A new log

The long log across the centre of Emthree (east/west) has once again returned to the earth and I have replaced it with a new one of oak or, maybe, chestnut found in the nearby wood.  This could have a longer life.  The trees at the top of the picture include the sallow on the left, the birch and the ash at the end of the log and most of the rest of the Square Metre fits into the frame with the western boundary marked by the ash tree.

While positioning it I had an amusing accident.  I sat on the little bench I use to admire my handiwork and it toppled over backwards in slow motion, depositing me in the mass of brambles and nettles that lay behind.  I could not get up too easily from this position as my legs were arched over the now vertical bench seat and I could not get enough purchase on anything to win sufficient leverage, so I lay there for a few moments enjoying the blue sky through a filigree of birch twigs. After a bit I managed to worm sideways, get on to my hands and knees and re-assume the vertical apparently uninjured apart from a few scratches.

Another highlight of the day was the discovery of a hawthorn seedling (see right) close to the centre of the metre square.  It must have been a small plant through 2015 and now seems to be enjoying its second year.

Bees and birch trunks

In sunny weather flies and other insects settle on the white bark of the large birch tree to warm themselves up.

The picture is of a male small sallow mining bee, Andrena praecox, one of the many insects attracted, no doubt, to the pollen of our large male goat willow, Salix caprea, in full bloom nearby..

The trunk of the birch sheds horizontal strips and patches of the thinnest bark and these flutter ceaselessly in the wind while still attached making it harder perhaps for predators to see the dark insects against the ever-shifting patterns of light and shade created by these shifting shreds.

Mustard oak

Enough midday sun to warm the shoulders and a feeling of freshness, almost of joy in the air that can only be experienced in spring.  The birds and animals feel it too.  A great spotted woodpecker was drumming noisily, a hollow ‘ratatatat', a few metres away in Churchland Wood.  A couple of dock bugs, Coreus marginatus, (see left) were skittering about in the meadow area on the south side of Emthree; a bee fly made a sortie across the Square and the oak tree over the hedge has suddenly burst into leaf.  This new growth is a striking mustard yellow colour and only lasts a few days before the green creeps in.  The small Emthree oak has expanding buds, but not as advanced, though the larger tree may well be its parent.

 

I had a further look at the base of the collapsing bramble hedge, a damp, mouldering undercroft characterised by the dingy green webs of common feather-moss, Kindbergia praelonga. Other plants already here included stinging nettle, various ferns and grasses, red campion, cleavers, creeping buttercup, herb-robert and bugle. The friable wet dead wood gives it the quality of a small nightmare creeping along a corridor of thorn-guarded shadows.

One brighter aspect of this sinister grot was a surviving leaf of bramble intricately mined by larvae of the tiny glossy bramble pigmy moth Stigmella splendidissimella.  The mines were empty, but maybe a new generation of moths will soon be emerging.

The fate of a hedge

The bramble hedge on the south side of Troy Track, the hedge that has been sheltering Emthree from the prevailing wind for many years, looks in a very sorry condition this year.  The majority of the second year floricanes have died after fruiting and many are not being replaced by first year primocanes.  As a result the whole thing is flopping over into the meadow beyond.  I am not sure why this is, but I wonder if many of the plants have simply expired of old-age.

This, of course, has let a larger amount of light into the ground layer beneath the dead and collapsing brambles, though it is well-protected by the thorny, coffee coloured stems.  I will scrutinise this area during the coming year and beyond to see how it responds.  But, as Schopenhauer wrote “we can never arrive at the real nature of things from without. However much we investigate, we can never reach anything but images and names.”

Tree bees and campions

5^th April 2016  First spring trip was on 31^st March.  As what I consider to be an omen (for what, I am not sure) as I turned the corner into Emthree, a fine male brimstone butterfly flew up from Troy Track and spiralled upwards and over the hedge – an uplifting splash of lemon yellow.  There were also some as yet unidentified Lasioglossum sweat bees sunning themselves on the white trunk of the birch tree.  Distinctive from their very long antennae.

 

The following day I found a fine queen of the tree bee, Bombus hortorum, nestling, almost burrowing, into the grass also on Troy Track.  It nests in trees and under eaves and has been quite common in the garden in recent years. Having been first recorded in the British Isles in 2001 it has now spread to mid-Scotland.

Today was the warmest of the year, though not exactly boiling.  Some tree buds are expanding rapidly.  Hazel followed by birch, then hornbeam.  Oak and ash are holding back.  The dark shagged fiddle heads on the broad buckler fern are well visible now.  There are many plants of red campion, (first noted in Emthree in 2008) in the absence of rabbits and they are more advanced than the other herbaceous plants.  And, of course, they do flower earlier.  They tend to grow in woods and other shady places so I suspect this faster growth helps them to get into flower by mid-May when there are still plenty of insects about before the before the canopy closes completely.  Is the Square Metre now woodland I wonder.

