A DANDELION TO WATCH

I can see this dandelion from my kitchen window. I watch it as the months go by - while the water runs warm into the sink, while I wait for the kettle to boil, when I look down the street to see how much traffic there is . . . 

From now on, you can watch it with me. It doesn't do much but remarkably, notably and all-on-its-ownedly . . . it's there.

So we'll see what it will do.

 Tweet

30 DAYS WILD : 19 - MAKING CHOICES

Every so often, the Wildlife Trusts sends emails to those registered for 30 Days Wild with suggestions of what they might be doing for their 'random acts of wildness'. One of them recently is to go litter picking. Gathering litter is a bit of a challenge. Not only am I currently extra-wary of germs there's always the problem of what to do with the product of one's 'gatherings'. Most weeks the council collects things to be re-cycled (paper, plastic bottles, cans) and food-waste; but 'residual waste' (i.e. more or less everything else) is taken once a fortnight - and sometimes there's a delay with that. Even a short excursion to pick up crisp packets, stray plastic bags and fish and chip cartons can land one with more 'stuff' than will fit even in a big black wheelie bin when combined with one's own accumulated bits and bobs of packaging etc.. And if it doesn't fit in the wheelie bin, it won't be taken away.

I do put things in my bin if they land up outside my house, whether they have been dropped there by passers by or blown there from further along the terrace. But street responsibilities don't stop there. What about the plants which grow in the gutter or up through the pavement? For all that I enthuse about wild plants in the street, I remove these too. Plastic bottles and cans come bobbing along when it rains, form log-jams against any plants they come across and water pools across the road. It gets in the way. If there were any traffic, pedestrians would get splashed. I've been splashed. I didn't like it. Plants which come up through the pavement tip the slabs into an angle and people trip. Plants which push their way through tarmac cause cracks and the pathway disintegrates. So I pull them up too. When I'm doing this 'street tidying' I don't feel in the least bit 'wild', I feel fuddy-duddy and mean. I can even sense some of you looking over my shoulder, being critical, saying 'I thought your blog celebrates street plants?'. Well it does. But even they have to be in the 'right' place. 'Nature' is pretty strong. We humans can be overwhelmed. We aren't always as indomitable as we think. Let buddleia take root in the tiles of our roofs and our houses will fall down.

Quite a lot of us have become interested in the way the coronavirus pandemic has led to an increase in plant-life. Verges have been left un-mown. More plants than usual have been left unmolested in urban settings. Which means ordinary citizens are having to decide 'what is to be done'; what is to be removed and what should stay. It's not just me.

And so it was, that when I was photographing a wall full of ferns (Maidenhair spleenwort do you think?) with flowering yellow poppies at its feet, a voice came shouting across the road,

"THEY ARE POPPIES'. 

I knew. I turned to see who was telling me. A woman who lives in that street explained from a healthy 'social distance' that she had pulled out other plants along the foot of the wall but had left the poppies on purpose. I really like this. It mean these poppies are not here by chance but by choice. Someone had chosen to leave them - and that is as much a choice as it would have been to have put them there in the first place.

I have a neighbour who lets ragwort grow in a pot outside her front door each year. I do love this neighbourhood! And ragwort is currently almost everywhere. Dandelions have stopped flowering but we still have lots of yellow flowers. A spontaneous 'Britain in Bloom'.

I've even come across a teasel. This is my biggest surprise. Not only has it been allowed to grow taller than me, it seems to be the only one. How did it get to be there? It has three seed heads. Maybe there will be more teasels next year. 

30 DAYS WILD

Today's Random Act of

Wildness is to

pick up litter and

choose which flowers

can stay in the street.

Tweet

30 DAYS WILD : DAY TWO - HARTS TONGUE FERN IN WALL

Harts Tongue Fern (Asplenium scolopendrium). June 1st 2020

Yesterday morning I sat in the sun with my neighbour. Long distance sitting. I brought out a chair and a cup of tea and sat in front of my front door - the first time I've done this since Lockdown. She sat on the wall outside her house, also with a cup of tea, and we bellowed at each other. Our doors are much farther apart than two metres but despite that it was very companionable.

And while I was sitting there . . .

no

pause

. . . simply sitting there in the sunshine with the trees above us and my trays of brussels sprouts and rudbeckia between us . . . that can count as one of the 'wild' things I did yesterday. Nothing more 'wild' and less tamed than fresh air and sunshine!

