Tag: West Sussex

Arun valley oaks around Billingshurst

Daniel GreenwoodLeave a comment

Billingshurst and the Wey-and-Arun Canal, West Sussex, January 2024

Pre-ramble

This long post (2500 words) is based on the Billingshurst walking route available in the Ordnance Survey guide to walks in West Sussex and the South Downs.

The difference in my route is that I went by train not by car. It’s always better by train if you can do that. I also took a longer route to the south via Parbrook.

Billingshurst is a growing ‘village’ on the from Victoria to Bognor Regis or Chichester.

The name Billingshurst means a wooded hill of the Billa’s people who were perhaps an extended family rather than a large tribe.

Billingshurst Local History Society

For this post I’ve relied on Geoffrey Lawes’ Billingshurst Heritage (2017) for historical references, which I borrowed from my local West Sussex library.

I wouldn’t do the walk after high levels of rain in winter because the Arun is prone to flooding in epic fashion and could make some of the walk impassable, particularly beyond the bridge.

This would be a good one to do in the spring when it’s a bit drier and the birds and woodland flowers are coming to life again.

There are some quite dangerous crossings here, so care needs to be taken when you meet the A29 twice, and another country lane that has poor visibility about a quarter of the way in.

Parbrook

After leaving Billingshurst station you pass through a new housing development to the west of the village, and then the village of Parbrook, which was once separate. There’s an impressive timber-framed building here called Great Grooms, which dates to the 1500s. It’s on the Historic English register as the Jennie Wren Restaurant, as it was recently known.

In Billingshurst’s Heritage there’s an insight into the life of people here around the time of the First World War. Doris Garton describes her childhood in a ‘small, primitive cottage’ in Parbrook, and her father’s life after he returned from the war:

In the 1920s my father did contract to local farms at Parbrook. He would set off at 6:30am with his tools and hay knife strapped on his bicycle. According to the seasons he did hay cutting and tying, harvesting and threshing, thatching and land work, draining, ditching, ploughing with a horse, hedge-cutting and layering of hedges. He was also sometimes hired as a water diviner, using a hazel twig.

Billinghurst’s Heritage: Geoffrey Lawes, 2017: p. 255

The walk gets serious quite quickly as you cross the A29, which is a diversion from the straight line of Stane Street, a Roman Road that provided a route from London to Chichester. Crossing the A29 gives the immediate reward of this – the sort of place where Doris’s father would have plied his trades in the 1920s:

Ancient woodland

As you probably already know, ancient woodland is a sensitive habitat, so be careful not to trample wildflowers like bluebell and wood anemone in the spring (it’s hard!), and not to disturb ground-nesting birds (March-July). I noticed some bluebells were peeking from the leaf litter, which seems to be fairly normal for January in the last decade.

It was here that I spoke to a local woman about the walk I was doing and what the best route was. I’m always looking for tips.

The woods are surrounded by open farmland. The make-up here is typical managed ancient woodland of old – hazel understory with mature oak trees (otherwise known as ‘coppice with standards’). Mr. Garton’s bread and butter.

Holly is another element of this prehistoric mix. This isn’t meant to sound patronising but I think that sometimes too much holly can be removed from woodlands by well-meaning people who want to reduce shade for flowers to thrive. I understanding the motivation, but holly’s powers are subtle.

Speaking of which, this magnificent holly was growing on one of the wood banks. I think it’s one of the largest I’ve ever encountered, probably around 200-300 years old, but I’m not sure.

I got a bit lost here and ended up following a desire-line (an informal path) along the edge of this stream, as you can see on the map above. The erosion of the bank (possibly by people and pets entering it) may have contributed to this hazel losing its footing and falling in. It does look quite dead.

This was my first time on the Sussex Diamond Way!

Having found the path again, I passed through this lopsided gate into the field.

There were some lovely large oaks along the boundary of field and woodland.

This is The Lordings, a Grade II-listed farmhouse dating to the 1600s (Historic England listing). With its uneven development and attached Sussex barn on the left-hand side, I had wondered how old it was. The windows of the house are in different places and rather small, which did suggest old age. The ditch in the image is part of a stream and pond. The landscape was lovely here, formed by the movement of water over time, which makes me think that’s a natural spring-fed watercourse. Little Lordings Wood sits nearby, and once upon a time woodland will have covered this entire area. ‘Lordings’ appears throughout this walk but I can’t find any more information about the significance of the name.