Apart from the usual snake oil remedies, the red campion has little attraction for the human (but not rabbit) forager.  This is understable as the plant contains the toxin saponin that can have a nasty effect on the digestion.

A new beginning?

A return, after a long rest, to the Square Metre, perhaps inspired by this from Paul Harrison's book Elements of Pantheism:

• When we go to unfamiliar places or landscapes, almost everyone does for a time look at things more closely. But we should be able to look at our garden or local park as naively and attentively as if it were a tropical rainforest or a host of penguins on an iceberg.

Also, perhaps, because I have bought a pair of waterproof, fur-lined boots with cherry red, spat-like tops which makes travelling to and fro easier and more comfortable.

Today was a fine and frosty midday visit with the sun striking through bare winter branches. Emthree looks a bit untidy after a year or so of relative neglect but, of course, it is still there and has been following its own dynamic

A particularly noticeable feature was the large number of fine flat bright green sorrel leaves spread on the ground (see photo above). I think this may be to do with the number of cats that have, as mentioned in May 2015, been active in the area and have seen off all the rabbits and other creatures that might relish a sorrel leaf. Whilst I am not happy about cats in gardens and the wider environment (except for their ratting abilities) the coming year will give me an opportunity to evaluate their effect on Emthree which, I suspect, might be substantial.

It was cold, so I did not do much. But I cut back some of the long whips of bramble which had snaked over the higher branches of the medlar, the ash and other trees and were close to finding a rooting place on the ground. The twigs on the medlar are developing a good crop of lichens as their morbidity increases. I identified a piece of Evernia prunastri on the ground and will have a go at the others when I get a chance. The Key to lichens on twigs from the Natural History Museum should be helpful in this context.

Some of the vegetation to the south west of the medlar was cut back during the summer and this has let more light come in underneath the tree. The gladdon and tutsan are doing well here and there is a number of foxgloves.  In the picture below there are not only gladdon berries but herb bennet, tutsan, ivy, broad buckler fern and common smoothcap moss: a promise of things to come.

Blue May

A return to writing about Emthree after a long gap, though I regularly make visits. It is the time of the Chelsea Flower Show and there is an increasing emphasis on wild gardens using native plants and so forth. Yet a dazzling effect has been produced in Emthree almost entirely by selective weeding and pruning. Almost nothing has been planted.

This spring there is a greater quantity of bugle that ever before and their blue purple spikes are not only good to look at but attractive to bees and other invertebrates. The pale blue of forget-me-nots and deep pink of campions contrast nicely with the bugle and there are other flowers dotted about. White-flowered herb-robert, for example, and sweet vernal-grass.

The trees have all survived the winter well and look very lively in their shiny new spring green and I spotted what appears to be a foxglove plant towards the north east corner of the original square metre. This will be a first for this species if I am right.

Since April Sammy, one of our granddaughters has been living here with her two sons and several cats. The cats are very adept at catching small rodents and rabbits and this will, I think, change the ecology of Emthree, possibly quite substantially (like re-introducing wolves into Yellowstone Park).

As I walked back to the house, I heard the shrill screaming of a flock of swifts above then saw the black-sickle shapes swirling about high in the sky. When so much wildlife is threatened, it is good to see things like this. The cuckoo too has been calling locally.

The eleventh anniversary

It is the eleventh anniversary of what I call 'The Square Metre' project, or 'Emthree' (M3), a small area of garden that I have studied in some detail since 3rd September 2003. I was 65 then and now, as the arithmetic shows, 76. I have changed just as much as M3, but in a different way. I am older and more tired. Bits of me do not work as well as they should, but I manage. M3 is now more of a wood (even an 'ancient wood') than a meadow. There is a silver birch at its heart maybe twelve metres tall and a four metre ash. There are small birches, a sallow, an oak, a hornbeam and a holly. Just outside the square, in what I call the penumbra there are two hazels, some hawthorn, a cotoneaster and other plants sown in droppings from birds perching in the old medlar tree. I have introduced nothing: it all arrives of its own accord. The medlar is on its way out: today it was sporting a fine array of wood-rotting bracket fungi and sulphur tuft toadstools.

In several places I have identified wild privet (right), again bird sown and there are two species of rose - one I have not identified and the field rose (much attacked by leaf-cutter bees) which, despite its name, is supposedly an ancient woodland indicator. Quick aside: a tawny owl was hooting loudly in the wood down the garden at 1 p.m. English tawny owls are thought to be evolving away from the continental varieties and one of the criteria is daytime calling.

