Autumn ruminations

Last night we had the first frost in the garden since early April and the hour went back this morning at 2 am, so suddenly the feeling is wintry rather than autumnal.  There are many colourful leaves on the ground.
And various fungi including the group of sulphur tuft, Hypholoma fasciculare, below, a species that was flourishing here last December.

There is much activity too on the top of Butterfly Rock.  In this picture there are at least two kinds of lichen, and several mosses as well as evidence of perching birds and rabbits and ambitious tendrils of heath speedwell, Veronica officinalis, climbing up from below.
Late autumn tends to be a rather sad, dying time of the year and it is difficult for me not to reflect on the newly arrived ash die back disease, Chalara fraxinea.  There has been much talk about this in the media and most of the accounts I have heard are very unbalanced.  A better way of getting an understanding of the situation is by looking at the Forestry Commission's fact sheet on the issue:
http://www.forestry.gov.uk/chalara
The general story from the media is that nearly all the ash trees in Denmark have died, that a few cases have been found in Great Britain and that imports of ashes from nurseries abroad have been banned.
According to the FC the disease was first recorded in Poland in 1992 and infected trees have been found widely across Europe including six places in various parts of England and Scotland.  As it is a fungus presumably it spreads by spores that can travel in all sorts of ways.  The FC add that "It is believed to have entered Great Britain on plants for planting imported from nurseries in Continental Europe. However, now that we have found infected older trees in East Anglia with no apparent connection with nursery stock, we are also investigating the possibility that it might have entered Britain by natural means. These include being carried on the wind or on birds coming across the North Sea, or on items such as footwear, clothing or vehicles of people who had been in infected sites in Continental Europe."  (I wonder how they are going to investigate these possibilities).
The banning of imports might, I suppose, slow the spread of the disease, but it looks rather like shutting the stable door after the horse has gone.  Most of us remember how fast the horse chestnut leaf miner moth spread: stopping imports of its host would have made little difference.
With Dutch elm disease, the various afflictions of oak, phytophthera on sweet chestnut and other species I sometime wonder if this might be the way nature operates, killing whole swathes of trees from time to time and opening up forests for other flora and fauna.  Often a few individuals of the species attacked seem to survive, like post-myxomatosis rabbits, to repopulate the old habitat which, by then, may be relatively free of their pests and diseases since these have had little or nothing on which to subsist.
Anyway, my ash tree in Emthree (naturally self-sown) seems to be doing fine and the slight curling of some leaves is just a natural manifestation of autumn.  I have often reflected that as this ash grows it would eventually take over the whole of the Square Metre.  Maybe Chalara fraxinea will prove me wrong.

Trailing tormentil confirmed

In my post of 11th June below I pointed out that in order to confirm the identity of what I thought was trailing tormentil (Potentilla anglica) I needed to see ripe seeds.  I have now managed to do this:

Ash and trailing tormentil

A kind of spring clean after a period of semi-neglect (which Emthree is quite happy with: it looks after itself to a degree).  I spent half an hour cutting back the new bines, nettles and fern in Brambly Hedge noting that everything is now growing very fast during this cool wet period after the May heatwave.

Many of the small plants I have become familiar with over the years are flowering, with heath speedwell, Veronica officinalis, doing particularly well, especially where the soil is poor and dry – on top of the meadow ants’ nest for example.

The ash tree by Hazel Edge has recovered from the severe pruning by rabbits over the winter and is now nearly one metre tall. The young leaves at the highest point are an attractive treacly maroon colour.

The yellow potentilla has come into flower again (see picture below) and I also have a plant from Emthree cultivated in a pot. I have little doubt that it is trailing tormentil, Potentilla anglica, though I will need to wait until I have some ripe seed heads to be absolutely sure. Rich & Jermy in The Plant Crib (BSBI, 1996) say: “P. anglica and its hybrids, P. x mixta Nolte ex Rchb. (P. anglica x P. reptans) and P. x suberecta Zimmeter (P. anglica x P. erecta), are extremely difficult to distinguish from one another.” Also the hybrid P. x mixta is commoner than pure P. anglica. One additional clue I have is that last year I found a yellow rust on the leaves of the potentilla in Emthree and this turned out to be the rather scarce Phragmidium potentillae which, according to Ellis & Ellis (1985) has only been found on Potentilla anglica and P. tabernaemontani. The second of these, spring cinquefoil, is a rare plant in Sussex and has only been recorded from one or two sites well outside our area. It also flowers much earlier than the others.  The rust seems to be a first record for East Sussex.

Tomorrow I might prune some of the smaller trees - the hornbeam, the second birch – into one metre tall cordons.

Spring flowers & sallow seeds

Emthree is now starting to burgeon and it is good to see so many bugle flowers - probably the greatest number in the last nine years, though they nearly always flower in slightly different places.  Here the Cladonia lichen cover can also be seen on Butterfly Rock behind.

The grey willow/sallow, Salix cinerea, that flowered earlier in the year has already produced its fluffy bunches of seed as the catkins burst open.  They are very evanescent and will, I suspect, be gone by tomorrow.

Close up these look astronomical, like whorls of gas in stellar space with the seeds as black holes.

