Sky in the water

What’s wrong with these pictures? Unless you live on Pandora you don’t often get to see land floating through the sky! It’s been raining here in London almost non stop for the last couple of weeks, so on one of the few fine days last week I took my chance to go for a stroll in Finsbury Park. The huge expanses of grass that act as spontaneous football pitches in better weather were saturated in standing water and acted as natural reflecting pools. I took these photos of trees and sky reflected in the water and turned them upside down – as you can see from the image below.

For more beautiful and fascinating images of the sky around the world, visit Skywatch Friday!

Autumn and the Moon

The last time I posted it was August – I was off on an island adventure and the days were still long, if not especially sunny. If I hadn’t realised that that’s been a long time, the trees on the streets are reminding me – it’s been the most beautiful autumn, the indifferent summer mellowing gently into it, then, Bam! Cool, foggy mornings, crisp nights, short days and the trees igniting in a shower of gold, amber and crimson. We had our annual samhain party, and after the dancing and debauchery and fireworks and fun came the morning and the hangover. One of the best ways to blow away the cobwebs the morning after is to go for a walk, so three of us made our way to Hampstead Heath to admire the autumn colours.

Up past the kite flying crowds on Parliament Hill, down into the gentle sweep of valley below Kenwood House the panorama of of London falls behind us, winks, vanishes and reappears framed between gentle hills then vanishes again as we enter a grove of beech trees. The light is fading, without a tripod I cannot capture this on camera but photography is not the point – this is a special place to all of us and we just come here to stand among the giants and drink in the eerie, glimmering light. The biggest tree in the grove which three people together cannot reach around has already shed its oval leaves and the woodland floor is carpeted three inch thick with them; the other trees are only just beginning to turn. A carpet of beech leaves in the dimness of an autumn or winter twilight takes on an eerie orange pink which the individual leaves, as you can see below,  do not possess.

The giant stood bare at the head of the grove, drifts of its own leaves burying its roots and swathing the clefts and fissures of its trunk.  Clusters of plump fungi nestled in its bark.

The strengthening wind stirred its upper branches and whipped the smaller trees into fierce motion.  The sky darkened. It was time to walk back. Twilight is one of my favourite times of day in the city, especially during the shorter days of the year. The cosy warm glow of shop and cafe windows and the weird artificiality of streetlights against a deep indigo sky are a perennial delight to me. Maybe you are surprised that a nature lover like me can take such pleasure in what is essentially light pollution but I cannot help myself; I do love the darkening autumn and winter nights and their cheerful illumination, and there are reasons why I live in a big city, after all. The gorgeous sight of the whole of London spread out and twinkling before us was as ever breathtaking. If you are ever in London on a clear autumn or winter evening there is nothing, and I mean NOTHING so heart stoppingly lovely to be found anywhere else in the city as the view from Parliament Hill. But on this particular night the city and it’s gaudy beauty was upstaged as the racing clouds parted and a brilliant moon, just a little short of full but as big as I’ve ever seen it lit up the deepening sky. It was bright as a spotlight, shining through clouds still faintly tinged with colour from the setting sun, and it cast a glamour over the ponds fringing the heath. A silver glittering path bloomed on the waters surface and faded as the clouds massed, then came brighter than before.  All the lights of the city cannot compete or compare to this unearthly beauty.

Hiding in plain sight

You don’t have to go to far flung wildernesses to experience the wild. It exists everywhere and in tandem with us; all we need to do to enter this wild world  is look.  This weekend I witnessed something lovely which proves the point.

I’m not going to reveal the exact location to ensure the safety of the protagonists; sufficient to say that the action took place in a thronged urban park very close to my house. During a busy event which saw stalls set out under the lovely old plane trees flanking the park I noticed in one of the trees the angry rattling alarm call of a Mistle Thrush. This, I thought to myself, could well be the bird who’s dreamy song I have often heard from our back garden, and I began to circle the huge trunk in hope of seeing the bird.  I was not alone – another woman had noticed the sound too and we resolved that one of us would see the angry bird. In fact, we saw so much more.

All of a sudden I could see what was hiding in plain view – a thrush, sitting boldly upright in the fork of the tree a scant twelve feet above our heads. Big as it was, it soon became apparent that this was a juvenile bird still in the nest and it’s parents were flying about the tree fitfully, making that rattling sound.  As we watched in amazement a parent bird suddenly flew in, stuffed a cherry into a gaping beak and vanished as suddenly as it had come. This flurry of excitement revealed three chicks in the very much outgrown nest, who quickly settled down so that only the very tops of their heads were visible.