Today I can see few flowers other than singletons on stunted ragwort and bugle. The summer is over. The ground is littered with brown and yellow birch leaves, a hogweed has an umbel of pale green seeds and a red campion holds its empty goblets, once full of seed, to the blue September sky.

Early fungi and a new bug

About fifteen fruiting bodies of sulphur tuft toadstools,Hypholoma fasciculare have appeared along the log dividing TSM in half. They are very obvious and have come up quickly and rather early in the year. Hopefully I will be able to collect a few as they decay and breed some insects from them.

I also found a rather beautiful striped oak bug, Rhabdomiris striatellus (= Calocoris quadripunctatus) upside down on a knapweed leaf and quite dead though apparently uninjured (old age perhaps).  Though supposedly quite common, it is the first time I have come across this oak-favouring species, though there are plenty of oaks around the garden and next door.

I rearranged it a bit before taking the photo above, but it remained dead.

I have recorded the fungus in TSM before, but not the mirid bug.

Thoughts on the future

I have just finished reading The Ash and the Beech, by Richard Mabey. Mostly the book ranges widely over our human attitudes to woodland over the centuries and our current confliction between 'natural' and 'artificial' (do woods really need to be managed etc.). It made me reflect, of course, on quite what category the Square Metre falls into.

My purpose in constant intervention is, perhaps, to preserve perspective - the short and the longer views, a hole in the Universe. But apart from that what happens, happens: I trim and weed to the minimum necessary to stick to my purpose, but I do not plant or sow anything or introduce fauna.

It is important to me to preserve a sense of ease, of connection to everything else that is there, to let species interact with each other as well as with myself. It is a space to reflect, to meditate, to achieve calm, balance and a sense of proportion in this troubled world. My intercessions are only to achieve and conserve these ends (il fine giustifica i mezzi - falsely attributed to Machiavelli). But there is no end. If I am no longer able to visit, the vegetation will close over and TSM merge back into whatever surroundings the future holds. Like the Hovgaard Ridge microcontinent below the waters of the North Atlantic between Greenland and Spitsbergen, its place in the sun will have gone and it will lie hidden among the many millions of other square metres comprising the surface of the Earth.

And, of course, if the Earth should one day explode into an ever-drifting and dispersing cloud of stardust there will be no co-ordinates to determine where the Square Metre might once have been. There will no longer be any ‘where’.

The picturesque?

I have been reading The Ash and the Beech by Richard Mabey (Vintage Books, London. 2013).

In chapter 3 Mabey explains the importance of John Evelyn in promulgating the idea of planting trees as opposed to natural regeneration. Mabey comments "But as a philosophy, a policy, woodland creation was regarded as faintly eccentric and probably unnecessary. Why waste energy planting trees, when, since the time of the Creation, woods had done it so very successfully themselves?"

The picture above from the Metre and its immediate surrounds makes this point.  There are 10 trees in the foreground of the picture, though some are difficult to see.  The obvious ones are, from left to right, hornbeam, birch, sallow, birch again and ash.  In addition there are oak, holly, hazel and hawthorn.

All these have appeared of their own accord, unaided by me, though they do, to a certain extent, have to be protected from rabbits.

I am struck too by how much TSM now looks like woodland with its bugle, ferns, lanky grass and, of course, the trees.

There are now several baby common hawthorns (Crataegus monogyna) and they seem to have done particularly well over the last year.

Mostly the bugle is doing well too, but some plants are not so vigorous and have their leaves mottled with yellowish.  I suspect this is a virus of some sort.

Owls, roses, lichens

At about 4.30 in the afternoon a tawny owl called loudly from the tall incense cedar, Calocedrus decurrens, maybe 10 metres from TSM. The call was almost piercing and must have carried far. This owl, and maybe its mate, have been hooting since last autumn and could be nesting in Churchland Wood, but today was the closest I have known one.

The new, strong rose shoot that I spotted a short while ago has been bitten off about 15cm above the ground.  I suspect it is a rabbit and its teeth have gone straight through the stalk but it has not eaten any of the shoot: the upper part was still hanging to the stick I used to try and protect it.

I noticed that the lower part of the ash tree, where the bark is several years old, has thin grey lichen growing on it.

Sallow snow

The air is full of sallow seed-down blowing from the goat willow to the south. It is like the first snow flurry of winter but each downflake hangs slower in the air, drifting among trees and bushes, perpetually agitated by eddies and thermals, carrying minute germs of life to wheresoever they may find a hidden lodging.

