Category: Trees

Greenfinch

THIS YOUNG greenfinch had hit the glass panel in our back door. We’ve heard bangs on the patio windows on two or three occasions during the last week or so but this is the first fatality. It’s whole shape, but particularly that tail, is fishlike.

Ways to reduce casualties might include moving the bird feeders further from the house and sticking birds of prey silhouettes on the windows but the latter would have little effect if, as probably happens several times each day, the bird is being chased by a real sparrowhawk at the time.

Another young greenfinch, presumably a nest-mate of this bird, continues to come to feast at the sunflower heart feeders.

One evening Barbara saw a sparrowhawk swoop at a goldfinch on the feeder. The goldfinch swerved from side to side as it was chased at high speed down the garden and managed to escape across the meadow into the comparative safety of the wood. By this time the sparrowhawk gave up and flew up to perch on a branch.

Mole

Another casualty, but this mole may be a casualty of natural causes rather than of predation. I noticed a number of molehills in our small patch of meadow when I was mowing back the weeds and grasses on our return from holiday. It’s been very dry, so the mole might have been under some stress as its earthworm prey became inactive, but this individual appeared to be a well-fed. This week the meadow between us and the wood has been mown, so I expect that it’s possible that this mole suffered some kind of internal injury as the tractor moved across the field and fled to our garden.

But moles may be like their relatives the shrews; you find them lying dead by paths, apparently having simply expired there. Shrews are said to be distasteful to predators, so perhaps, like them, moles don’t make attractive prey items.

Horse Chestnut

Taking my mum to a hospital appointment when we got back from holiday, I found time to draw this horse chestnut from the shelter of the entrance porch, as it was raining at the time.

Growing from a narrow grass verge between building and tarmac road, it’s not surprising that the tree is showing signs of stress, putting out all those shoots from the trunk.

Parts of the Pea Flower

My mum had put some sweet peas from her garden in a vase with sprigs of lady’s mantle.

The magenta petals of the flowers are backed by the green, star-shaped sepals. The flowers grow in a raceme, a type of inflorescence in which the flowers are arranged along a central axis along the stem.

Each flower is supported by a pedicel – a small stalk.

Forest Trail

Wednesday (Mittwoch), 8 (acht) June (Juni)

View from our balcony at the Hotel Bernerhof, 1.50 pm

OUR ONLY day of the holiday without a travel pass, so, on this drizzly morning, we walk up to the Park Hotel to follow Wengen’s Forest Trail on the lower western slopes of Männlichen. You can get a trail leaflet from the Tourist Information Centre in Wengen.

It’s an easy way to get familiar with the trees and flowers of the area as 69 species are labelled with their botanical names and in German, French, English and Italian (we’re only 22 miles from the border with Italy, but that’s over the mountains and across the Rhone Valley). Hornbeam, Carpinus betulus, for example, is Charme in French, Carpino in Italian and Weissbuche or Hagebuche in German.

2.15 pm

Rhododendron hirsutum is the German Behaarte Alpenrose, French Rhododendron cilie and Rhododendron peloso in Italian. The label suggests Hirsute rhododendron as the English name but I’d go simply for Alpenrose, which is also the name of one of the hotels in Wengen, one that has been attracting guests for over a century. In winter, one visitor tells us, you can ski right down to this hotel from the slopes.

Maple Flowers

IT PROBABLY doesn’t show in these low res scans of my sketches but I’ve decided to try pencil as a change from pen. The lighter tone of pencil should make my watercolour sketches less like a coloured drawing as the line should blend in more but, I’ve made the lines darker than they should be here. This branch of Field Maple, Acer campestre, (above) currently in flower (those little greenish yellow bobbles) seemed like the ideal subject until, after I’d drawn the first leaf, the branch kept bouncing in the breeze.

At the foot of the hedgerow, Greater Stitchwort, Stellaria holostea, (left) was in flower. The flower appears to have ten petals but it’s actually made up of five deeply knotched petals.

The catkins on the female Sallows, Salix caprea, are now sprouting fluffy seeds.

Problems with Pencil

Pencil is going to take some getting used to. My B pencil soon lost its sharpness as I drew the mape and I continued using a Staedtler 0.3 mm lead Mars Micro clutch pencil. I kept breaking the lead in that as I pressed too hard as I drew, then, when I replaced it with a fresh lead that disappeared without a trace into the innards of pencil. I fell back on my ArtPen for drawing after lunch.

Sycamores

The Hospice makes the most of its leafy surroundings with plenty of windows and several small conservatories, a contrast with the tall, often inaccessible windows in the wards of the old buildings of Pinderfields Hospital just across the road.

We’re here visiting my mother-in-law Betty. They’ve done all they can for her medically in the hospital and the aim of the Hospice is now to make her comfortable rather than to bombard her with all resources of modern medicine in order to come up with a cure for her condition.

I see it as the difference between hard-nosed Health, with a capital ‘H’ – with all it’s targets for waiting lists, meeting budgets and successful outcomes – and well being, a softer concept which is more difficult to measure but is obvious when you come across it.

Leafy views and fresh flowers in vases, hair-dressing and aromatherapy sessions, have no place in the already stretched budgets of our National Health Service but they make such a difference to the way you feel, such a difference to the atmosphere of the place. The Health Service view might be to diagnose the problem and work towards a cure, seeing the patient to some extent as a problem to be solved. With the Hospice, it seems more as if the main aim is to treat you as a human being.

Having said that, we’ve got no complaints about the treatment Betty received in her months on the acute wards but the Hospice feels like the right place for her to be now.

Ash Trees at Dusk

Coxley Wood, sunset

blue titrobin and blackbird4 pm; I was going to draw birds but there was little activity by the time I’d filled up the feeders and settled down with my sketchbook. A couple of Blue Tits briefly peer out from the hedge, a Robin flits about below, a Blackbird pecks in distracted haste at the bare earth of the border while over in the wood, three Woodpigeons are clattering around in the tops of the Ashes.

Ash, Horbury CemeteryYesterday morning I was sorry to see this large Ash (left) in Horbury Cemetery being felled, one of several that are to go. It appears to be a healthy specimen but there’s no doubt that in some gale over the next decade or so it would have blown down, causing considerable damage to the houses that were built adjacent to the cemetery in the 1960s, when the tree was probably already half a century old (if I get the opportunity, I’ll count the rings). Unfortunately trees can do more than damage property and this autumn, during one evening of high winds punctuated by more powerful gusts, a huge bough from a tree at Stanley Churchyard crashed down onto a passing car, fatally injuring a woman.

Luckily the Ashes and Crack Willows in my watercolour of the lower end of Coxley Wood, don’t threaten any road or property and it’s highly unlikely that anyone would risk walking through in the kind of high winds which caused the accident at Stanley.