have?” (Emthree has so far produced 15 species of mollusc, but I expect it would have been 20 if it was on calcareous soil).
Maybe each species of snail evolved long ago when there was significant competition with a neighbouring species, but once one had died out, the survivor could live with less closely related relatives because they were not directly competing. Explanations can, of course, be thought up for anything, but they are not necessarily correct.
After a cold winter, a long drought is now causing serious concern among the farming community in South East England. Today it was warm, but for the last week or two it has been dry, cold and windy with only a few inconsequential showers.
Emthree is really only just beginning to show the effects of the weather. The grass is bright green, but rather sparse, with a dead, dry layer on the ground. In the midday heat many of the larger plants wilt.
There are a good few flowers: creeping buttercup, narrow-leaved vetch, smooth hawksbeard, still a few forget-me-nots, herb robert, cinquefoil and heath speedwell that has now spread far and wide. There is sweet vernal grass and rough meadow grass, the first going over, the second just beginning. A gladdon iris is flowering in Medlar Wood and so is the plant of herb bennett, a first for the project area.
The leaves of the smaller birch are heavily mined by the fly Agromyza alnibetulae (ostensibly a first for Sussex, but I expect it is not uncommon) and there are great colonies of purple aphids, Uroleucon jaceae, on several of the black knapweed stems.
The shorter of the two birches in Emthree has many long, squiggly leaf mines on its rather large, soft leaves.
These are unquestionably those of the small two-winged fly Agromyza alnibetulae, a species that also attacks hornbeam.
This seems to be a first record for Sussex, though I expect it is quite common.
I have recently come across two quotes that are particularly appropriate for the Square Metre project. The first from the early 20th century is from Edward Connold’s Gleanings from the Fields of Nature (1908): “Many hours of most careful search may with great profit be devoted to a space so small as one square yard of roadside bank, and a rich fund of facts accumulated.” Connold lived in St Leonards-on-Sea some 9km from the Square Metre as the crow flies, so he must have been familiar with many Emthree-like sites.
The other is from Tony Aldous in New Scientist[1]: “If you cannot know the present in its entirety, you can have no idea what the future might bring.”
Despite years of close study, there is much about the Square Metre that I do not know. What is happening, for example, in the soil where thousands of small organisms, many of microscopic size, are going about their business. I cannot know the full spectrum of visiting organisms: animals and insects, fungal spores and organisms carried in on the feet and fur of night visitors.
It is not, of course, my aim to discover everything about Emthree and I do not attempt to predict the future, but I do wonder on the worth of many ecological studies that purport to make predictions without “knowing the present in its entirety.”
To paraphrase John Donne "No species is an island, entire of itself."
[1] Google’s data junkie. New Scientist 210 No. 2810, 30 April 2011.
The birch tree that appeared from seed 7 years ago in spring 2004 in the south west corner of the Square Metre itself, has a few green catkins among its delicate leaves.
I estimate the tree is now about 6 metres tall.
These are the first catkins that have been produced and it shows how quickly birches can reach reproductive size from seed.
There is much activity in Emthree in the welcome warm weather. Many of the usual insect friends are making an appearance and there seem to be more solitary bees this year paying particular attention to North Wall which is becoming more earthy as it collapses into the mould.
Cardinal beetles are on the wing and this red-headed (Pyrochroa serraticornis) is resting in the shade under a bramble leaf.
At the base of the medlar trunk I found a, small, hard bracket fungus. With the help of Martin Allison, the county fungus recorder, this was determined as Ganoderma applanatum, the artist's bracket or artist's conk.
Some artists have produced remarkable effects. Have a look at these drawings by Marie Heerkens which are somewhat better than my script:
Recent research has shown that chemicals from this fungus could be of value in the treatment of diabetic complications. It is also said to make an excellent, if rather bitter, medicinal tea. However, what it was excellent for (or against) was not specified. It can also be used for dyeing wool, some fabrics, or paper and will yield a rust colour with wool when ammonia is used as a mordant.
Ganoderma applanatum causes white rot within the host tree, which explains why a large chunk of the medlar died back last year. I expect the rest will go fairly quickly, but some suckers may survive. It is rather sad really as it is a wild medlar (with thorns) that came, many years ago, from the bank close to my parents house at top of Whydown Hill at the far south of the parish. Ganoderma, mankind or medlar, we are all headed for the same destination.
The forget-me-nots (Myosotis sylvestris) are in flower now, little sky mimicking flowers between Midsummer Pond and the western edge of Emthree.
People used to give someone forget-me-nots if they were going on a journey on 29 February. Since it is not usually in flower at that season of the year, this could be problematical.
Writers like it. For example Miss Price in Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood said "I will knit you a wallet of forget-me-not blue, for the money, to be comfy."
John Neal in Goody Gracious and the forget-me-not wrote "if you get tired of being here, all you have to do will be just to pull it up out of the earth, and wish yourself at home, and you will find yourself there in a moment, in your own little bed." I wonder what he was on.