Now came one of the most dangerous crossings I’ve encountered during my 15 years of rambling (with my legs). The gate opens right out onto a road where the speed limit is 60mph, and you have no way of seeing what’s coming round the corner, or it seeing you. Having a hi-vis is useful in this kind of situation. Reader, I made it.

There are a number of old farm houses dotted around this walk. This is Tanners Farm, which ties in nicely with the oaks. Tanning is the job of removing moisture from animal hides in the process of producing leather. Soaking the hides in with oak bark releases the tannins from the bark and helps to waterproof the resulting leather.

It had the feel of an ancient agricultural landscape, with oak a core part of its progress over time.

The Tanners Farm section, passing beyond two large oaks, provides the best views of the entire walk. It was misty when I was there, so the views of the Downs weren’t complete. The drama is still felt, and is a reminder that one of the nicest things about walking in the Low Weald are the views of that majestic chalk whaleback.

This enticing path into oak woodland was not to be taken on this occasion.

The misty view south, with the Downs not quite making it into the scene. Another one for a spring or summer day.

So much choice. It was time to leave the Sussex Diamond Way and join the Wey-South Path.

The Wey & Arun Canal

January is too early for blackthorn, though that is changing with the march of climate change. This froth of white is actually lichen hanging over the Wey & Arun Canal.

The canal was constructed after plans were brought to Parliament all the way back in 1641 to ‘link the upper reaches of the River Wey to those of the Arun by a canal between Cranleigh and Dunsfold’:

[I]n 1785 The Arun Navigation Act was passed and the section between Pallingham and Newbridge opened two years later.

Billinghurst’s Heritage: Geoffrey Lawes, 2017, p.174

The canal began to transfer goods in 1816 when the Wey & Arun Junction Canal opened. So it took the best part of 200 years for the canal to be built (sounds like HS2). The Industrial Revolution of the 1790s changed the world in that time, but the impacts only really began to be felt a couple of decades after the 1820s when the canal was in full operation. It closed in 1888 – two centuries of planning, sixty years of action.

I passed these dead oak trees covered in an orange algae (I presume). I expect oak would have been one of the resources transported up and down the canal. The oak woodlands around Billingshurst, which covered a far greater area then, would have been felled, debarked and planked, their produce taken upstream to the Thames’ shipyards, or south to the Solent in Hampshire where international trade could have taken place. My understanding of the specifics is limited, so I’m generalising a bit, but Lawes States that most trade ‘was from London, mainly coal and groceries, porter beer and pottery’ (Lawes, p. 176). Lawes also confirms that the canal gave access to Littlehampton, Portsmouth, Chichester and Arundel via other water-links that could connect with the Wey & Arun Canal.

Ash trees would have been useful also, particularly for tool handles. One way to identify a distant ash tree in wet winter weather is the yellow glow on the outermost branches. These are xanthoria or sunburst lichens which of course thrive in wet weather. I would say this was a significant ash tree, and possibly had been pollarded, due to the branching taking place so low down on the trunk.

The Arun mocks the canal with its swooping bends as it takes its wild course through the outskirts of Billingshurst. The walk along this stretch was a sloshy trudge for a good while (wellies are advisable). It would be nicer in spring or summer, as all good walking guides will tell you.

The damp atmosphere around the river and canal meant the fingerposts have become home to algae, moss and lichen.

This is a large ash tree with what looks like an old hedgeline queueing behind it. To the right-hand side is what seems to be an alder, a tree that thrives in wet conditions. You can see a vehicle passing on the far left-hand side of the screen. The view of this field completely underwater during twilight is one of the more memorable scenes I can recall from travelling to Midhurst on the A272 over the years.

I passed this massive oak (it looks smaller in this image than it is in real life) several days a week between 2018 and 2022. The mud underneath is from the cattle standing there to shelter from the rain. The oak is probably around 400 years old, making this stretch of the Wey-South Path around Billingshurst a land of giants.

New Bridge only allows one car at a time, but I’d never seen the three frogs under the bridge until I did this walk.