Anyway . . . while we were sitting there, I noticed these scruffy ferns in the wall. I guess they are Harts Tongue ferns (Asplenium scolopendrium) but they are very small and very sad. I'm used to Harts Tongues being a foot tall and a deep green and growing directly out of the ground in the Dorset woodland. However, the remarkable thing about these is not really that they are so dilapidated but that they are there at all. No water. No earth. What nutrition?

Dandelion seeds?

Also to be noted are the added 'extras' that only really get noticed later. I could already see the plants were sort of dusty as well as pale. Indeed, I had briefly wondered if I should tidy them up a bit before photographing them - a gentle sprucing with a handbrush or something. But that way you miss things. As well as the inevitable threads (what are these threads that are in all the pictures?) and bits of  spiders webs, there are seeds. Looks as if they are from dandelions. Ah . . . dandelions!

30 DAYS WILD
Today's act of
random wildness is to
sit in the sun and
look around.

 Tweet

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.

Tweet

THE MEANING OF LIFE?

Dandelion Leaf in My Window Box
April 20th 2020

An older friend, charming but prone to gloom, once told me the only difference between a long life and a short one is that you do the same things three times instead of once.

In 2019 intensive care 'outreach' came to my bedside three times to advise nurses how to look after me. My temperature raged. My blood pressure sank. They monitored carefully in case my organs decided to shut down.

Sycamore seedling in my window box.
Unfortunately this will have to be taken out but for the moment I can be pleased
 I am being visited by a tree.
April 20th 2020

In 2019 two rounds of pretty heavy chemo didn't work. Even after I'd had a stem cell transplant, the leukaemia was still there. The consultant advised me that things did not look good. But the new stem cells settled in and I was given a trial drug 'on compassionate grounds'. Result! the leukaemia is in retreat. If it is still here, it is here in such a small amount it cannot be detected. This, note, is not the same as a definite 'cure' but it's pretty good.

Dead Daffodil Flower
20th April 2020

Then along come the corono virus to disrupt all our lives. All the immunities bestowed by childhood illnesses and inoculations were swept away by the transplant and my ability to fight off infections is weakened by the anti-cancer drug. I am, to put it mildly, a bit vulnerable. The government has put me in the 'shielded' group. (It's even sent me a food parcel!) This is partly to save my life and partly to save the lives of others. If I land up in hospital I could be in the way of someone else who needs to be there. I can't leave the house for three months. Oh joy! Even more time to contemplate the purpose of existence.

Obviously, I haven't come up with any brilliant ideas. I can't even work out what I want to do with my own life let alone understand the purpose of  'life' in general. But I do keep thinking about my friend's idea that we merely repeat ourselves.

With all this going on, I've still not really 'moved in'. Others would have been more efficient but I still have things in boxes and in odd and 'wrong' places. It's quite entertaining. I don't really know what I still own and what I disposed of before moving from Dorset to Halifax. Things keep turning up. The other day I was looking for a missing memory stick when I came across a package of writing from when I was at Junior School.

In it, along with a little 'book' I'd written about the reign of the Stuarts and another about cats which included an incomplete chapter on 'Methods of Tiger Hunting' (!!!!!) was a short page and a half about wild flowers. I present it to you here for your entertainment. It's a sort of proto-type Loose and Leafy. I don't seem to have changed my mind or my ideas since I was . . . somewhere between seven and eleven years old. On the one hand it's a good find; good to discover one has been consistent, a current of interest over a lifetime. On the other . . . . maybe all I am doing is saying the same thing over and over. Is this what my life amounts to? What, I ask myself in the spirit of enquiry rather than negativity, is the point? If I had died aged twelve (not at the time an option) would I have contributed any less to the world than I've achieved in the decades since? Perhaps the answer is simply that there is a virtue in repetition. Perhaps some things are worth saying over and over? I don't know.

Certainly I'm currently experiencing the truth of something I am always advocating, only in reverse; that fresh air and exercise make the mind as well as the body lither, stronger and happier. Cut off from both I'm growing sluggish and dull. I feel queasy and faint really easily. I'm having to work at not being miserable. I've decided to be delighted in the small functionings of my brain. "Wow! I remembered something! How did I do that?!" I'm trying to persuade myself that walking up and down the three flights of stairs in my tall, thin house is a fair swap for hills and moors.

And perhaps I am truly having to settle with the idea that the sole purpose, the main aim, the highest and most worthy career goal of my life is to persuade everyone that dandelions are wonderful . . . and that this revelation is worth repeating endlessly; way more than my allocated three times!

