IT MIGHT not look very impressive but after all the planning, weeding and preparation this is my mini-meadow; a small area of turves from a friend’s wild flower meadow surrounded by an area sown with a mix of wild flower and grass seed collected in the same meadow. I’ve left the fringes as they are; a tiny strip of woodland edge where Cow Parsley and Snowdrops are already well-established.
We sowed about a litre of seed, a third of which had been kept in the freezer until today. This should convince it that after a long hard winter spring is really here and it’s time to burst into life.
I’ve seen photographs of my friend’s wild flower meadow in full flower and it appears to be dominated by Red Clover, Dog Daisy and Yellow Rattle. The latter is important because it is semi-parasitic on grass-roots, so it helps prevent the grasses becoming lushly dominant and shading out the wild flowers.
We’ve covered the seeded area with garden netting because I know our House Sparrows will love to dust-bathe in the fine tilth and they’ll then discover the seeds and start feasting on them.
Metablobs
After all that work in the garden I felt indulging in another tutorial from Create 3D like a Superhero, making a start on this ‘Dolphin Underwater Recon Vehicle’, simply constructed from ‘primitive’ shapes – squashed spheres, a torus and a skewed cube – which you can melt into each other by hitting the ‘Metablob’ button. Just the canopy and the shark style vents to add and I can take my model to the paint shop.
8.40 a.m. THIS MORNING’S snow, settling briefly on the Blackthorn blossom by the wood when I drew this, seems out of season after the weeks of dry, settled weather we’ve been had, recently with summer temperatures. Cold air is moving in from the continent as a couple of high pressure systems over the Atlantic weaken and retreat. At least that’s as I understand it from the Met Office sequence of maps that I’ve been looking at. Warm fronts (indicated on the map by a red line with semi-circles facing in the direction of travel) followed by cold fronts (indicated by a blue line with triangles) have been moving down across the country but today the map shows an occluded front (a purple line with alternate triangles and semi-circles) across southern England.
An occluded front occurs when a second mass of air moves in so quickly that it overtakes the first. If colder air is catching up with a warm front it will plough under it, wedging itself beneath the warmer air.
If warm air is forced upwards it’s going to cool, resulting in rain, and if the rain falls through the wedge of colder air, that would, I guess, turn it to snow.
Weather maps show the situation from above but to understand a swirling meeting of air masses like an occluded front, you’d really have to see it from the side or in three dimensions.
Occlude means to block, stop up or obstruct and in today’s case I think that would refer to the cold wedge of air swirling in and cutting off the warm air from the centre of the low pressure system, a cyclone, which in the northern hemisphere moves in an anti-clockwise direction when seen from above.
THIS TREE by the old mineral railway bridge over the River Calder at Addingford mystifies me every year. It’s the combination of catkins, which I associate with willows, with broader, glossy, bright green leaves that don’t look willow-like. I stop to draw the details and my best guess is that it’s Black Poplar, Populus nigra, a tree introduced to Britain from Europe.
Chiffchaffs are now singing in the trees and bushes on the old railway embankment, along with Chaffinches. I sketch a Long-tailed Tit which flits amongst the branches as I’m drawing.
Despite its loud and cheerful song, I have difficulty spotting a Chaffinch in a hedge.
The song is so conspicuous that I expect the bird to be conspicuous too; I look in the top branches but, no, it’s singing from half way up in the hedge 12 or 15 feet tall hedge.
I think this must be the preferred height for a song post for Chaffinches because fifty yards along there’s another one, singing from exactly the same height.
I’d usually walk straight into Horbury up Quarry Hill alongside the busy A642 but I decide to give myself a bit more time today, to walk via the quiet towpath, derelict railway and Addingford Steps, returning alongside Slazenger’s playing fields and the riverbank (right). This stile is little more than 10 minutes walk, via Wynthorpe Road and across the bypass, from Horbury High Street. New footpath signs direct you to Thornes downstream or Netherton across the valley.
WE’RE HEADING down the M1 with an urgent consignment of Rhubarb and Liquorice; another batch of my Walks books for the distributor. The spring countryside is looking so inviting for walking so it’s ironic that we have to spend so much time delivering walks books when we’d really like to be getting out to walk ourselves!
Barbara is driving, giving me chance to scribble in a notebook. Scribbling is all that I can do to start with, as the little roads around home are bendy and bumpy, but I make a start with the sky, attempting to sketch and to write ‘100% cloud’, a contrast to the 100% blue sky that we had a week ago today.
When you’re getting into the mood for sketching or taking notes, you sometimes have to start with the abundantly obvious, just to break the ice and get you moving.