This frog looked particularly surprised to see me.

In Billinghurst’s Heritage there’s a passage from a canal tourist in 1869 – J. B. Dashwood. He travelled along the Wey & Arun Canal one spring or summer from the Thames to the Solent. There’s a description of what our man J. B. saw with his travelling partner somewhere along this stretch. Quoted below.

At a little before 7 o’clock we reached Newbridge where our boat lay quietly at her moorings, wet with the morning bath of dew…[at the first lock] we watched the lock-keeper’s wife and two pretty daughters making butter in the early morning. Though flat the meadows on either side presented such a lovely English picture with cattle dotted about, …the larks sang aloft sending forth their melodious morning song and the banks of the Canal clothed with wild flowers of every hue and colour that we enjoyed this part of our journey almost as much as any.

Lawes, 2017, p.175

I wonder if these are the water meadows being described. While searching online for more information about New Bridge I discovered plans for housing affecting the area you can see in this image on the left-hand side (northern side) of the road. There’s a beautiful timber-framed house and barn called Hole Cottage (Historic England listing), dating to the 1500s. It wouldn’t be affected directly by the housing, the arable fields out of view towards the ‘village’ would be.

The proposal is called Newbridge Park (there’s a consultation online which closed in January). This area would become a country park, which is wise. Driving along the A272, the sight of the Arun flooding these meadows is a sight to behold. No one would seriously suggest building along this floodplain (would they?), particularly with the sort of winter deluges we’re getting now in this part of England. This is a rather old oak, perhaps 200 years, sitting at one of the bends in the Arun, which is just below the ground level.

This is that sumptuous bend in the Arun, a river which I have now learned was previously known as Tarrente or Trisanton which means ‘trespasser’ (Lawes, p.174). The river does trespass widely here, or is it the other way around? We have trespassed far into the floodplain of this great river. This is another view into the area which the developers propose would become a country park. But how long would that hold for, and who would fund the management of a park here?

There was a winterbourne (I am guessing) flowing over the banks and into the canal. Growing up in Lewisham in south London, it’s so nice to see water moving of its own accord in the landscape (with respect to the work to restore the rivers in that particular borough.)

Let’s appreciate the generosity of Eileen Cherriman here, who donated a stretch of the canal in memory of her husband John.

I do enjoy bringing interpretation boards to a wider audience.

Further down the canal is another bridge at Rowner Lock.

This was restored by the Wey & Arun Canal Trust.

Returning to Billingshurst

It was time to turn away from the watercourses and back towards civilisation.

The walk turns east as it returns towards Billingshurst through farmland walked by electricity pylons.

One of the footbridges on the way back was in a state of devastation, probably due to the impact of flooding. I presume this wasn’t vandalism, but from my experience you just can’t be sure sometimes.

A rather sickly oak in a process of retrenchment as the upper branches die away. You can see more oaks dotted around beyond the hedgerow.

Looking north-east into the Weald, with the mist spoiling most of the fun.

There are some interesting boards near the A29 crossing as you enter back into Billingshurst. I’m sorry that this timber-framer didn’t make it. This settlement seems to be very old, possibly prior to the Norman Conquest of 1066. Local school children have found lots of treasure at Burnt Row in their research into the site.

Entering back into Billingshurst I enjoyed the sight of this interesting timber-framer. A couple of local lads were causing a bit of bother here and couldn’t understand what I was doing.

I haven’t featured the church in this post though it is important and has a prominent position in the village. The Causeway is a row of houses, many of them old and timber-framed, with one potential dating back to the 1200s (Historic England listing). If you needed any evidence that Billingshurst and its surrounding countryside is an oaken land, this should be it.

Thanks for reading.

The Sussex Weald

Wasps vs. spiders

Daniel Greenwood2 Comments

Saturday 31st May felt like a passing of the seasons, with spring departing and summer arriving. That could be seen in the invertebrate world, with more summer species out there in my garden.

This post is generally wasps and spiders, with some lovely little bees to calm you down afterwards.

As ever, some of these things are so ridiculously small that without magnification (in my case a macro lens) you (I) wouldn’t necessarily see them.