The bugle is at its best now and I suspect we have more spikes than in any previous year.  Perhaps it rather likes wet winters.

Hazel nut horde?

Pleasant, sunny spring weather has brought on the plants and brought out the insects. Today I removed my wire cage exclosure from western Troy Track since it looks very ugly and has failed to produce anything of interest within apart from two hazel seedlings with a third (nibbled) just outside the exclosure. Three seedlings within a few inches of each other indicates that there had been some sort of nut horde buried there. Interesting as the nearest source of hazel nuts is some distance away.

Using my close focus binoculars I watched a common pill woodlouse, Armadillidium vulgare, questing about in the sunshine to no apparent purpose. There was a rather splendid black beetle, probably a Carabid moving rapidly about among the vegetation and often flying from one place to the other. Twice it climbed about half a metre up the trunk of the sallow at high speed before taking to the wing. I saw the first of the wrinkled ants, Myrmica ruginodis, for the year dragging some kind of booty across Flat Stone. Other insects include a 14-spot ladybird, Propylea quattuordecimpunctata, and the copper hoverfly, Ferdinandea cuprea, both sunning themselves on leaves.

Roses by other names

The roses in TSM seem to be growing very vigorously this year and flowering cannot now be all that far away, though maybe not for a year or two.

We have two species of wild rose in TSM, the field rose (Rosa arvensis) at the top and one of the dog-roses.  The latter has been there since the early days  of the project and is one of the canina aggregate.

A carder bee was busy on the bugle flowers.

Purple with rage

Some of the leaf stems on the ragwort rosettes are an enchanting purple colour. I wonder why: it does not seem to have much evolutionary advantage and might well attract the attention of pests and predators.

Marsh bird's-foot trefoil seems more abundant this year (maybe the wet winter?). There is figwort here and there and many black bryony seedlings that never seem to come to anything.

The ground to the north now has more of a woodland appearance with dead leaves, sticks and withered stalks and the grass very sparse. There was a buff-tailed bumble bee on the bugle flowers today, the third bumble bee species in the last three days.

There are some fine new shoots on the rose which I transplanted from elsewhere in TSM on 1 November 2004. Maybe I shall see it flower and be able to determine it to species level rather than Rosa canina agg.

I am always surprised at how quickly new leaves on trees and shrubs are attacked, though at this time of year it is usually impossible to find the culprits.  The hornbeam leaf below has a neat hole, but it is the only damaged one I can find on the whole plant which probably has several hundred leaves.  It is near the top too which indicates that almost certainly the leaf-chomper had to climb a long way for this insignificant meal.

Oak first

“If the oak comes out before the ash there’ll be a splash.”  Well, we’ll see but the oak is decidedly in advance of the ash in TSM and seemingly elsewhere in our local countryside.

The tall birch has already flowered and is shedding its catkins on the ground.

Insect life is still sparse but today I saw a common carder bee on the bugle flowers and not far away this little moth Réaumur’s longhorn (Adela reaumurella) was resting on a leaf of the same plant.

The return of spring

The bugles are flowering already - quite early, often they do not start until late April or early May - and the broad-buckler fern is unfolding. Most of the trees are now in leaf, even the oak and the ashes, and I discovered another small hornbeam just outside the western border of TSM.  Flies were warming themselves in the sunshine on leaves and trunks and a beetle ran rapidly along the now mossy cherry-plum log.

A queen white-tailed bumble bee (Bombus lucorum sensu lato) buzzed about around the logs and bricks of North Wall and the forget-me-not. This bee is, apparently, now defined as a complex of three species B. lucorum, B. cryptarum and B. magnus which cannot be reliably distinguished from each other except by DNA analysis. The new systems of defining species that are now emerging make life difficult for the field naturalist without complicated laboratory facilities and the flora and fauna of the world is becoming a more complex phenomenon than we thought it was. Nevertheless, I still want to be able to talk and write about white-tailed bumble bees without having to explain what I mean in terms of genetics and phylogeny.

Knapweed ichneumon wasp

I recently caught this ichneumon wasp laying eggs into larvae concealed inside the flower stems and upper stalks of knapweed, Centaurea nigra, in Emthree. 

The wasp draws its ovipositor from its sheath (the black sting-like projection to the rear of its abdomen) then curls it under its body to pierce the plant tissue with great delicacy and skill.  Somehow, of course, it is able to detect the presence of the larvae in which its own larvae will live, probably in this case picture-winged flies (Tephritidae).

Identifying an ichneumon such as this is difficult without catching it, and not easy even if one does.  What I will try to do in this instance is to collect some of the flower heads and stalks and see if I can breed out both parasitoid and hosts.

