A WILDLY STUPID IDEA

I'm walking along. It's thundering. There are drips of rain. The light is bad. And I have a good idea.

At a stretch, the idea might not be considered a bad one but only later did I reflect that it is not always necessary to put a good idea into practice the very moment you think of it.

But I did.

Why not follow a bramble flower from bud to blackberry?

There are challenges.

The first is that I need to be able to identify the flower - to go back to it and know which it is.

The next is that it needs to be high enough that it doesn't get eaten the moment it ripens.

So it has to be easily found yet not easily reached.

I'm wandering along peering at the bushes. Would I remember this . . . or . . . that . . . if I returned?

Then I saw a bee.

Follow the flower from pollination to fruit.

I photograph the bee.

How will I identify the flower?

I find a branch that leads to it.

How will I identify the branch?

I tie a piece of grass round it.

I try to re-connect the branch to the flower the bee was on.

I fail.

I've spent ages brightening pictures I took in the gloom and peering into them. It hasn't worked. The flower I chose is not the same as the one the bee was on.

Never mind.

If the grass stays there I'll have roughly the right spot.

See the bit of grass out of focus at the front?
I might never find the right flower but as long as the grass stays there
there's a bit of a chance I'll find the branch.

The pictures will be fuzzy and lacking in the best kind of detail - I've chosen flowers my camera has to zoom to.

This may be the last you even hear of the bramble. On the other hand . . . I may be asking you for recipes in the autumn.

All pictures taken on the afternoon of July 19th 2014

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My other blog is Message in a Milk Bottle

Daily photos - plants and other ordinary things.

(You can have them emailed if you wish - as you can this blog.)

NATIONAL INSECT WEEK

It's National Insect Week (23rd - 29th June 2014) - which is why all insects have gone away. On holiday, I suppose. Celebrating their smallness, their essentialness, their general interestingness. It's annoying though because I'd hoped to write you an interesting post - show some brilliant pictures - that kind of thing.

It was certainly sunny enough when I went looking. And when I went looking again. And a third time. Maybe they didn't like the cheerful breeze. Or, maybe, as I said, they'd gone on holiday. Having a special week having gone to their heads.

But I did find some.

There were masses of Swollen Thighed Beetles on white flowers. A bit small, I thought. Or maybe I remembered them wrong. Beauty expands in memory.

Swollen-thighed Beetle
(Oedemera (Oedemera) nobilis)
June 25th 2014

It's hard to catch their colours. Sometimes they seem blue; a bright, iridescent blue. And at others -they look green.

Broad Centurion Fly
(Chloromyia formosa)
June 25th 2014

The Broad Centurion Fly really is green. Or, rather, it has a green body. Its wings are brown.

Aphids and ants
June 25th 2014

Ants farming these blackfly on a broken elderberry twig are brown too. These I found specially interesting for I associate aphids with gardens, not with hedgerows. Hedgerows usually seem to hold themselves in a better, healthy balance. I'd hazard a guess this balance is disturbed when bushes and trees are trimmed back. It's only a guess though. I hope you can bear to look.

Large Skipper
(Ochlodes sylvanus)
June 25th 2014

This Large Skipper is another matter. A beautiful orange and a pick-me-up for those of you who need to recover after being confronted with aphids! The puzzle here is why it's called a 'Large' Skipper for it's only about half an inch across.

Riband Wave Moth
(Idaea aversata)
June 25th 2014

This Riband Wave Moth may have been just as beautiful when it was alive - but it's been caught in a spider's thread. (I wish spiders counted as insects because I found some interesting ones. Another time.)

There were bumble bees bent on being busy behind bramble twigs and leaves. I lurked for them a bit; then gave up. I'd already been chasing Ringlet butterflies up and down and was beginning to feel a little self-conscious. There may have been few insects but there were masses of walkers - mostly older women. Maybe National Insect Week coincides with a festival for feminine fitness for the post-sixty-fives. Some were walking in regimented hoards. No time to stop. Others were more on an amble - and a chat. It's hard to chase a butterfly and be polite.

Honey Bee
(Apis mellifera)
June 25th 2014

This honey bee was a bit easier to snap. It kept moving from blackberry flower to blackberry flower and not staying still even then but at least it stayed on the same bush long enough to show it was there. Imagine being able to fly on such thin wings!