I should have known it was going to be a good photography day when this little jumping spider appeared in my kitchen sink! The light was rubbish so I’ve had to draw out the shadows and ‘de-noise’ these photos a bit. I’m unsure of the exact species, but I do get an apparently uncommon oak jumping spider in my garden/near the house sometimes, and this may be one.

While we’re on spiders, here’s a wasp – a spider-hunting wasp! I’ve learned that sitting down on the grass by a shrub for 15 minutes isn’t just a forest-bathing exercise, it’s also a good way to allow the life to move around you. One fence post was being explored by this very busy spider-hunter. And then, something amazing happened.

On a vacant fencepost (that’s just how I consider them now) a spider appeared at the top. The spider-hunting wasp saw their moment and burst onto the post, but missed the spider by milliseconds!

The spider-hunting wasps paralyse their prey and then carry them away to a cache. It’s pretty grizzly, but if you think that wasps have been in existence for over 100million years, and spiders, gosh, they’ve been around for over 300million (humans 200k and unlikely to make 1million at this rate), it’s something that’s been going on for a long time. If you’re annoyed about one species of wasp bothering you, imagine how spiders felt when 100million years later a spider-hunting wasp evolves from nowhere!

This is around the time when I begin to notice the very tiny yellow-faced bees (Hylaeus). I’m happy to identify them to that level, and don’t really take it any further.

And here we have some of the ‘best’ images I’ve taken this year. This yellow-faced bee is probably less than 4mm in length. Here it’s nectaring on the stamens of a cultivated garden hypericum. This was grown from a cutting taken from my grandmother-in-law’s garden and is a very good plant for pollinators, though it does need maintaining. I love the way the bee uses the stamen a bit like an Elvis impersonator on a standing microphone. Ah-huh-huh.

Here’s a bumblebee for scale!

I don’t think I’ve seen as many honey bees as in recent years, but there was a glut of them around May. There are reports of problems in the U.S. this year (bit of an understatement, considering who’s running things there).

This solitary bee was visiting the flag iris in our little pond. I do enjoy the bee’s sideways escape. Not sure of the species, might be one of the Andrena mining bees.

I will now make like this bee and leave it there. Thanks for reading.

Macro | Support my work

After 17 years, a small miracle

Daniel Greenwood10 Comments

In 2008 I took an interest in growing things.

After eating an apple one evening I decided to copy what my dad was always doing, and plant some seeds. I potted a couple of apple pips in compost and left them on the windowsill.

The pips began to grow into little seedlings. I was astonished, these pips just had to drop into some soil and trees grew.

There’s no doubt to me that this experience, along with time spent under a hawthorn and small willow tree in my parents’ garden as a child, helped me to learn to love trees. It’s the dynamism, the strength, the age, the ability to grow from seemingly nothing we could survive on.

The apple tree matured, was re-potted, and was eventually delivered to me by my parents in 2018 when I moved to Sussex. It’s about 2 metres tall and just sits in its pot, not really doing much, putting out leaves, letting the seasons come and go.

As far as I’ve known, this tree will never flower or produce fruit. That’s all I’ve ever read or been told. It needs to be grafted with some other apple, ready to produce fruit.

I blogged about the tree in 2021 as part of 30 Days Macro, when bees nectared from the leaves after they became curled up by farming ants(?) and drenched in aphid honeydew.

And so… the other morning I was sitting in my garden enjoying the spring sounds, smells, and sights of new flowers. I stood up and turned to go back inside when I saw a pink flower on the apple tree.

I couldn’t believe my eyes.

17 years of nothing, and then these bright pink and white petals appear.

It made me think of the passing of time, of all that’s happened, where I am in life. It reminded me of where the tree came from, that my dad’s annual sowing of seeds had inspired me to even consider putting that pip in the little pot of compost.

Will it produce fruit? I don’t know, I don’t actually eat apples anymore (too acidic)! I don’t even know what type of apple it is.

But it felt like a signal – life can surprise you – that trees are resilient, dynamic, and beautiful.

Thanks for reading.

Mushroom, mushroom burning bright 🍄

Daniel Greenwood3 Comments

…in the forest on a warm July afternoon.

It’s been a very busy summer so far for me of working and commuting. I had a free afternoon and so headed to my local dreamspace, but with no mushrooms on the mind – literally or figuratively.