Dandelion and Gorse are in bloom and in the fields Oilseed Rape is starting to come into full flower so yellow is the dominant colour but in gardens there’s the dusky crimson of flowering currant alongside Magnolia and flowering cherries. Red Deadnettle brings a touch of crimson to disturbed ground by the roadside verge.
Collared Dove, Blackbird, Wood Pigeon and Carrion Crow are the birds that I jot down before we reach the motorway and, as we slow down because of a minor accident at Tinsley, I sketch Crows building their nest and a larger, domed Magpie’s nest (or possibly a Grey Squirrels drey?).
At Orgreave a large Red Fox lies by the road near the extensive open area of the old colliery site.
FOR A WEEK or two we’ve noticed the Blue Tits been flying back and forth to the nest box near our back door but we’re concerned today because bumblebees have been flying in and out and flying around the box investigating it closely and we haven’t seen the birds. On one occasion a wasp went in but soon came out again.
We’re relieved in the early evening when one of the birds appears again, making several trips in and out with food from the bird feeders. It could be that the female is sitting on eggs and the male feeding her at intervals throughout the day.
We’ve been making the most of what might be the last of a spell of dry settled weather which seems to have lasted for the best part of two months. There could even be a bit of snow coming so today I’m finishing painting the edges of the raised beds. It’s never a job that would be top of your list of essential tasks in the vegetable garden but there’s never going to be a better time to do it as not only is it so dry but there are almost no crops in the bed, so I can push back the soil to paint the timber.
It’s like clearing your desk before you start a new project.
I’M TAKING my time preparing the patch at the end of the garden that I’m hoping to transform into a wild flower meadow. It’s in such an unkempt state because this is the corner that gets used for sorting, shredding and on a couple of occasions burning the debris from trimming hedges, replacing fences and clearing the pond.
Rich disturbed soil like this makes an ideal habitat for a wild flower that I introduced year ago and have often wished that I hadn’t; Chicory. The flowers and the bitter-tasting foliage of this tall, blue-flowered relative of daisies and sunflowers have been eaten in salads and an extract of the roots (and some suggest the seeds too) has been used as a substitute for coffee.
But I’d like our mini-meadow to be diverse rather than being dominated by one plant, however useful it may be, so I’m gradually forking over the area, removing every fragment of root I can spot. This has amounted to four bagfuls of the vermicelli-like ‘roots’. Perhaps I should be turning them into coffee.
After a couple of hours weeding I realise that I need to improve my posture. This is how I picture myself when I’m digging; I feel as if I’m putting a lot of unnecessary strain on my lower back.
A sketch from a photograph that a friend took of me using an edging tool to cut turves on Monday (right) shows that I need to bend even more when I’m using a garden tool with a short handle. Most handles are too short for me, so I’m going to start looking out for a fork with an extra long handle.
On Gardeners’ World presenter Monty Don characteristically stands with his legs apart and now I can see why; the ground is a long way down and with legs apart you can get that bit nearer.
My habitual action when I’ve been digging and want to pick out a weed or rootlet is to bend over, folding myself up in a Z-shape. I guess that it would probably be better for my legs and arms if I adopted an A-shape, legs apart, trying to keep my legs straight, bending at the waist. This stretches my back, and my legs, rather than putting strain on the joints.
I’ve been trying this and I’m convinced that it’s better for my back but I still find myself automatically adopting the ‘Z’ crouch when I need to pick out a piece of root that I’ve just spotted.
“They always say that you should crouch instead of bend,” says Paul, who has helped us out so much in the garden since the autumn.
I guess that you should work in whatever way you find comfortable and that varying your working position is probably a good idea.
THIS AFTERNOON I wanted to do the simplest of drawings so I’ve gone back to ArtPen ink, a water soluble fountain pen ink, using my Pentel water-brush to turn the line to wash.
We’ve arranged these fragments of flaggy sandstone to disguise the edges of the liner of the restored pond. They should be half submerged but as we’ve had no rain the water level has sunk by about 4 inches.
The Smooth Newts have re-established themselves; I’ve just seen three of them on the shallow margin of the pond, one male waving his banner-like tail at a female. We’ve now seen most of our regular garden birds coming down to drink or bathe at the pond’s edge. Insects drink here too; I’ve just rescued a honey-bee that was struggling in the water. A single pond skater is striding across the surface.
THE SUMAC in next door’s front garden keeps its own seasons. While weeping willows are bursting into bright green leaf and birches are showering us with so much pollen that it gives some of us hay fever, the Sumac seems to be stuck in bare-branched mid-winter. In contrast, in a garden at the end of the road, a smaller Sumac has red-velvet fruiting heads.
Male and female flowers grow on different trees, so I’m wondering if this bare tree is a male and the smaller tree a female.