Small insects swarming in the early evening sunshine over The Meadow, each capturing the golden beams and transforming themselves in whirling scintillae of light.
More trimming of brambles and dead stalks this evening: sorting things out after the long break.
On the smaller of the two birches in M3, the lower buds swell and break earlier than those higher up.
The holly above looks as though it might be Highclere holly, Ilex x altaclerensis, a common garden escape and with flatter leaves than the native British holly, Ilex aquifolium, in the picture below. Note the rabbit-bitten stubs of the leading shoots.
Spring has arrived with an appropriately sunny and reasonably warm day and I have returned to Emthree after repining for much of the winter with a sort of dukkha composed of tiredness, cold, anxiety and a variety of small afflictions. Maybe M3 will help me transcend all this.
The Square Metre itself is fleeced under a close-knit mat of pale brown and green grass, with various forbs starting to grow through. The box bush behind North Wall is in flower and a queen bumble bee boomed among the brambles in the southern hedge as she looked for a site to make her nest.
Most of the previously recorded plants seem to be happy, the rose is leafing and buds are breaking on birch and sallow.
One surprise was the presence of three bright brown toadstools like the three wise monkeys. I have identified them as shining inkcaps (Coprinus micaceus) growing, I expect, from buried dead wood. The last time I saw these inM3 was Christmas Day 2008 – they seem to like special days!
Everything looks flattened after some of the heaviest and earliest snowfall for many years. We had about 1ft (30 cm) of snow on 1st and 2nd December with a lowest temperature in the garden of -9⁰ C, but on the night of 3/4 December there was a rapid thaw and today nearly all the snow has gone.
A highlight on this visit to Emthree was the larger of the two birches with its bright brown trunk shining in the winter light. The bramble hedge has been flattened by the weight of snow for the second time this year and, if this is a regular occurrence, it will be a significant factor in the ultimate shape of the hedge.
There are still a few snow patches and, curiously, I found the plastic lid of what looks like a food mixer flask floating like a round white moon or a small flying saucer in the middle of Midsummer Pond. It is remarkable how ponds attract rubbish and maybe this was dropped in there by an animal.
We are quick to blame irresponsible people for dumping stuff in ponds, but maybe there are other explanations ...
1 September 2010 A return to Emthree after a long period of neglect – what a religious might call a spell of spiritual dryness. Partly my motivation has returned after reading a passage in Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God (see below) and partly because it was a wonderful sunny September day after a spell of indifferent weather.
The pond is full, the medlars are ripening.
Later I did a little micro-management: cutting aggressive brambles and some grass; allowing a little more sunshine to reach the yellow ants’ nest. The wild rose is doing well but the sallow has sad yellow leaves caused by some microfungus.
A cloud like a skeleton of a prehistoric fish lies in the blue sky to the south among the sounds of aircraft.
Anyway, here is the passage from Karen Armstrong:
... the cult of ‘sacred geography’, [is] one of the oldest and most universal religious ideas. Certain places that stood out in some way to the norm – like the labyrinthine caverns of the Dordogne – seemed to speak of something else. The sacred place was one of the earliest and most ubiquitous symbols of the divine. It was a sacred ‘centre’ that brought heaven and earth together and where the divine potency seemed particularly effective.
It reminds me of what I wrote on 23 November 2003: “There are several Metre3s: the one I observe nearly every day, the one that modifies my view of other places, and the one I imagine to be there when I am not. There is also, I like to believe, a second Metre3 in another world and maybe beyond that a third where everything is the same but magically different – a half-glimpsed, half-understood possibility.” As Archie Hill wrote in The Second Meadow (1982):
I often asked myself who had passed through the gate leading into the Second Meadow — the great thinkers and poets, painters and music-makers? Yes, these must have passed through.
Who then had passed into the Third if it be there — and surely it must be there? Christ, Plato, Beethoven? The few precious people who had stood upon great mountain peaks above all others, those rare geniuses who were linked together but separated by the distance of centuries?
Yes, I thought, these above all had at least passed into the Second Meadow, and perhaps into the Third. New, uncluttered mental and spiritual pastures.. . voyagers of the universe within...
I shall never get there but, like Archie Hill or St Paul seeing through a glass darkly, I might get an inkling of an understanding with the help of Emthree.
2 September 2010 What I thought was a slime mould turned out to be a seaworn flint buried in North Wall.
The wrinkled ants were swarming by the doll’s head – quite late I thought.
A short-legged harvestman fell on me from somewhere and I put it safely on a ragwort flower head.
The cold weather that has been going on for so long it has depressed almost to nil the number of insects I find as I go about the garden. Today, despite the still lying snow, I decided to take a tussock of cock's-foot grass from Emthree and see what I could find in it and to alleviate my invertebrate withdrawal symptoms
The method is simple: the tussock is cut off just below ground (I find a bread knife with a serrated edge is best for this), put in a bag and brought to some place where it can be examined (the dining room table is often quite handy).
This excision leaves a hole of course, but this might fill up with interesting things in due time. Or you may even find something in it - I found a mauve plastic clothes peg, a survivor from the days when a washing line passed over the area.