I wish I’d taken a picture to show you exactly where all of this was taking place. Directly below the tree was a plant stall and a busy path on which families were walking to and fro. Ten yards to the right is an extensive and noisy children’s playpark and ten to the left, a community centre where youths lounged drinking orange juice post football practice. This spot is always busy, and yet I wondered how many people had ever noticed this nest sitting in the open on the broad tree fork just above head height. The Mistle Thrush is supposed to be a shy bird, and yet here it was confident in it’s own invisibility in an environment where people mostly just scurry past, head down. I’ve heard these lovely birds singing from busy intersection street lights in the most uncompromisingly grim and urban spots, traffic thundering by, the most sordid of human dramas enacted below.

They have adapted admirably to life alongside us; there is something poignant and oddly touching in how the nest appeared to be made largely of frayed nylon rope and strips of plastic bags. I turned to my friend and said that if there hadn’t been an event happening they may well have left the nest this very day, and shortly afterwards while a knot of us chatted and watched, one of those birds did take a momentous leap and left the nest, flying safely to a branch in the same tree.

These wise birds have inhabited this park for years and I had always wondered where they nested. Turns out they hadn’t even been hiding from me. The woman who had joined me in looking for the birds told me that she’d seen Mistle Thrushes nest in plain view on the front of the Town Hall and it seemed to her that she was the only person who ever noticed, noisy and large though these birds are. I started to wonder – how do they do it? I don’t mean how do they go un-noticed; human preoccupation would easily account for that. Rather how can they make their home in such seemingly threatening environments, with all the cars, pollution, humans and noise – how does it not drive these shy birds crazy? Perhaps they do that truly urban thing of shutting out all that does not immediately effect them – the human world is as invisible to the thrushes as their world usually is to us.

Hunting the elusive Bee orchid

Whilst doing the seed bomb workshop a couple of weeks ago I discovered a delightful fact – allegedly there are Bee Orchids growing on Tottenham Marshes about a mile and a half from my home, and they are due to start blooming right now. How could I resist such a lure? I’ve been neglecting the marshes lately, so I got on my bike and went to see what I could see.

What I saw, alas, was not Bee Orchids. It hardly mattered though, since I was out and about on the last glorious sunny day of this summer so far, and what I did find was rather wonderful in it’s own right.

Zooming down Coppermill Lane through a dense tunnel of rank vegetation, assaulted by the shrill voices of wrens and the scree of nestlings in every tall shrub I wondered why I don’t do this every day. When I got to the drainage ditches at Springfield marina the air was filled with zipping electric blue sparks of Enallagma Cyathigerum – the Common Blue Damselfly. I sat down beside the water and watched their nuptial dances, and was lucky enough to find these two in their extraordinary lovers embrace. If you view mating damselflies from the right angle their joined bodies make a perfect heart shape. Most bodies of water on a still sunny day will yield views of these lovely creatures right now in the UK, and they are well worth looking for. I also saw a glorious Libellula Depressa – or Broad-bodied Chaser, a male dragonfly with a body the colour of powdered and bottled summer skies. Naturally he teased me by flying from his territorial perch every time I got him into focus but I don’t go on these adventures just for photographic trophies and it’s just as well – I would have been deeply frustrated that day!

After half an hour of happy damselfly and tadpole watching I got back on the bike and rode along the River Lea navigation towpath. Shoals of small fish swarmed in the still water and mute swans fussed over their huge nests, and overhead swallows chattered. I was at Tottenham marshes at last.

It’s not much to look at, perhaps, to some people. A swathe of rank long vegetation sandwiched between a busy road, allotments and a canal and with pylons, gasometers, bus depots and factories looming at it’s edges, it’s not many peoples idea of a wildlife paradise. But it’s truly wild, and this liminal post industrial landscape is where the revolution starts, you mark my words. It’s places like these that are home to undiscovered beauty, the covert reclamation of land by all the other living things besides the human. Of course it’s managed to some extent, but the beauty of places like these is that things slip in under the radar – this kind of land is the sort that will suddenly sprout, unexpectedly, a beautiful flower from seeds or rhizomes that have slept in the earth for years.

The air was thick with the scent of elderflower and pollen tickled my eyes and dusted my feet. The voices of many warblers made one territorial claim after another, each responding to the last in a singing chain, a necklace of song. I wheeled the bike along and searched in vain through the long, tangled vegetation.

Was I sad that I didn’t find any Bee Orchids?  Not at all, not when so many other beautiful things crossed my path. The bee orchids got me out of the house and may have been my stated aim, but their coy refusal to show themselves led me to other secrets every bit as marvellous.

Seed Bombs!

Last Saturday I was lucky enough to get invited to help run a seed bomb workshop at  Haringay Independence Day. It was a perfect sunny summer day and we had our hands dirty for most of it, as well as getting to attend other workshops, jam sessions, swap gardening knowledge and give and get stuff for free. But let’s cut to the chase; what on earth is a seed bomb?