Red admiral (phone pic)

The number of butterflies was remarkable, perhaps the sense of doom about 2023’s poor invertebrate spring had dampened my expectations too much. There were red admirals, skippers, whites of course, and even a white admiral on the sandy track. White admiral is something I don’t see that often, mainly because I lived in London for so long. Then again, it is cropping up in SE London now, which is interesting.

I was enjoying the sense of a butterfly summer, when I nearly spilled my invisible coffee at the sight of a deep red mushroom on the edge of the track.

Mushrooms, so abrupt, unapologetic. They know how welcome they are, even if you don’t realise it yourself at the time.

This was one of the summery, colourful boletes that can be found at this time of year. It’s probably a neoboletus, but my iNaturalist record is without community input and I haven’t had the time to do any research myself. So it remains an unknown jewel.

A few paces away was a more common and typical summer shroom, what I would guess is a blusher.

This short walk on the edge of the High Weald was notable for its green-ness, surely close to peaking as August nears.

We’re lucky over here that we aren’t experiencing the mega burns and record high temperatures of Greece, Italy and Arizona. You have to wonder how some of our fungi will cope with the drought and the impact on our woods. No doubt fungi will outlive humans in the long, long run (they can survive and thrive in nuclear reactors) but the heat can’t be good for the health of our woods which may struggle to adapt to pace and intensity of change.

When are we going to see serious action on climate, rather than flip-flopping by both major political parties? The kind of urgency we saw in crisis-managing COVID-19? Am I destined to see meaningful environmental policy remain as a marginal ideal in my lifetime?

No doubt fungi will rise into conservation thinking beyond the obsession with bringing back questionable, extinct species. But will that be too late as the heat rises and the woods burn?

Fungi, ever-resilient, have been found to benefit from burning in Australia, but of course that is just a handful of species.

It would be foolish no to follow one of the key messages fungi can teach us: don’t forget the present, you never know what might pop up.

Thanks for reading.

Fungi

Oak timbers: Poplar cottage

Daniel Greenwood3 Comments

In June I spent some time at the Weald & Downland Living Museum in Singleton, West Sussex. I was trying out a new wide-angle lens and in the perfect place to do so. I focused on Poplar Cottage, one of the most attractive ‘installations’ at the museum. Below are some images and also the italicised text which is written in the cottage’s binder, and therefore copyright Weald & Downland Living Museum.

Poplar Cottage was originally built on a small plot of common land on the edge of Washington Common in West Sussex. It is a building of a distinctive type with a hipped roof at one end and a gabled roof at the other. The gabled end originally contained a smoke bay.

Washington is a village at the foot of the South Downs in West Sussex, near Chanctonbury Ring. Its name relates to “Wassa’s people” rather than a place renowned for cleaning.

© Weald & Downland Living Museum

This cottage type is associated with ‘wasteland’ or ‘wayside’ encroachment onto common land. The earliest occupants of the cottage are likely to have been husbandmen or rural craftsmen. Husbandmen were socially inferior to yeomen but superior to labourers.

Many cottagers engaged in small-scale craft activities, like making wooden hoops for barrels or spars for thatching, or indeed shoe-making. We have evidence to suggest that a shoe-maker may have lived here in the 17th century.

Thanks for reading.

Oak timbers

A spring epistrophe? 🐝

Daniel Greenwood1 Comment

Another week of some sun, some showers, and some temperatures that got close to freezing. That sentence may turn out to be a spring epistrophe, but more of that later. In Scotland it reached as low as -5C. April 2023 has been a mishmash of seasons. Here’s what I encountered in my garden on 22nd April.

One of the joys of this time of year has to be the red mason bee. They are tricky to catch up with sometimes away from their bee boxes, but I managed to get close enough to this red-haired male in the skimmia hedge.

This is a mining bee that I can recall seeing each year early in the season. I’m not sure of the species, but it has a likeness to the chocolate mining bee.

I tried with this rather slender-shaped mining bee, but it didn’t like Homo sapiens approaching with a camera and macro lens, however small that equipment is nowadays.

He’s not quite in focus but this hairy-footed flower bee stopped for a snap. Never mind his hairy feet, look at those legs! They do look a bit like tiny Highland cows to me.

