A RAMBLE (TREE FOLLOWING)

Pea shoots on the window sill in the early morning light.

The house I live in was built in 1882 and faces east. It's made of stone; part of a back-to-back terrace and traditionally expected to be dark and poky (there are windows on only one side). But these windows are massive; light floods in and the view is filled with trees. Every tree now has its leaves and the leaves come in as silhouettes dancing across the rooms. If my laptop screen goes black, writing is replaced by their swaying reflections. When I shut my eyes, I see them. And when I sleep I find I am viewing their cousins - trees elsewhere; trees I wasn't even conscious of when I first saw them but somehow their images have imprinted themselves in my mind so I re-meet them unexpectedly in my dreams.

The trees are reflected in the glass of the window as a dandelion begins to open
when the light arrives. May 2nd 2020

This combination of trees and windows and light means I see trees whether I am looking outwards or in. When I nip outside to look at dandelions in the window boxes (cannot resist) I find I am looking at the trees behind me.

Being indoors all the time is dulling my daytime vision. The house may be alight with sunshine and leaf-shadows but I've started to squint when I go outside. It takes a few moments to adjust.

Sycamore blossom. May 5th 2020. (The right hand tree.)

When I said I would be 'following' sycamore trees, Phil Gates (at the Cabinet of Curiosities) replied by talking about greenfly. Greenfly like sycamores. I can't think how many greenfly there must be in these trees; millions and millions of them churning out honeydew . . . the sticky stuff ants like to eat, the stuff which makes leaves hang heavy, which sometimes makes them gloriously shiny and sometimes dulls them where dust and the millions of white-shed, empty aphid skins stick to it; the sticky which coats cars parked beneath so they get grubbier and grubbier. They are plastered with bits and bobs of grit and sycamore blossom all gunged in place with honeydew. Sitting unused during 'lockdown' they look as if they've been abandoned for at least five years. So this curtain of shimmering light . . . was thickened, enriched, by the gentle fall of honeydew and the bodies of aphids tumbling down through sunbeams.

Dandelion flower in window box. May 2nd 2020.

I once watched a caterpillar turn into a chrysalis. It took several hours and however hard I tried, I couldn't work out what was happening. It looked painful. The caterpillar seemed to be turning inside out. Eventually, whatever was happening stopped. Months later, I walked into the kitchen and found a cabbage white fluttering about the kitchen.

Half a dandelion clock. May 2nd 2020.

Mysteries, every day mysteries, are going on all the time. Dandelions closed. Half-open. Open. However posed, they are different.

Then, all of a sudden, like from one day to the next, they are even more different. Instead of a yellow flower you have a clock of brown arrows with white flights stuck into a pale green cushion.

Dandelion after the seeds have flown. May 2nd 2020.

And some time after that . . . the seeds start blowing away and you are down to the aphid that was there all along.

Aphid in the picture above on the dandelion
after the seeds have blown away.

For while you are looking at the dandelions, you find you are also looking at the aphids which have fallen on them from the trees. It's a greenfly landscape! 

Common Sycamore Aphids
(Drepanosiphum plantanoides)
2nd May 2020

Did you notice too, below the flower in the earlier picture? See left. Common Sycamore Aphids.

Smooth Sow Thistle. (Sonchus oleraceus)
16th May 2020

On to something else . . . only not really . . . in front of my house is a tiny patch of earth. Before I got leukaemia I started to dig it over ready for something . . . can't remember what . . . but it was abandoned when I went into hospital. It's still abandoned - but not unoccupied. A Smooth Sow Thistle has moved in. Smooth Sow Thistles have pretty little yellow flowers, a bit like small dandelions; and like dandelions these flowers produce 'clocks' so the seeds can be taken by the wind. But I don't like them. There's something very unpleasant about their leaves. Sow thistles are taller than dandelions, and gangly (about eighteen inches?) and their leaves, (which stick out from the stems) are all different sizes. They can't decide. And the surface of the leaves is dull. It doesn't reflect light much. There's nothing enlivening about them. I can't justify the way I react to their leaves. It's not their fault. Nor is it their fault that a white mould or something is forming where the jolly old honeydew has landed.

Smooth Sow Thistle Leaf. (Sonchus oleraceus)
2nd May 2020 - before the white mould began to form.

But in the spirit of investigate blogging (!) I photographed a leaf I didn't like. Then another miracle happened. When looking at plants, or anything really, you go through several stages of 'seeing'. In this case I 'see' a plant and don't like it. I re-'see' it when I put its picture on my laptop screen . . . . then I get tempted to fiddle. In theory I am trying to make the picture clearer. 

In practice I find I am making the leaf conform better to what I like in a leaf. The green gets a bit deeper. I change the light so more detail can be seen . . . and gradually, I notice good things about the leaf . . .  it has an interesting and elegant, jaggedy edge.

What if I heighten the contrast - oh wow! It's mind blowing!

I went back to take another look at the leaf - two weeks later. It's not as big as I had begun to remember it. It's quite inoffensive really. It can't help its bedraggled state. And all that detail, all the dips and ridges and edges are there even if my unaided eyes can't see them.

But wouldn't it have been nice if I could have shown you a sow-thistle clock? Earlier, there was one but all the seeds blew away.

Smooth Sow Thistle. (Sonchus oleraceus)

16th May 2020

There's a dead smooth sow thistle flower. Seeds are forming beneath its shrivelling petals. The miracle is taking place but not ready yet. Perhaps I should be dissecting some of these flowers to see what is happening? (Something I couldn't do to the caterpillar / chrysalis!)

I potter briefly in front of my front of my door, ready to dart inside if anyone comes. Along the pavement I have some pots and in one of them there is nothing . . . or not quite nothing, there's an unintended aquilegia.

Aquilegia are funny. They start off as bright flowers but after a few years of self-seeding their descendants loose their colour. This is one of these. Pale and a bit dreary (though standing erect) and it too is sticky with honeydew. Sticky with honeydew to which . . . . Smooth Sow Thistle seeds are stuck! (I think that's what they are!) And aren't the sticky stems beautiful with the light shining through them? Aren't they beautiful with the seeds stuck to them? I hadn't noticed before how hairy they are!

Smooth Sow Thistle seeds (probably)
caught on Aquilegia stems. 16th May 2020

Hurray for light! Hurray for trees! Hurray for Aphids! Hurray for honeydew! Hurray for dandelions, for stickiness, for seed clocks . . . for a few square feet by the front door where one can go for a ramble.

ARE YOU?

Notes and Links

Honeydew on Wickipedia

About the Common Sycamore Aphid - 'Identification of Aphids' section of the 'Influential Points' site.

Identify the most commonly seen British Aphids - on the same site.

Identification of Aphids - lots of pictures - and links via the plants you find the aphid on in the left hand column. (Same site.)

                                                                                                       

     New to the 'Identifying Things' tab (below the header on Loose and Leafy)

Weevils - Mark Gurney's Album on flickr (beautiful to browse even when you don't have a weevil to ID!).

P.S. At the top of the aquilegia picture there are two little, yellow, sideways-vs on the stem. They are aphid legs.
P.P.S. There are more dandelions seeds on a post on my Dorset blog:- 'Sheer Indulgence'.

Linking to Nature Notes at Rambling Woods.

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