Beltane and Bluebells

For May eve we camped out in a little East Sussex wood; we wanted to be out in the fresh new green and jump over our own mini Beltane fire to bring in summer. Also, the area is renowned for its bluebells, of which I am something of a connoisseur.

The weather was cool and damp, the humidity intensifying the depth of the colours  and general sense of lushness and rampant growth. Birdsong seemed astonishingly loud, the only other sounds a constant dripping and the babble of running water.  I felt I could almost be in a high altitude cloud forest anywhere in the world if it were not for the familiarity of the trees and vegetation around me.

There are so many wildflowers all blooming together right now, the harsh winter having telescoped the seasons down until the first late winter flowers stand shoulder to shoulder with summer blooms. And everything is giving it’s best after that winter, including the bluebells.

If you are lucky enough to have been in a bluebell wood in full flower you will know well the extraordinary sensual overload that this can provoke.  You walk along thinking that you’ve already seen it all, it couldn’t possibly get any bluer. Then the trees open out a little more and they are swimming in an astonishing violet mist of overwhelming voluptuousness. This, I can tell you, you have to experience for yourself.

It’s not just the colour, the scent is vivid  too – heady and exotic for something so British, but with a coolness that makes it bearable, like lilies crossed with violets. Sometimes you can smell the flowers long before you see them.

I remember my first sighting of bluebells as a child, and the wonder I felt at their unexpected beauty. My mother wisely told me not to pick a single one, they could never look better in my hand than standing exactly where they were and I understood and did as I was told. Coming back from our walk we saw a family who had not been so wise; they had greedily picked as many as they could carry and were already making disappointed sounds at how swiftly they had wilted. They bore my mothers rage with baffled indifference, but if they learned nothing that day, I had learned plenty.

To read more Nature Notes, why not visit Rambling Woods – in fact, why not write a Nature Notes post of your own?

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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.

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Wildflower stroll in Durlston Country Park

After the excitement of  “Meet a Moth” day, we set off for a walk in the meadows around Durlston Country Park.  This has to be one of the best places in the UK for spotting wildlife, a 280 acre countryside paradise consisting of sea-cliffs, coastal limestone downland, haymeadows, hedgerows and woodland. At this time of year it is glorious, stuffed with birds, rare and unusual plants, butterflies and if you are lucky there are dolphins, whales and basking sharks to be spotted out to sea.

N knew which fields are home to the rare Early Spider Orchid and had seen them on a previous walk, but sadly it was too late in the season and the flowers were all finished. This was barely a dissapointment given the beauty of the meadows, decked out in the brilliant deep blue of Chalk Milkwort and fat, hairy clusters of Kidney Vetch.

The day was hot, but a cool sea breeze and a bit of atmospheric haze kept us from shrivelling up as we walked along the clifftops, watching guillimots on their nests and Kittiwakes zooming about below us on stiff wings. This pair of herring gulls were disarmingly affectionate, displaying to each other within a few feet of us. At one point the male coughed up a nice bit of fish for his mate, but rather ungallantly changed his mind and ate it himself… charming!

On the cliffs nearby we found some Houndstongue, it’s deep red flowers only just beginning to open.

Working our way inland we came across white drifts of Sea Campion.

Into one of the meadows now, where we spotted this brilliant green beetle eating buttercup pollen. It’s name, Cryptocephalus aureolus, seems bigger than the insect its-self.

Crossing some cow pasture, the short fine turf revealed tiny, delicate flowers of Eyebright. Each is only a couple of millimetres across.

Eyebright wasn’t the only thing that the short, grazed turf revealed. As we scoured the meadow for any sign of Early Spider Orchids, an even rarer flower came to light. This tiny Early English Gentian studded the turf with lavender stars, and though my picture is out of focus I still wanted to share this lovely little flower.

We did find some orchids eventually, in a meadow shining yellow with tall waving buttercups and filled with birdsong. But that I will save for another post…

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No such thing as waste ground

I went out to get photos of small tortoiseshell butterflies that I’ve been seeing about the place since the weather changed to summer. But today it was windy; no butterfly would sit for me, not even the normally obliging brown sort you see hanging around in long grass. Personally I was glad of the breeze, and I don’t need much excuse to go to Walthomstow and Hackney marshes.

Set against an uncompromising semi-industrial backdrop, the marshes are about as wild as any place in London. What many people might dismiss as “waste ground” is home to countless small wonders if you take the time to look, and has some fine blackberry picking if nothing else at all takes your fancy.

The first thing you notice on a blazing summer day like this one is the alien mechanical whirring of grasshoppers. The sound reaches out, as far as you can tell, to infinity and yet you will be lucky if you can spot even one. In spring the marshes are a bewildering cacophony of birdsong, but by the end of July all the birds are silenced by exhaustion and the end of the breeding season and the usual urban soundtrack of sirens, trains rattling across the many bridges, kids joyriding on scooters and low flying aircraft take over.

