Rest easy
Author: Daniel Greenwood
Landscape photographer with a focus on woods and trees, fungi, and macro photography
Saturday football
Set: Mayo in Winter
Redwing (Turdus iliacus)
“London: how wild can it get?”
London assembly members and MPs discussing biodiversity at London Wildlife Trust’s conference “London: how wild can it get?” at King’s Place, London, 26th January 2012
Guest Photographer: A Summer Road Trip by Adela Hurtado Saura
Positano Poemas
‘Bronze-breasted women’
Bronze-breasted women
gazing at crystals,
in Positano shop windows.
And, in the vines
entwined overhead,
blue butterflies,
warming their wings
in the boiling
morning sun.
‘A swallowtail fell’
A swallowtail fell
onto the terrace,
a banknote,
slipping through the railings.
‘In the night’
In the night the forest
burned, a clutch
of smoking orange groves.
By morning
helicopters ran drills
from the sea to the sky,
pouring fish
and blue water,
into the flames.
Woodland Diary: Litter picking in lost gardens
A slender pathway cuts through the ground layer of ivy, more likely to have been forged by a train of foxes. A large ash has been pulled down by the wind, the underside of the ivy leaves are a fresh colour, like the flesh of a lime. To the side a den has been made, with string tied to the rotting logs which rest against a tree in a tepee form. It can be the case that the people spend a night in the wood to qualify for a homeless shelter and so the sign of a tent or den surrounded by food packaging and drinks bottles is not unusual. There isn’t much litter to be found, other than things the ivy has subsumed, bottles or cans missed previously and taken in by the soil, or blown over from the road. Spiders make a home for themselves in empty bottles and the woodlouse is a common inhabitant of an old shoe.
We toe the path which leads around the ridge. It’s just ivy, above and below, masking the trees and the woodland floor. On the ground the leaves of premature bluebells peek through the earth and we take care not to trample. The coming of spring is a time of year to be cherished, the very thought leavens the darkness of long winter nights.
The ivy ends and a clearing opens up around a large yew tree, the soil cleared of life by the acidity and shading of the tree’s needles. The trunk is rippled and worn like an old doll’s limb, its circumference suggests it could be a few hundred years old. A line of tall yews appear as we move on, what must have been a hedge in a garden, turning into a right-angle. The ground dips to reveal the whitish bricks of a wall and a trail of broken glass. Behind us is a tall group of silver birch trees, quarantined amidst layers of ivy and the yew. These birch look like they’re waiting for something.
The other side of the wall shows a support structure for the terrace of an old Victorian villa, where people would have taken tea and listened for the hammering of woodpeckers in January, the repertoire of the song thrush in spring, and the call of the woodlark. A century ago they would have sat listening to the voices leading Britain to war. Now we look out from over the wall at wildness regenerated. Trees collapsed and left to rot down as fodder for bugs and beetles. The slow life of the woodland has been allowed to resume. A blackbird calls in the canopy and a great tit sings its winter song down in the woodland glade. The sun is setting low through the slope of trees. It’s time to go home.
Woodland Diary: Bramble, love or hate?
Bramble (Rubus frusticosus) is a point of contention. This is a common plant in gardens, alongside railway lines, in woodland and parks. Through the summer and into autumn ripe blackberries are a delicious and easy feed for humans and animals alike, the only price you pay is the odd nip from a thorn or a scratch to the tummy reaching for the highest bunch of all. The gobbling of blackberries by animals and their ultimate evacuation is one of the main ways the plant colonises new ground. In my family we have a dense lot of bramble at the back of the garden which, traditionally, my mother picks for fruit and freezes through the winter. Blackberries work wonderfully in pies, their bloody juices swamping the mixture of apples and sugar, colouring the innards a fantastic pink.
In the open and wild landscape of woodland bramble can be invasive, encroaching on grassland, rides and glades until wildflowers are shaded-out. A happy medium can be drawn by the technique of ‘scalloping’ along pathways and rides or in glades. This can be achieved with a grass hook or slasher, or else with the petrol power of a brushcutter. By cutting messy semi-circles into the shrub layer the bramble is pushed back, but not completely, and hopefully wild flowers will thrive with the new light which reaches the soil. The biodiversity is improved all round. In the autumn we brushcut the woodland ride of Cox’s Walk in Sydenham Hill Wood and the next day I accidentally flushed a green woodpecker (Picus viridis) which was feeding on insects in the newly cut scallop.
In the summer months bramble is a good place to spot butterflies. Comma (Polygonia c-album) and red admiral (Vanessa atalanta) can lay their eggs on bramble, and speckled wood (Parage aegaria) is commonly seen sunning its brown wings on a bramble leaf. Last year on Cox’s Walk we found a dying purple hairstreak (Quercusia quercus) amongst bramble, a butterfly which is tied to oaks (hence its Latin name) and should really have been ferrying between the canopy above. Bramble is not a good sign for wildflowers in woodland because it points to nitrogen-rich soil which promotes common nettle (Urtica dioica) more than anything.
However, the problem with labelling plants as wholly good or bad was emphasised to me recently when a group of teenage volunteers were working in One Tree Hill to push back the bramble from the acid grassland patch. They did an excellent job and opened up a patch which will hopefully be reclaimed by a diverse array of acid grassland flora in the growing season. But as we enjoyed a break, we glimpsed a small mammal, possibly a wood mouse, but small enough to be a harvest mouse, climbing through the last line of bramble. The red bramble leaves were frost-covered. This beautiful mixture of ice and vibrant colouring, and the tiny creature escaping to safety made me wince at the thought: bramble, good or bad?
Purfleet
Unlocking Landscapes 