* * * 

P.S.
Because I live in England I have been in the care of the NHS. On behalf of the country as a whole it has spent thousands and thousands and thousands of pounds on keeping me alive and never once has anyone asked me if I'm worth it. I am a citizen, therefore I am cared for and my treatment is free. I am not a patriotic kind of person but I am bewildered when I realise having a system like this is not the aspiration of every country in the world. Goodness, am I grateful! I am hoping someone in the NHS will think preserving the life of a repetitive dandelion advocate is truly commensurate with the expense.

P.P.S.
The stem cells which saved my life were donated anonymously through the Anthony Nolan Trust. If you are between 16 and 30 years old you too can become a donor and save someone's life. If you are over 30 you are still able to help save lives through financial donations. The link is to the UK site but it operates a shared register with other countries too. I'm not sure how many, Germany is certainly one of them.

P.P.P.S.
In case you aren't able to read the text in the photographs, I've copied it out here - preserving the spelling!

"Wild Flowers"

"Wild flowers are often just as beautifull as garden flowers. When a wild flower is caught trespassing in a garden, it is normally uprooted and thrown away, but when it is found otherwise, the same plant is praised, picked, and taken home to decorate the house. Nature is one of the wonders of science, going on year after year, giving us food and delight. Sometimes when the words Vegitation or Vegitable are mentioned, our minds imediatly think of things like carots or cabages, so it is a good idea to remember the game anamal, VEGITABLE, and mineral.

If you look hard, even in the busy streets there are wild flowers. Dandelions grow tucked away in a crack under a wall. Mosses, ferns, and grasses are here and there, sometimes moss grows in between the  paving stones, but the best place to look is in the country, there you don't need to look very hard, in winter it is not so good but nearly always the dead remains of plants can be found.

Different plants grow in different types of soil and climate, so before going out into the country to find any particular plant, it is best to check that you know where to find it."

* * *

Link
Anthony Nolan Trust

Tweet

Linking to Nature Notes at Rambling Woods

HAPPY EASTER! THERE'S SOMETHING WRONG WITH THE TULIPS!

So much has happened!

My main sentiment is that I am alive! Quite a good one for Easter Day.

Tulip in window box - something wrong with the flower.

I had a stem cell transplant for leukaemia in July and it seems to have worked. For a while my immune system was right down so I had to carry on being largely separate from the world.
I needed to build up my physical strength too and work out what to do with my life now it had been extended. Should I gradually take up with the old and familiar or launch into something new? Through lack of inspiration I was gradually drifting back to the old, like picking up stitches instead of casting on with new colours, when two things happened more or less simultaneously. I broke my arm and was put in the 'sheltered' group in the population - ie not to come out of my house for three months, not even to shop or exercise. So for the last few weeks I've done a lot of bewildered sitting around, wincing at the pain in in my arm, listening to the radio at night and dozing a lot in the day.

Tomato seedlings and pea plants hardening off outside the house.

My sling's off now. I have some seedlings growing - trying to do allotmenting-at-a-distance by starting things off then getting other people to weed out some soil and soon to start planting on my behalf. It's not exactly 'gardening' but home grown food may well turn out to be very useful as well as pleasant when we find what the winter floods did to farming and how far the coronovirus will halt imports from abroad.

Very early in the morning - like 5am - I take the rubbish out. No-one is around so I can stand outside my door for a moment and look at the moon. For the rest of the time my world is reduced mostly to my bedroom and the view it gives me of sycamore trees gradually bursting their blossom and leaf buds. There are very few birds - one robin, a group of great-tits, two blackbirds and a couple of crows in a nest. One evening some bats flew around. Bees seem to turn up in the evening to bob between blossoms. There are some dandelions along the wall opposite. One in particular has taken my attention and I count its flowers each day. Hurray for dandelions!

I have window boxes outside my kitchen and living room. Things are rather crammed in - good because I am enjoying a few flowers at a time over a long period instead of a dramatic display from one variety which then has to be swapped completely for something else. There have been tiny daffodils and big daffodils, tiny iris and red cyclamen flowers. Currently there should be tulips . . .  but something has gone wrong. Even before I was advised not to leave the house, the window boxes had been left to their own devices. I am at risk from the moulds which live in earth. Imagine having to avoid earth. And with a broken arm I'd not been able to lift the can high enough to water them. Rain blowing in this direction had to suffice. It has, until now 'worked'; a cheerful nod to the passing season.

But now . . . the tulips aren't opening. The flower buds are smaller than I'd expected. Maybe I planted small tulips. I can't remember. But the tips of their flowers are shrivelling and they are not opening.