A seedbomb is a convenient way of sowing seed on derelict land in the hope of improving the environment either aesthetically, or by improving the soil, by encouraging native wildflowers or even planting vegetables or other edible goodies. Seed bombing probably came out of the Community Garden Movement that sprung up in New York in the 1970’s, when ordinary people decided to do something positive about the derelict land that blighted the city’s heart. They planted clandestine gardens in vacant lots, utilising seed bombs as a start when access to the desired land was proving difficult.  New Yorkers were not the first to practice the creative art of Guerilla Gardening which has a venerable history wherever derelict land and human need have coincided, but seed bombing was a technique the New Yorkers made their own.  So, what makes a good seed bomb, and why is it a “bomb” exactly?

A seedbomb consists of three things – the seeds, a pinch of peat free compost or topsoil, and the outer bomb casing for want of a better description. In our demonstration we used London clay for this,  which is perfect because it’s free (If you live in London you just dig down a metre or so beyond all the builders rubble and crap and there it is, a rich seam of beautiful clay) and also because when it’s dry, it becomes brittle and shatters easily. If you do not have a local clay soil, you can use newspaper pulped in a blender to make papier mache mixture instead. I guess you could even use a mixture of flour and water…

So, you need:-

• Clay or papier mache
• a small amount of rich topsoil or peat free compost
• seeds of your choice
• a bit of paper to wrap each seedbomb in

Grab a lump of clay or papier mache about the size of a golf ball or a little smaller, and roll it into a ball. Next, poke your finger hard into the clay or papier mache until you’ve made a hole. Then, put a small pinch of your topsoil or compost into the hole… it only needs to be a tiny amount. Now you are ready to add your seeds – you can mix up your flower varieties if you like but a favourite seed bomb flower of mine is poppies. Once you’ve tucked the seeds into the hole, close it up by smoothing clay over the hole or adding more papier mache, and roll the ball in your hands again to make it round. Then put your seedbomb somewhere safe to dry, like a sunny window ledge.

Make as many as you like! When your seedbomb is completely dry, it is ready to use.

How do I use it? And you still haven’t explained why it’s a bomb!

Well,  seed grenade is probably a more appropriate name, since what you are going to do is throw your seedbomb on the ground really hard in order to make it shatter. In the act of shattering, your seeds and their little bit of nutrient soil are dispersed much better than if you tried to sow them by hand and it’s much less fiddly… you can plant hundreds of seeds on the move and in an instant – you don’t even have to break your stride! So once your papier mache or clay balls are completely dry, put them in a bag in your pocket and go out looking for targets.

Where should I seedbomb? Any small neglected patch of land. Be creative in your choices! The dirt around a street tree might be a good place, or the long grass near some railings where the mower can never reach, or a neglected municipal flower bed. Grass verges around car parks that need brightening up. Traffic islands and roadside verges are great fun to seedbomb from a bicycle and the extra speed means they explode all the better! If you don’t have time to tend your garden – throw some down there!

Is there anywhere I shouldn’t seedbomb? Seedbombing is best done in neglected places frequented by humans – nature reserves or wild places should not be seedbombed! They may have delicate ecosystems that could get disrupted by introducing new plants.

What kind of seed should I use? Plants that don’t need a lot of looking after are best. If you just want to add a splash of colour to a neglected spot I would always recommend poppies. Poppies are a seedbombers friend because they thrive in neglected soil and wherever you live in the world there will probably be a native species of poppy you can use seeds from, so you are helping wildlife too! In fact, using native wildflowers is always better,  because they don’t need looking after and will not create a pest problem.  In the UK I’d recommend looking for a wildflower meadow mix as these will contain beautiful colourful plants that will do well in poor soil and with no extra effort once sown.

It didn’t shatter properly! Don’t worry, you can help it on it’s way by crushing the seedbomb underfoot if you can get to it; the weather, passing animals and insects will probably finish the dispersal for you. If it’s at least got a good crack running through it do nothing; the next time it rains the water will split it apart and disperse it naturally.

But what if my seeds grow and the council comes along and mows everything up, that would be horrible! The trick is be prolific in your seedbombing and don’t be too precious – of all the millions of seeds created by nature only the tiniest percentage survive to become thriving plants and for whatever reason this may well be true of your seed bomb babies. Don’t be downhearted… keep trying! Even if only a few plants make it you’ve brightened the world a tiny bit. There is a lovely saying – “If I knew the world would end tomorrow I would plant an apple tree today”.

We made hundreds of seedbombs on Saturday, and there was a handful left over that nobody took away. I’m going to look out for suitable sites to bomb and report back when I’m done!

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