To finish this week’s post, I noticed this medium-sized hoverfly in the skimmia. Putting it on iNaturalist I received a quick response, identifying it as spring epistrophe. It has a huge range, from Sweden to northern Spain, and then as far as Ireland to the Caucasus (Russia). Its name obviously means it’s a spring arrival, but ‘epistrophe’: “repetition of a word or expression at the end of successive phrases, clauses, sentences, or verses especially for rhetorical or poetic effect” – via Miriam-Webster.

I’ll have to listen to the hoverfly more closely next time.

Thanks for reading.

Macro

Apaches over the Downs

Daniel Greenwood1 Comment

Steyning, West Sussex, February 2023

A walk from Steyning, along the field edge with those lumpy Downs caught in a smoke-like haze. The sun beat over the hilltops, the trees naked, grey and brown without leaves. Hazel catkins were the only decorations.

We walked through an old farm replete with buildings that seemed to be crumbling. The ground underneath was churned up with that grey gloop where the downland chalk meets the Wealden mud, a Sussex special.

The woods were cold and quiet except when labourers felled a tree somewhere in the shade of the Downs. It crashed down and broke into pieces. No doubt an ash tree, dead or dying like so many of them across this once ashy landscape.

On the banks there were the first signs of woodland spring, with dogs mercury leafing and some flowering.

Rising up towards Chanctonbury Ring, the views north were dulled by a dense grey fog that looked like London’s winter pollution belt.

A stand of dead ash trees led to the top of the Downs, where a pair of marsh tit passed between the brittle branches, calling as they moved from tree to tree.

A new vista opened out with the views south, hills folding away into the haze. Black trees breaking the lines.

Further along the South Downs Way a great roaring emerged from the south and an Apache helicopter flew low overhead. It felt too low. A flock of what I thought were starlings were spooked and seemed to fly right at the helicopter.

A second helicopter appeared, banking north and turning 90 degrees as it slid over the edge of the Downs and dropped out of view into the Weald beyond.

A man came past on a bike and stopped to speak to us, registering our surprise: ‘Have you never been here when they do that? I just hope they’re training Ukrainian soldiers and that they’ll be sending them out there.’

We heard stories of accidents that had happened when the appearance of sudden, low-flying military aircraft had disrupted the flow of civil life in the wider landscape.

Up ahead beyond the enclosed South Downs Way, cattle grazed the green hill, unperturbed by the helicopters. In the valley to the south one of the few hedgerows to be seen jangled with the key-song of corn buntings.

Thanks for reading.

The South Downs

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A tale of two hedges in the South Downs

Daniel Greenwood3 Comments

Amberley, West Sussex, February 2023

The light was low over the Arun valley. To the south the Sussex coast was a band of grey concrete, the horizon between sky and sea broken only by the pale sticks of the offshore wind farms. The Isle of Wight rested out at sea to the west like a great sleeping sloth.

The Arun’s floodplain had traces of silver, the remains of January floods. The rain had gone quiet in recent weeks, and so the wetlands were receding back to the river.

The birds were quiet, too. Every now and then a small flock broke and reformed in leafless branches, possibly linnets, goldfinches, chaffinches, it was hard to tell. A red kite followed the crests of the Downs for much of the seven I walked along the South Downs Way that day.

When I first turned off the main road onto the trail, I saw a couple planting out the fresh green leaves of cherry laurel, no doubt to screen their farmland. I gasped but said nothing. They worked at speed, focused intently on their planting. 

Cherry laurel is one of the most invasive and ecologically destructive shop-bought species in the UK. I’ve spent much of my recent working life removing it from oak woods. I firmly believe it should be banned from sale. Holly and yew do just as good a job as screening hedges and are nowhere near as destructive. England’s most ecologically rich and diverse woodlands are usually oak, a tree that loses out every single time to cherry laurel. It can also become established in downlands, of which the South Downs are famous.

A couple of weeks ago I was working with a group of volunteers pulling cherry laurel saplings from an ancient oak woodland that holds a diversity of broad-leaved tree species, namely: oak, ash, wych elm, hazel, holly, yew, field maple, hawthorn, guelder rose, and more. Where cherry laurel has become established in this woodland, all of these species would disappear without intervention. So the task was very clear – remove the self-seeded laurel saplings before they become established and reduce the woodland to a monoculture of one species.