Between my house and the public pavement there's a huge stone slab for a 'path' and about six square feet of concrete edged by a wall. (A useful small space where plants can harden off.) Usually there are people walking up and down on the other side of the wall. It's a friendly place. People stop to say hello and chat. Not now. It's silent. So I poke my head out of the door in daylight. (Daylight!) And step down. A quick photo, a flash of scissors, a quick look at the dandelion that's self seeded in 'the other' box - and dash back in. What a weird life we live now that the best, the friendliest thing to do is never to meet anyone!  How strange to be the kind of person that can be killed by earth. How strange that all of us now can be killed by the breath of other humans.

Warped tulip flower cut open.

Neither, of course are causing the demise of the tulips. I'd assumed an insect had got inside. But when I cut open the one I'd 'snipped' expecting to find a grub - nothing.

Anyone got any ideas?

Hope you are all having a happy Easter.

Do tell me your news.

Lucy

Tweet

AN OUTDATED STREET PLANT POST (Should have been posted at the end of April.)

I'm horribly disorganised. When I first wrote this post at the end of April, we were well launched into the first dandelion season of the year. It was freezing cold but there were dandelions everywhere. I need not have worried that I'd miss them when I left Dorset. Not only were they unmissable but in some places nature had arranged them so beautifully it was as if they had been flower-arranged.

There's a surprising amount of countryside in this very built-up Halifax. Even outside the wooded ravines which cut into the town there are reminders of what happens when a tree falls. This fungus is growing on a the remains of a lopped trunk in a car park.

And earlier in the day I'd came across violets on a small patch of earth outside an abandoned house.

Then there are walls. Non-stop walls. Dry stone walls around almost everything: gardens, fields, industrial premises. These are wonderful places for plants to dig their roots into - and I've been surprised how little the walls seem to crumble under such invasion. Of course, I should have put a photographic illustration of this here but I didn't. All a bit of a rush! And since then I've been busy doing the usual excuse type things like digging acres of mare's tail out of my allotment. But the point I was heading to at the time was that not even the flat fronts of buildings can deter a determined fern.

And drains. In Dorset I grew a habit of looking down drains to see what's growing there. Drains rarely disappoint. They are a bit like the shells hermit crabs grab. They look pretty similar on the outside but you never know who or what's lurking inside till you look.

And trees. No urban garden would be complete without trees. I think this is the most spectacular I've come across. Can it be a silver birch?

Sorry for the delay. Someone found my glasses for me. They are gold rimmed which makes them extra difficult to find unless I am already wearing them. But anyone else can lift them up and say 'These?' But other things have been getting between me and Loose and Leafy posts too. Like a plasterer putting up an acoustic wall, local elections in Halifax and civil unrest in Armenia.

We all have backstories!

P.S. I really do recommend that you read about Hermit Crabs.

Tweet

STREET PLANTS AT THE END OF MARCH FOR THE BEGINNING OF APRIL

This is a picture post. There's not much to read. If I had lots to say, I'd say it. But today, I don't. I'll let the plants speak for themselves. Or, rather, not speak for themselves for they are pretty quiet at present; battered by frost and snow, constantly being deceived into thinking it's spring when it isn't.

The exception is this groundsel which seems pretty chipper. I've never described anything as 'chipper' before but the word seems to fit. The angle shields it both from north and east winds and for the moment it's not garlanded with litter.

For the most part though, I look higher up walls to find plants. I've never lived anywhere with so many stone walls before. All seem to be built in the same way; two walls built parallel to each other and the gap between them filled with smaller stones. On top of these is a layer of long stones laid horizontally, with a row of quite hefty, sideways stones on top. The work which must have gone into these walls must have been phenomenal. The tonnage, mind boggling. And because of the topography here, some are waist or shoulder high on one side but way, way higher on the other.

Here are dandelion seedlings beginning to look out newly on the world.

And foxgloves which have overwintered are beginning to green.

This is common but I can't name it.

A dilapidated ivy leaved toadflax would you say?

And the always-interesting shape of an unfurled willow-herb seed pod.

All these plants were photographed on 30th March, ready for the first of the month posting. Daft. So I'm moving the street plant posts to 20th of each month. I'll put a link box then too - and afterwards always on the 20th.

In the meantime, if you have a street plant post that you'd like us to know about, do put its URL in the box below.

(The site which provides the link box seems to have gone down . . . and the link box has vanished along with it. By the time I next look, hopefully it will have reappeared. In the meantime . . . . if you have a Street Plant Post to share - leave its URL in with the comments.)

Tweet