I don't know what this is.
There are masses of them in the convolvulus flowers.
Maybe there are more elsewhere - but they show up well against the white.
They are 3mm long at the most.
June 25th 2014

And there are always these little insects on bindweed. What are they? I don't know. Just little black insects who like to live in convolvulus trumpets. Cheerful creatures. (I think.)

The slogan for National Insect Week is 'Little Things that Run the World'. Maybe this little black dot is supreme ruler of us all. I nodded respectfully. Took its portrait - and moved on.

Have you spotted any insects recently?

* * *

I've found a new site that may be of interest to readers in the British Isles (and fun to browse for others). As well as other information about butterflies and great help in identifying them, it has charts of which to look for each month. Here's a link to butterflies which fly in July.

Here's its home page - Steven Cheshire's British Butterflies

* * *

Here's the link to a previous National Insect Week post on Loose and Leafy. 'Followed Trees and Incidental Insects' (July 3rd 2012). There you can find a
Swollen-thighed Beetle -(Oedemera (Oedemera) nobilis)
Honey Bee - (Apis mellifera)
Garden Bumble Bee - (Bombus Hortorum)
Common Carder Bee - (Bombus (Thoracombus) pascuorum
Shield Bugs Mating - Palomina prasina
Darkling Beetle (Lagria hirta - I think)

* * *

With thanks, as ever, to iSpot for help with IDs.

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IF IT'S NOT ONE THING, IT'S ANOTHER

Thorncombe Woods, Dorset. April 13th 2014
Not autumn - but spring!
We'll come back to the mosses, fungi and lichens another day.

So many Tree Following posts! So many comments! It's good to see the conversations:

trees of the same kind are leafing at different times - sometimes within the same garden - why?

was Venice built on alder?

is ivy inevitably bad for a tree?

are hawthorn leaves and buds really as tasty as bread and butter?

New words - is your tree monoicous or dioicous? (Here's the Wikipedia link.)

April, for many trees, will be a month of particular change. By May - will all the snow have melted? Will blossoms have come and gone? Will southern leaves have fallen? How many bees will we have seen?

The next Tree Following link box will open at 7am (UK) time on 7th May and close 7pm (UK time) on the 14th.

* * *

New Forest, Hampshire.
April 17th 2014

Since the last post I've been pottering around Thorncombe Woods in Dorset and The New Forest in Hampshire - enjoying the mosses and lichens and fungi and flowers and insects . . . and (apart from a few familiar flowers) not knowing what any of them are. Some will appear in later posts - whether identified properly or not!

SLOWLY OUT OF THE WOODS AND INTO THE LIGHT

In the meantime, I keep finding myself looking at things other than what I've set out to find.

Hawthorn Trunk - April 13th 2014

I was planning to photograph bluebells in their variety - blue, white, pink, 'native' and Spanish - but found myself looking at the bark of a hawthorn tree instead

Snail on Alexanders (Smyrnium olusatrum) - April 13th 2014

which reminded me of the shell of an ordinary snail

Aprill 11th 2014 - See the pollen sack?

and while I was looking at snails, a bee came by

I've been trying to understand how a bee puts pollen in its sack - I think it's like this . . . With its front legs it churns pollen into the air so it lands on the hairs of its back. It then licks the feet on its middle legs to make them a bit sticky, picks up the pollen with them and pops it into the sack which is attached to its back leg. Its back leg works as a pollen press, bending to squash the pollen tight so it's delivered back to the hive in the form of compressed pellets.

Bee experts - please mark my homework! Is this a right description?

April 15th 2014

Another snail

(do you see it on the Red Valerian (Centranthus ruber)) . . .

Holly Blue butterfly (Celastrina argiolus) - April 15th 2014

and near this other snail there's a Holly Blue butterfly (Celastrina argiolus) on an Alexanders plant

and not far from the butterfly, caterpillars of the Brown Tail Moth (Euproctis chrysorrhoea) recently emerged from their gossamer tent and sitting around on brambles.

Which is where things go wrong. I never delete anything from my camera; ever; in case I delete something I don't want to delete. I'm good at mistakes. But videos take a lot of space, both on the card and on my laptop so . . . having taken several videos of caterpillars going in and out of their nest, and deciding one was so interesting I kept watching it over and over . . . and having decided it was so interesting and so clear and the camera held so steady I couldn't possibly want any of the other tries - I deleted it. I suppose there's virtue in consistency. Hey ho. Never mind.