The Stag’s horn Sumac, Rhus typhina, a native of North America, was introduced to Britain in 1629 by John Parkinson.
30 March: after another sunny day the tips of the branches of this Sumac were bursting into leaf by late afternoon. It’s catching up with the season.
BISCUIT is grazing his way around the meadow. We’re now into spring and the evenings are getting longer, a couple of minutes each day but when the clocks go forward and British Summertime starts this weekend, it will suddenly seem as if we’ve gained a whole extra hour.
Buds are swelling on the crab apple and the hawthorn hedge is bursting into bright green leaf. We’re intending this weekend to make a definitive start in the garden. Barbara has weeded the three beds so we should be ready to get the onion sets and garlic bulbs planted. The seed potatoes can probably still be left for a while. I’d also like to get a seedbed going with whatever varieties of vegetables it is appropriate to sow now.
Fragment of a Lakeland rock (I'm not sure exactly where I picked this up now!)
I REMEMBER this rock near the lakeside at Bowness from a childhood holiday in the Lake District. It’s been smoothed and polished not only by passing glaciers but also by the effect of several decades of children sliding down it. I remember joining a queue at the top and enjoying the slide down onto the turf below so much that I went back up and queued for a second go. I have a vague memory that there were two routes down; a nursery slope and an extreme sports alternative. It seemed a wild ride after the children’s slides that I’d been used to in council recreation grounds.
Close up of the fragment, approx. 10x, showing a mineral vein, probably quartz.
Unfortunately since the 1960s, the rock has been cut through to widen the road. It’s a shame not only for the children but also because this was such a prominent example of a roche moutonnée. I always thought this meant a sheep-shaped rock, smoothed by glaciers but, according to Wikipedia, when Alpinist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure came up with the term in 1786, he was thinking of the wigs, slicked down with mutton fat, which were worn by the nobility of the day.
In my memory, this ice-smoothed rock was further up the slope from the lakeside, far enough inside the park for a soft landing on the turf below. The road and the lakeside have been re-engineered here, so that might partly account for it but apparently the lake shore itself has changed. In Eric Hardy’sThe Naturalist in Lakeland, written in 1973, I was surprised to find a brief reference to an increase in the water level of Windermere, brought about by controlling the outlet at Newby Bridge, the aim being to provide a more reliable water supply for Manchester. This would have been in the 1960s.
And he refers to the time ‘when Morecambe Bay is converted to a barrage or to storage reservoirs’, as if the matter had already been decided.
The ‘Greywackes’ of Windermere
Slaty cleavage in a fragment of rock from the edge of the car park at the Belsfield Hotel.
Jonathan Otley(1766-1856), ‘the Father of Lakeland Geology’ observed that,
” . . . the greater part of the central region of the Lake Mountains is occupied by three distinct groups of stratified rocks of a slatey texture – the Clayslate, Greenstone and Greywacke.”
Otley’s ‘Clayslates’ are what we used to call the Skiddaw Slates, which underlie the smooth bulk of the fells of the north Lake District; the ‘Greenstones’ are the Borrowdale Volcanics of the knobblier central fells and ‘Greywackes’ are the Silurian rocks of South Lakeland, now known as the Windermere Supergroup.
In Lakeland Rocks, An Introductory Guide, Alan Smith describes the Windermere formations as ‘Geologically interesting but not charismatic for the non-specialist in any way.”
Link;Rigg Side Publications also publish Alan Smith’s The Story of the Bowder Stone, The Ice Age in the Lake District and, one that appeals to me as ideal to take on a future break in the Lake District, Landscapes around Keswick; it would be great way to get to know more about the landscapes Keswick, Bassenthwaite, Derwentwater and Borrowdale.
IT MIGHT not look very impressive but after all the planning, weeding and preparation this is my mini-meadow; a small area of turves from a friend’s wild flower meadow surrounded by an area sown with a mix of wild flower and grass seed collected in the same meadow. I’ve left the fringes as they are; a tiny strip of woodland edge where Cow Parsley and Snowdrops are already well-established.
We sowed about a litre of seed, a third of which had been kept in the freezer until today. This should convince it that after a long hard winter spring is really here and it’s time to burst into life.
I’ve seen photographs of my friend’s wild flower meadow in full flower and it appears to be dominated by Red Clover, Dog Daisy and Yellow Rattle. The latter is important because it is semi-parasitic on grass-roots, so it helps prevent the grasses becoming lushly dominant and shading out the wild flowers.
We’ve covered the seeded area with garden netting because I know our House Sparrows will love to dust-bathe in the fine tilth and they’ll then discover the seeds and start feasting on them.
