Maidenhair trees with nuts

In the grounds of a school near Forest Row, East Sussex, I found a line of mature maidenhair or ginkgo trees (Ginkgo biloba).

This remarkable species from China is a survivor from the age of the dinosaurs and the only living representative of its order.  It seems probable that the species has survived, more or less unchanged, for 270,000,000 years.

The tree above had a large crop of fruit rather like small greengages.  There is a soft, fleshy outer layer (said to smell very badly, though I didn't notice anything)  with a nut inside like a small hazel nut.

Apparently the species only fruits well in Britain after warm summers.  Another manifestation of climate change?

The kernel of the seed is popular in China and Japan and it is easy to find recipes for them on the Internet.  When raw they are said to be slightly toxic (though I ate one and it had no ill effects) so they should be roasted before consumption.  All the descriptions of its taste that I have seen differ.  To my mind it was somewhere between a hazel nut and a soya bean and quite pleasant though unremarkable.

Killingan Coppice in autumn

The coppice just up our road is rapidly moving into autumn mode.

Many of the new sprouts from the cut stools have been grazed of by rabbits and/or deer and I expect this will get worse as winter comes in.  Brambles (see below) like thorny trip wires are spreading rapidly in some places growing flat over the ground like a blanket.  By this time next year walking through the area will probably be difficult.

In other places there is still much bare ground and, despite recent rains, no sign of any seedlings or woodland fungi.  The hornbeam and other tree species' seed that germinated in spring all seem to be doing well though.  On some of the bonfire sites the bonfire moss, Funaria hygrometrica, is growing thickly and has produced many bright orange sporophytes.

Here and there flowers are still brightening the ground like the pink musk mallow (Malva moschata) and the yellow smooth hawksbeard (Crepis capillaris) below.

The Selsey Bill Rant

Yesterday I made my first visit to Selsey and Selsey Bill in West Sussex. I had been working nearby and had half an hour or so to spare, so I made may way to this most southerly point in Sussex.

The final stretch of road ran through what was effectively a large, suburban-style estate on the road to nowhere with total coverage by bungalows, semis and the occasional grander structure, all with their nurseryman’s catalogue gardens. Chichester, the nearest large urban area, is some nine miles away. The gardens are more wildlife friendly though than the vast open fields spreading across the flat Manhood Peninsula to the north of Selsey.

Why, I wondered, had the planners allowed the end of this thrust of land to be covered in houses. Apart from the beach there seem to be few places to walk, though there is Pagham Harbour not to far distant by car.

The Bill itself is an extraordinary place. The road just runs out and there is a single metal bar to stop cars driving into the sea, plus a litter of tired street furniture and wonky fences. If people didn’t live there, the place would benefit from a good tsunami.

Immediately to the east of the dead end there is a playing field style open space, but everywhere else the houses and gardens encroach as closely as they can to the pebbly, breakwatered beach. Strange constructions of concrete like a parkour course allow passage on foot around the private properties and, at one place, there are some strange eyeless amphorae made of concrete and beach pebbles – perhaps an attempt to create a Mediterranean feel to the place. They reminded me of Easter Island moai staring inscrutably out to sea from their platforms.

Despite this wrecked landscape, the sun was warm, the sea blue with its waves eternally marching towards the shore. I even made a few wildlife records including some tiny wrack flies, Thoracochaeta zosterae, in washed up seaweed. The most southerly invertebrate records in Sussex no doubt.

Selsey Bill has a sadness about it and it is a kind of monument to our corporate inability to look after our own environment. It epitomises our disastrous tendency to want to cover memorable places with houses as though the residents can gain some sort of apotheosis by owning a bit of what might otherwise be a wonderful wild place (or the middle of a potato field). How very peculiar that the most southerly part of our area, the Land’s End of Sussex, should be part of somebody’s garden.

I think I shall start a campaign to forbid any building within half a mile of the sea (ports and harbours excepted). The state should buy existing houses as they are vacated and demolish them, allowing the land to re-wild in its own way but enabling the public to go there.

Nature's symmetries

People have always been fascinated by the way an often chaotic-seeming nature produces intricate patterns of organisation.

Recently I have bee intrigued by the roundness of ivy flowers and the way that insects, such as the fever flies (Dilophus febrilis) distribute themselves apparently in orderly fashion across the flower heads.

These insects - they all seem to be females - were in the flower heads for a couple of days then they all suddenly disappeared.

Caper spurge (Euphorbia lathyrus) is really a weed in our garden and does not, as sometimes suggested, drive away moles.  The leaves arrange themselves with great symmetry in four rows around the central stalk.  Very few British plants seem to be like this, but I have seen some unrelated plant species from New Zealand that are similar.

Caper spurge is not a British native but a long-standing resident species known as an archaeophyte and originally from places further south.  It is widely naturalised out side its native range.

Natural selection?

I have, this year, grown some crimson-flowered nasturtiums in a pot and, needless to say, the white butterflies soon found them.  Before long both large white (Pieris brassicae) and small white (Pieris rapae) caterpillars appeared, the large whites (below) being particularly obvious on the leaves and flowers.

This morning nearly all these caterpillars had disappeared and a couple of wasps were spotted searching the plants for more.  By the evening all I could find was a solitary small white (below) that had survived, perhaps, because of its more cryptic colouring.

Caterpillars of the white butterfly family, the Pieridae, store toxic chemicals derived from their foodplants within their bodies making them distasteful to some of their predators, mainly birds.  That is why the large white larvae feel safe to feed openly on the foodplants and have a black and yellow pattern of colour that acts as an " I taste nasty" warning.

While it may offer some protection against birds it does not stop the wasps and various other creatures that eat large white and other caterpillars, indeed the bright colour may even help them find their prey.

Since wasps and large whites have probably been around together for thousands of years, it makes one wonder about the survival of the fittest dictum.  Constant removal by wasps does not seem to have resulted in better adapted caterpillars, yet somehow they evolved to their current colour and shape.

The last laugh, perhaps, will go to the nasturtiums who have survived the onslaught and have plenty of summer time left to set seed.

Speckled bush cricket

This year seems to be a good one for crickets.  This afternoon I found this female speckled bush cricket (Leptophyes punctatissima) on a leaf of our nasturtiums.  (Much better than Mr Pooter finding a brick in the middle bed of geraniums).

I wondered if it might be eating the burgeoning population of large white caterpillars, but apparently they are wholly vegetarian.

It is remarkable how difficult it is to see such a large insect.

An urban walk round Hollington

I have always enjoyed walking round streets visited little except by those who live there.  Today I walked from Fern Road in Hollington on the western side of Hastings in a circuit around the eastern side of the Hollington Stream/Filsham Valley (see below).

Note the fine stand of self-sown buddleia at the bottom of the picture.

In some places obscure public footpaths weave among the houses, usually with close-mown lawns containing a wide range of colourful short turf plants - bird's-foot trefoil, cat's-ear, self-heal, yarrow.

On one bank by a busy road I found, among the Irish ivy, a patch of fading woodruff : not a common plant in our part of East Sussex.  The Dr Pepper can adds, I feel, to the picture with a nice touch of colour

 

Woodruff and ivy are quiet plants, but sometimes there is a hot spot, such as this duet of tufted vetch and smooth hawksbeard by a footpath.