That is the fundamental issue with monocultures of invasive species: the diversity of plants, fungi and animals dies out. That is bad for everyone and everything, even laurel eventually.

This is a tree that originates in the Balkans and is available in most garden centres as a quick-growing, glossy evergreen to create a screen in a garden. It’s also toxic.

Of course there are many species which have toxic chemicals in them, and humans are experts at introducing them to the environment, but I’ve personally felt the impact of laurel’s toxicity. 

Some years ago I somehow got a very small laurel splinter into the vein in my wrist. The following day my wrist swelled-up and a line appeared down the middle-underside of my forearm from the site of the splinter. I went to the accident and emergency and was forwarded through to a care unit where they injected my hand with antibiotics and took several tests, including an ECG. They puzzled over the issue and sent me home with a prescription of more antibiotics. Laurel wasn’t even on their register of toxic plants on that December day in 2017. The infection dropped away after the NHS’s treatment and a few weeks later a miniscule, redundant piece of laurel splinter appeared from my wrist.

Cherry laurel contains cyanide in its leaves and is used by entomologists, or so I’ve heard, to create kill jars for trapping invertebrates. That said, yew is of course also toxic, and the cherry family (which laurel resides in) holds cyanide as a defence mechanism in many of its relatives. The laurel is just doing what’s in its nature, its our role in spreading it to places where it causes harm that is an issue.

Along the South Downs Way, there was much better news. For miles I observed a trench dug into a farmer’s field and saplings of hawthorn and other native hedgerow species planted. This new hedgerow spread for several miles, an incredible contribution from the farmer, or perhaps volunteers who had been involved. Britain has lost 50% of its native mixed hedgerows since the Second World War and, in a landscape home to declining farmland birds like corn bunting and yellowhammer, this new habitat will make a huge difference.

In this case, the difference will be a positive one.

Thanks for reading.

The South Downs

SOLVED: Mystery sea creature drama in Worthing 🦀

Daniel GreenwoodLeave a comment

A new year walk on a very busy stretch of the West Sussex coastline. Proof, if you needed it, that I can do watery blogs.

Now, I am a total novice when it comes to marine ecosystems. I know mostly where the sea is and that the moon has convinced it to sway back and forth. It’s also made of water, among other things.

When it comes to crabs, however, nah.

My partner is a beach scourerer, snapping into squirrel-of-the-shore the moment she steps foot on a beach. She found this bizarre-looking shell/casing/wild packaging. I took a pic and then popped it onto iNaturalist. No dice.

I asked ‘marine ppl’ on Twitter. It appears this kind of person is particularly active on a Monday evening! Many replies later it turned out that it was a likely reproductive pouch of a female spiny spider crab. Thanks to everyone who helped.

Interestingly, a couple of other people had posted the exact same thing on the Worthing coastline in recent days. It shows the power of social media for community science and ecological learning, not just the misinformation, hate and division it seems famous for.

Sometimes iNaturalist doesn’t get the job done, often because the photos are technically inadequate. The very active ‘nature communities’ on Twitter can reach many people with helpful info, and very quickly. I find that with identification it’s a matter of several avenues of knowledge and information. In the same way that there is no one winning wildlife field guide, and definitely not for fungi.

On another note, I was kicking myself after forgetting to try and find Mercury and Venus slipping away with the Sun out at sea. Then again, a band of cloud on the horizon may have blocked any views. Maybe another time.

Thanks for reading.

December leaves 🍂

Daniel GreenwoodLeave a comment

One of my favourite things to photograph in winter is a frost-encrusted leaf. Where the frost remains long enough it allows for us non-early risers to enjoy some at lunchtime (to look at, rather than eat).

On the morning of Thursday 8th December I could hear sycamore leaves falling in the garden. There was a thick frost, the trigger for these leaves to let go.

At a nearby nature reserve I found this yellow hawthorn leaf, a colour hawthorn isn’t really known for. It’s one of the most underrated trees, despite its prevalence, and ecological and cultural value in England.

The image doesn’t do the real thing justice but even lichens get frosty sometimes. This is a little cluster of oak moss lichen that had fallen from a tree.

Thanks for reading.

Sussex Weald

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