A new harvestman

I found the harvestman Leiobunum rotundum perched halfway up the stem of the white marsh thistle in Emthree the other day.

Quite a widespread species in Britain but possibly declining.  I have seen it once before in our garden (1997).

Great white thistle

One of the several marsh thistles (Cirsium palustre) in Emthree has grown to nearly three metres tall and has white rather than purple flowers.  There certainly seems to be no lack of fertility in the soil, though unless it is in the rainfall, I do not understand where it comes from.

Meter on BBC TV's The One Show

Recently the TV cameras descended on the Square Meter to film a short piece on the project for The One Show.

It was broadcast on Monday, 24 June and is available on iPlayer here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03665cr/The_One_Show_24_06_2013/

The Metre piece starts 10 minutes into the show.

Steinkellner's flat-body

Yesterday I found a small moth resting on the trunk of the larger birch tree in the Metre itself.  It turned out to be the Oecophorid Semioscopis steinkellneriana, Steinkellner's flat-body.

This species has larvae that feed on blackthorn and rowan (neither of which grow in the Square Metre), so its choice of a birch trunk seems purely fortuitous.  It is not very well camouflaged either.

On the sallow next to the birch I spotted a small, black sawfly caterpillar feeding alone.

It does not look like the widespread Nematus pavidus as this seems much paler and feeds gregariously on sallow.  I will just have to see if it survives long enough to get a picture of the full grown larva.  It seems quite aggressive, raising its rear half angrily when disturbed and it feeds quite openly, often a mark of distastefulness.

Bugle time

Bugle flowers are now coming up to their peak all over Emthree as ‘blue steeples' (an Austrian term for the plant) and it is, as Geoffrey Grigson says in his Englishman’s Flora “A most lovable and inexhaustible little plant.”

These days it seems to feature only rarely in books about herbs and forageables but in the past it had quite a reputation for helping to heal wounds and cure whitlows etc. As Gerard wrote “The decoction of Prunell made with wine and water doth join together and make whole and sound all wounds, both inward and outward, even as Bugle doth. To be short, it serveth for the same that the Bugle serveth and in the world there are not two better wound herbs as hath been often proved.”

By ‘Prunell’ he means self-heal (Prunella vulgaris).

Bugle also does not seem to welcome many invertebrates. Although the flowers are popular with carder bees and some hover flies, rather few species choose to eat it. Those that do include the larvae of the yellow and black sawfly (Athalia cordata), one micro moth, the aphid Myzus ajugae and the Eriophyid mite Aceria ajugae. I have found all these except the mite in Emthree over the years.

The ash and the ants

A colony of wrinkled ants, Myrmica ruginodis, has appeared under the Lyon Stone.  Much later than usual and normally by this time of year there are several large colonies.

This evening I spotted two individuals that had climbed to the top of the ash tree, now just over a metre tall, and were browsing eagerly on the tiny glandular hairs that cover the new leaf stalks and petioles.

Such attractions are known as 'extra-floral nectaries' (EFNs) as they are not associated with flowers and they occur on quite a wide range of plants (including narrow-leaved vetch in the Square Metre).

The hairs produce a sweet material containing various sugars and other substances and are clearly both tasty and nourishing as far as the ants are concerned.  What advantage the plant gains is not clear, but is has been suggested that the ants discourage other insects and herbivores both of which might damage the plant (I find that unconvincing).

Like others with ash trees I am scrutinising our Metre plant regularly for ash die back disease, but it seems fine so far.  However, as spores of the die back fungus are dispersed from fallen leaf stalks of the tree, ants might well unwittingly transport them from the ground to the most vulnerable parts of the plants.

Note the ant on the left of the above picture of the terminal shoot of our tree.

Where have all the insects gone?

Another example of natural biodiversity.  The south west slope of The Waste, in the penumbra of the Square Metre, I counted 26 different plant species all self-sown and growing happily together.

There is a yellow meadow ant's nest at the top of the picture and the plastic half bottle in the centre is to try and draw the ants up to ensure they have not deserted.

Insects still seem very scarce and I have not yet found any ants' nests.  Yesterday the first butterfly settled in Emthree - a speckled wood  Today a green longhorn moth, Adela reaumurella, came to rest on a leaf of red campion, its long antennae blowing about in the chilly May wind.

Yesterday I heard a buzzard mewing its way over Churchland Wood to the east.  Eventually it appeared wheeling over our garden and I had a clear sight of it directly above the large birch tree.  Unless one actually comes and settles in Emthree, this is the nearest I reckon I will come to a buzzard record.