So here's what remains -  a caterpillar pottering around in the remains of its nest. (April 16th 2014)

If it's not a bluebell, it might be bark; if it's not bark, it's a snail; if it's not a snail, it's a bee; if it's not a bee, it's a flower; if it's not a flower, it's a butterfly; if it's not a butterfly, it's a moth . . . or a twig . . . or a - there's always something to see!

* * *

Links

Identify Your Bluebells (Natural History Museum - take a look in the sidebar of that page for more bluebell info.

Identify Snails (UK)  (Bug Blog)
Key To Snails Which Live in and Around Bristol! 

Identify Gastropods (USA)  (The ID Tools site may be very useful to readers in the USA - and can be fascinating for those of us who live elsewhere too.)

Brown Tail Moths - This Wikipedia entry is interesting on two scores. (Probably more but there are two which stand out for me.) First - it shows what the moth itself looks like (very pretty) and says to look out for it in July and August. Second - it shows the impact the hairs of the caterpillar have on human skin. Which leads to the question - why did the woman in the picture have caterpillars wandering around on her neck? 

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FRUIT TREES - A GARDEN CENTRE EXPEDITION

Bumble Bee (Buff-Tailed Bumble Bee (Bombus (Bombus) terrestris?)
on Hellebore flowers in a garden centre.

I've been to a garden centre.

Garden centres aren't the usual haunt for posts on Loose and Leafy but it's often struck me some trees along an old railway line not far from where I live mark a border between the domestic and the wild. Perhaps I should trace their modern origins?

Some have their roots - literally - in gardens below the embankment. What seem to be bushes turn out to be the tops of quite hefty trees, with their trunks disappearing down through the undergrowth into a world of mown lawns and washing lines. There are what seem to be vestiges of cottage and station gardens too - like apple trees with crocosmia at the foot of one of them. And there are damsons which are good to pick and turn into jam as well as sloes.

So I went to the garden centre to visit their cousins.

Garden centres are prim places compared with the brambled acres and nettlebeds I usually feature in this blog; and much better regulated than the little street plants which feature in my urban posts. But they are handy if you want to examine a twig.

There's an apple tree whose windfalls I collect in the autumn - but its branches are high.

Apple tree bud. (Spartan)

I can examine a garden centre apple bud close-to.

At this time of year it's hard to distinguish the rail-side damson trees from others crowded around them.

Damson (Merryweather)

But, at the garden centre, they are clearly labelled.

I've not come across pears growing wild. That doesn't stop me admiring them when I come across them standing close in a garden centre row.

Pears (Commice)

The top of one of the pear trees
close up

Sometime in the next few weeks, we are likely to be joined by readers of Kitchen Garden Magazine. Welcome if you are one of them! Would you like to join us in Following a Tree for a year (and beyond!). All you have to do is to pick a tree - whether in your garden or in the wild or in a public place like a road-side or a park - and keep an eye on it for a year; notice when its leaves break open, when it blossoms, what it looks like in summer . . . what plants grow at its feet . . . whether there are lichens on its trunk . . . insects in its bark . . . birds in its branches.

I'm Following a Tree

You don't need to write anything down to follow a tree. It's all in the noticing. However, if you would like to share what you see why not think about starting a blog if you haven't one already? (If you'd appreciate a little help, do email. I can advise about setting up one like this (the format is supplied free by blogger)). Or you might like another kind - click on some of the links on the Tree Following page and be inspired! (Wordpress is popular too.)

Maybe you are on Twitter? Use #treefollowing.

On YouTube - document your tree there. If you are planting a new fruit tree in your garden - star in your own movie about digging the hole for its roots! (I recorded birds from below an elderberry tree I followed. (April 2012))

Or if you would like simply to send me a photo of your tree once in a while through the year, and maybe a paragraph about it, I'll see if I can find a space for it here on Loose and Leafy.

looseandleafy@googlemail.com

Bloggers - on Friday March 7th and on the 7th of every month from thenTree Following motif on your blog - please feel free to do so.
on, there'll be an opportunity to leave a link to your tree following posts on a linky box. (If you have not come across one before, don't worry, it's perfectly straightforward to use.) And if you'd like to use the

For more about tree following - and a growing list of tree followers - click HERE.

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BEWITCHED BY BLUE

Chicory Flowers

I could do nothing but post about chicory.