Cycling along the River Lea towpath, a huge sky rolls out before you – a rare and exhilarating treat in such a built up city. The marshes are filled with flowering reeds and among them, particularly at the edge of drainage ditches, Purple Loostrife wave their sumptuously coloured flower spikes.

Startlingly acid yellow ragwort flame up and jostle against wild carrot and vetch, and on a day like today it’s all moving, swaying, the reeds sussurating in every breeze. The ground is dead flat, and heat bounces up from the towpath as the grasshoppers sing their hot summer day song, but it’s near water too, so the heat is just this side of bearable. Ponds and ditches have shrunk to scummy nothingness but the calming green of the reeds show that there is plenty of water in the ground yet.

The flowers of late summer are at their finest, and the appetising tang of wild horseradish is in the air.

You think you’ve got the measure of the place when you ride into a sudden, intense aroma of honey as if you have ridden into a brick wall. The buddlea, or “butterfly bush” has you in its sensual embrace, with its nodding purple blooms, clouds of butterflies dancing attendance and that sensational perfume. These non-native shrubs have taken to our waste grounds like a rat to a drainpipe – and to remind me that I was indeed in the city, as I took this picture a large rat came scuttling out of the undergrowth. I was so startled I didn’t get its photo, but I think the buddlea is probably more attractive anyway.

Some would call the pylons ugly; I think that in this particular, utilitarian landscape they come into their own. As huge sculptural presences they give scale to the land and a welcome perch to daytime hunting little owls. We are too far away to see the owl on this particular pylon, but trust me – there is one there! I have never been close to a pylon on the marshes without seeing its resident little owl.

Trains clatter across the two bridges over the marsh with great regularity. A friend of mine once went skinny dipping in the nearby reservoirs and gave astonished commuters on the way to office jobs on the square mile a cheery wave, completely naked, as their train sped by. You never know what you might see, flora, fauna, human or otherwise on an afternoon visit. I leave you with a typical Walthomstow Marsh panorama – the marsh its self, a passing train, and in the distance a fire which had broken out on a nearby industrial estate. It may be a wild refuge in the city, but city it undoubtedly is.

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Little Bog of Horrors

Much of Skye consists of boggy moorland, a habitat I know next to nothing about. I was so blown away by the profusion of orchids and sedges that it took me a little while to spot the locally common (but thrillingly unfamiliar to me) sundews. These tiny plants with their elegant succulent leaves sporting glistening red nectar tipped hairs are so small you’d be forgiven for not spotting them. On a sunny day however, large colonies of the plant are clearly visible, glowing warmly like alien jewels in the mud. Once I’d discovered one colony and knew what to look for, I glanced about in surprise, suddenly realising that I was completely surrounded by them for some distance.

That is when I began to feel glad that I am several feet tall and human, because this dainty botanical wonder is carnivorous.

Sundews inhabit soils with poor nutritional value and in order to obtain the minerals they need, they have evolved the ability to lure and capture small insects using their mobile, sticky tipped tentacles. Attracted to the bright colours and sweet, glistening dew an unlucky fly will become stuck, the tentacles of the plant slowly enveloping and smothering its victim. The plant then exudes enzymes which will digest the insect and extract valuable minerals. Some sundews are even capable of enfolding their prey completely in their mobile leaves.

I felt fairly certain that the plants I had seen were round leaved sundews and oblong leaved sundews, but upon further research I’m no longer sure about the oblong leaved ones. Oblong leaved sundews are supposed to be rare in Skye, yet the ones I had seen were staggeringly common, suggesting that they could in fact be Great sundews. It may seem like splitting hairs to you but I’m a keen amateur plant geek and I care about the details. Plus, if I really was lucky enough to see huge numbers of a rare plant in an unusual place, I really should report it. I only wish I knew for sure.

Anyhow, that’s the science bit over. I will now invite you to imagine that you are 5 mm tall. You have struggled through head high spongy moss and swum through carnivorous beetle infested waters. Somehow, the gigantic, whirring dragonflies have failed to spot you. Eventually you spy an island, a safe place, and greatfully haul yourself up a blade of grass onto it. Huge bog-myrtle trees tower over you as you pick your way toward a patch of bare mud, and the air is filled with an oddly enticing sweet scent. A dried sedge stalk trips you up, and you stumble headlong into something…sticky. You look up, horrified, and see the questing scarlet tentacles tipped with sickly sweet goo, and no matter how you struggle, the supple, asphyxiating leaves are getting closer and closer….

Don’t ever let anyone tell you that mother nature is kind, be greatful that you are the size you are, and above all, don’t have nightmares!

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