Once indoors the tussock is teased out and shaken in a garden sieve over a white sheet like a tea towel. Any insects that fall through the mesh onto the white can then be pootered up.
Today's tussock was far from the best I have ever had but it contained two garlic snails Oxychilius alliarius; several Entomobrya nivalis springtails; the bark louse, Lepinotus iniquilinus; two rove beetles, Stenus flavipes and Tachyporus chrysomelinus; two herb hammock spiders, Neriene clathrata;and a woodlouse, Trichoniscus pusillus.
The bark louse, the garlic snail, the spider and the two beetles are new records for Emthree and the only other records of the bark louse in Sussex are from our house and green house here, though I expect it is widespread.
It just goes to show what can be found even under snow (I had to get the snow off the tussock before I could cut it.)
For the third time in the last four months we have had heavy snow. Last night it was mainly east Kent and East Sussex near the coast that was blessed and we woke up this morning to a deep white mantle.
It is very cold too: an unusually hard winter. I rather suspect the effect on Emthree will be beneficial rather than the reverse.
Now well into February, it has been snowing much of the day and promises to do so much of the night. Phenology aside, most things seem to be delayed by cold - crocuses, hazel catkins, snowdrops etc are not yet in bloom in our area.
The pictures below were taken on 1 February after a hard frost when a dawn snow shower spread writhing plaits of white powder across the hard ground.
When there is any amelioration - temperatures up to 5 centigrade or more - there is a scatter of invertebrates. Winter gnats and midges swarming in the lee of the hedge, the occasional green flash of a leaf-hopper (Empoasca vitis) darting from the cover of the evergreen box.
Midsummer Pond has frozen several times.
The leaves of heath speedwell (Veronica officinalis) always stand out well after frost.
I noticed today that two or three leaves of the red campion (Silene dioica) had been mined by what turned out to be larvae of the agromyzid fly Amauromyza flavifrons.
The fly larvae clearly find red campion leaves more palatable than rabbits do as these mammals seem to leave them strictly alone.
This is a new record for Emthree and only the third on the Sussex Biodiversity Record Centre's database. However, I suspect the species is actually quite common in Sussex.
Today I noticed that some of the lichen/moss sward on the top of Butterfly Rock was missing and I found these patches of fairy cup lichen, Cladonia pyxidata, lying higgledy piggledy on the ground.
Undoubtedly they had been cast aside by hungry birds searching for insect larvae.
It is often written that Cladonia pyxidata is, or was, used as a cure for whooping cough. This seems to originate with John Lightfoot who wrote in his Flora Scotica (1777) "A decoction of this moss is sometimes given by the vulgar to children to cure the whooping cough but the good effects of it are not supported by proper testimonies.". However, under the rubric pyxidatus he included what sounds like several different species of Cladonia which he called 'common cup-moss or lichen' (lichens in the 18th century were thought to be kinds of mosses).
The ground is now patterned with snow patches as it thaws. With their irregular curving shapes they create a highly distinctive landscape, but not one that is much admired or loved.
The old wooden pole that the black bryony has climbed for the last six years has broken near its base, perhaps under the weight of snow and Submespilus Pit is full of cold water.
Judging by the evidence below, the birds must have been eating some of the berries.
The very heavy snowfalls since the 1 January have deposited a considerable weight of material on trees and bushes.
In the picture above the snow has crushed the bramble hedge along the south of Emthree, reducing it from chest height to knee height.
No doubt it will bounce back to some extent after the thaw, but it will have to grow up to chest height again and its general configuration will be permanently affected. Ultimately it should be thickened and strengthened.
Snow, if and when it comes, is an important part of the natural dynamic, not only altering the shape of trees and shrubs but often breaking off branches large and small to provides homes on the ground for invertebrates and fungi, and tears and tree-holes above for the species associated with those.
The cold and snow will also, no doubt, reduce numbers of birds and animals with all sorts of poorly understood knock-on consequences.
We had snow before Christmas and it has been lying continuously since New Year's Day. On most days we have had additional snowfall and it has been blizzarding here on and off all day with more forecast tomorrow and for several more days at least
This, of course, should be quite beneficial to most wildlife, though the birds in our garden are looking cold and hungry.
The Square Metre has risen to great heights over the Festive Season with an outing on ITV1's Harry Hill's TV Burp on 26 December under the title Insect East Enders.
It is on Watch it Again for a while about a quarter of the way in:
A note on the Emthree after quite a long gap.
t has been raining for days and everywhere is awash: a carpet of sodden leaves and mud. And still it rains - I can hear it outside as I type.
The overall gloom is enlivened by two splashes of colour on the edge of Medlar Wood. At ground level there are the first berries in a split pod of gladdon (Iris foetidissima).
In the branches of the medlar tree above there are some bunches of black bryony (Tamus communis) like bunches of small scarlet grapes.
So far these bright fruit have been left alone by the birds (who undoubtedly sowed their original seeds), but as the weather hardens I expect they will quickly disappear.