Here it grows up to about four foot high.

Hoverfly on Chicory Flower

I am not the only one who loves it.

Bee on Chicory Flower

Though my admiration does not extend to bathing in its pollen.

Willow Herb

There's a lot of blue and pink and purple around at the moment. The sky switches between blue and grey. If you look into sun-glare, it looks quite dramatic.

Except for leaves dropping from the tree in the autumn,
new ones arriving in sprin
and growing again through the summer,
this view stays much the same through the year.

This is looking up to where these plants grow.

I'm pretty much alone . . . but not quite . . . look behind me and a solitary herring gull swims away.

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IT CAUGHT MY EYE AT THE BEGINNING OF AUGUST

Crocosmia (Montbretia) on a cliff beside Portland Harbour (Dorset)

I've just returned from a holiday in 36 degrees centigrade. (29 degrees in the shade.) When the plane touched down on our return to Dorset, it was greeted with a shower so brief we might have numbered the drops if we had bothered to stop to count. Instead, we breathed deep. Grass! We could smell grass instead of dust!

There's nothing wrong with dust - it's just that green grass is . . . is . . . a bit more refreshing than dust. There's nothing wrong with hibiscus. Indeed, it smells delicious. But where the air was hot and the ground dry, few plants flowered untended. The Gardens of Babylon are remembered after centuries. Gardens are special where there are no hedgerows.

Ragwort beside Portland Harbour (Dorset). See the bee?

On the bus from the airport into Bournemouth roadsides were bright with ragwort - all of it happily looking after itself. Beside the train track, buddleia bloomed on the hills. How would Babylon have compared?

Buddleia and ragwort clash. They are not one of nature's best combinations. But there they were. If I came from a place of heat and dust, I expect I'd sniff the air as I arrived and delight in it just as much for home is home is home.

However could they have missed this when they televised the Olympic sailing?

But I was not born in Dorset so the air, the plants, the light, the sea - they bowl me over as an incredible luxury still, even after twenty five years.

Being without my camera was a condition of my going - one I willingly accepted for there are ways of seeing and of being. So there are are no holiday photos - only coming home ones. And what a home to come home to!

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FOLLOWED TREES AND INCIDENTAL INSECTS

How's your tree following?

SWOLLEN-THIGHED BEETLE
(Oedemera (Oedemera) nobilis)

When I chose my clump of elderberry trees I decided to follow a particular leaf bud on one of them. 'This,' I thought 'will be interesting'.

At first, it was. But once the leaf had opened, it got stuck where it was. Everything else grew. I keep returning to the tree to photographing the non-growing leaf - but the results are hardly riveting. I've been back to take pictures of the flowers - then they were cut off by the council as it came by on its annual trim back. Most of the blossom was shaken off when they did it so there are spikes where the flowers were and very few berries.

Fortunately, there are others close nearby so I'll add what happens to them in my extended tree.

It's a cross over moment. Berries are forming but there are flowers still. They are neither as profuse nor as big as in other years (there have been seasons when the trees and bushes look as if they are spinning big, white plates) . . . and on them . . . here! above . . . A Swollen-thighed Beetle. And just look at its thighs too! I didn't name it. I'd have called it 'The Beetle With Massive Thighs' for it isn't ill. Its legs aren't swollen because it hasn't been taking enough exercise. This is its natural state. And isn't it beautiful? I think he's a he and his presence diverted me from my elderberry intentions.

Already we were coming to the end of National Insect Week and I had already taken a few pictures of insects that morning and the day before so I hurried home and . . . began to find out (with the help of iSpot) what they are.

On blackberry flowers (where the fruits are already forming)

Honey Bee (Apis mellifera)

a Honey Bee (Apis mellifera)

And sharing a (Spear?) thistle;

on the right, a Garden Bumble bee

(Bombus hortorum)








and, on the left, a Common Carder bee
(Bombus (Thoracombus) pascuorum)

Single roses in the hedgerow

are host to Shield Bugs mating
(Palomena prasina)

or waiting (?) in the sunshine, on hips already forming

a Lagria Hirta (which, I think, is also called a 'Darkling Beetle', beautiful name, no?).

As for the tree following? Can't let go of the Sycamore. Some of the ivy has been stripped from it or cut - but, here it is still, being magnificent!

I expect I should have posted this a week ago. Never mind - here's a Happy Insect Week; after all, insects are here every week.

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