Lawn Rectangle: a Square Metre satellite

At the end of June I am giving a talk on the wildlife of lawns at a seminar for the Wildlife Gardening Forum project to be held at the Natural History Museum in London.  As a bit of an angle for this I have set up a small rectangle of lawn in our garden for close study between now and the date of the talk and its progress can be followed here:

http://lawnrectangle.blogspot.co.uk/

Rabbit dung fungi

Among other things a few rabbit pellets from the Square Metre produced some microfungi like orange blancmanges with slender spikes protruding: pale golden sea urchins.

My mycological friend Howard Matcham has identified these as Lasiobolus ciliatus, a common species but a new record for Emthree.  He says to keep the dung for longer as other species are likely to appear.

Spring sallow: life and death

Yesterday for the first time the sallow tree (Salix cinerea) that was spotted as a tiny seedling in the Square Metre in September 2004 has catkins showing that it is a female plant.

A good thing to encounter on the first day of spring.

At the other end of the spectrum I noticed the intricate geometry of a decaying log on the edge of Medlar Wood.  It was put on the ground as a neatly sawn cylinder a few years ago, but now the ravages of time have worn it into intricate shapes.

 

It reminded me of that immortal passage from Shakespeare's Tempest:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea all which it inherit, shall dissolve                 

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Non-Euclidian Nature

Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance wrote "Weeds and grass and wildflowers grow where the concrete has cracked and broken.  Neat, square, upright lines acquire a random sag.  The uniform masses of the unbroken color of fresh paint modify to a mottled, weathered softness.  Nature has a non-Euclidian geometry of her own that seems to soften the deliberate objectivity of these buildings with a kind of random spontaneity that architects would do well to study."

Though Emthree is not part of the built environment, these non-Euclidian manifestations seem to me to be all too apparent in the 'weathered softness' of late winter.  These shapes, reminders of summer, have a past and a future.   The picture above is of tangled grasses, that below of cut, or bitten, bramble stems.

As spring advances and things grow upright, the spirit of Euclid will, to some extent, return.

Frosty February

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.

On a brief visit to Emthree there were few signs of wild life but then I pay more attention to some of the remains of summer such as the dead ragwort receptacles below.  Their work ended long ago and they now rustle together like air fossils, the pepper pot receptacles surrounded by all-askew spiky phyllaries that once held up the golden flowers in a green embrace.

These have a certain gaunt, scratchy kind of feel, but cold weather brings beauty as well.  Here is the upper part of the birch tree which was spotted as a seedling in the Square Metre in spring 2004.  The lower part of its trunk can be seen in the picture at the top of the page.

Sulphur tuft and a mild autumn

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.

There are far more fungi than usual: glistening inkcap (Coprinellus micaceus), candle-snuff fungus (Xylaria hypoxylon), sulphur tuft (Hypholoma fasciculare) - see above.  Also several kinds of, to me, virtually unnameable Mycena spp.

Midsummer Pond is full again after some heavy rain during the week and the ground is getting squelchy with mud underfoot.

November novelties

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:

So far as I know, this has not been recorded from Sussex before.  Though it is probably quite common where box trees grow, I supposed it does not quite have the charisma of a snow leopard (though I fancy I can see an image of a snow leopard in the pattern).  Is it of equal worth I wonder?

The ash tree in Emthree, now nearly seven years old, has been bitten off again about half a metre from the ground.  It seems quite high for a rabbit and not very appetising, so I suspect it might have been one of the visiting deer.  I am sure the plant will recover.

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.

Leaf miners and fungi

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.

Since the heath speedwell arrived in the square in September 2005 it has attracted the scarce flea beetle Longitarsus lycopi, and now this fly.  In the picture above the shot holes in the leaf may have been made by the beetle.

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.

The other fruits that are very distinctive at the moment are the those of the black bryony (Tamus communis), high up in the medlar tree.

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.

November reflections

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.

Butterfly Rock is very colourful just now and the fairy cup lichen is covering a greater area than ever before.  It looks to me like Cladonia fimbriata,  from their golf-tee shape, perhaps mixed with another Cladonia.  Simon Davey, in 2008, said that Cladonia on this sandstone rock were C. pyxidata, but that was on the basis that they were not golf-tee shape.  Maybe we have had three Cladonia spp. here.  The grey patches are another lichen, supposedly Lecanora campestris, but I am not too happy with that determination.

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.

Brown birch bolete, Leccinum scabrum

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 toadstool is found with birch and must have a mycorrhizal association with one, or both, of the birches in Emthree, one of which is now of substantial size.

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.

I am sure it will attract many fungus gnats (Mycetophilidae and relatives) and maybe other species of insect I will see what I can breed out from the numerous larvae that invariably burrow their way through the flesh of these toadstools as they mature.

A microfungus new for East Sussex?

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.

Summer's end

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.

There is something like a pale greenish yellow powdery mildew on some of the box leaves and I found two species new to Emthree, both identified from leaf mines: in a bramble leaf the glossy bramble pigmy moth, Stigmella splendidissimella (even harder to spell that ‘Mississippi’) and the agromyzid fly Phytomyza conyzae, in fleabane leaves, a new record for East Sussex I think.

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.

Ruminations

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.

Dry June arrives

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.

Birch leaf mining fly

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.

Nature unknowable

I have recently come across two quotes that are particularly appropriate for the Square Metre project. The first from the early 20^th 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."

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[1] Google’s data junkie. New Scientist 210 No. 2810, 30 April 2011.