STREET PLANTS AND STREET PEOPLE

A sow thistle growing on a wall may flower and thrive.
A human with no-where to go will be less successful.

As you know - can't fail to have missed - I am impressed by street plants. They live in shop doorways and gutters and flourish there. People don't.

You may also have gathered from previous posts that I visit Oxford from time to time. What I haven't said in these posts is that while photographing street plants, I've been taken aback by how many people live on pavements there too. I mean, in almost every town people sleep rough - but in Oxford, to an outsider like me, the visible numbers are shocking - so many doorways are every night turned into cramped, temporary bedrooms.

The sycamore tree in a drain we have followed for the last few years
still lives but is getting a bit cramped.
Drains are not meant for trees - nor shop doorways for humans.
June 2016

I don't understand. Oxford is a place with one of the best universities in the world. It's a place stodgy with outstanding brains. You'd have thought they could have set aside some time to put their intellectual heads together and work out what can be done.

Meanwhile, council funding for charities working with and for homeless people in Oxford has been cut by £1.5 million this year.

I don't want to go on about Oxford over much. It's just happens to be where I get most shocked. It's the place where I think about homelessness more than I do anywhere else - even more than where I live. It's the place where I think, over and over "what are minds for if not for addressing these kinds of basic needs?" And it's where (I expect you were waiting for this . . . ) where I know someone who is taking part in an event to raise a little of the money charities need to help those who are homeless, or newly homeless, or newly with a roof over their heads. Having somewhere to stay - though important - is not the end of the matter. It means a life-style change and that doesn't necessarily come easy to everyone.

THE BIG OXFORD SLEEP-OUT

Weymouth, June 2016

It's always hard to think of an event that will draw people to raise money, to raise consciousness, to 'make something happen' without it being naff or offensive. Selling jam to raise money for famine victims it's . . . well, there's something uncomfortable about it. So it may be that the group of students and local citizens who will be 'sleeping-out' for one night may find it a bit awkward . . . Being in the open for one night is not the same as curling up under a cardboard box every night in November. However . . . however . . . however awkward it feels . . . sometimes if money is needed you have to go with the ideas you come up with; ideas that are within your reach to fulfil

By clicking the link you'll go to the Just Giving page of a first-time fundraiser. She won't be the only one coming at this from scratch but she happens to be the one I know . . . And while each participant has been asked to raise £100 by being cold for a few hours . . . it would be good if every one of them were to raise more, for it's not for themselves they are doing it.

Here's the link.

If any of you do feel moved to give - perhaps you will think of those street plants

And how people are rarely as resilient as they are.

Money raised will be shared between

Oxford Homeless Pathways

Connection Floating Support

Aspire, Oxford

Photos in this post were taken in Dorset, not in Oxford. But these kinds of plants live in both places.

Some other Loose and Leafy Street Plant posts.

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P.S. I suddenly realise it looks a bit odd, exhorting you to give when it seems (from the list) as if I haven't done so myself! But due to the nature of my card I had to use the 'anonymous' option.

A WALK ON MAY-DAY

May Days are celebrations of . . . May  . . . and Spring (ish) . . . and manual labour.
Roman Catholic Readers may also be aware it's the Feast of St Joseph the Worker. A pretty good collection of celebrations!

For most of the day I was at the Lyme Regis Fossil Festival. It was really, really sunny - but not too hot. (Perfect.) There were masses of people. (Good for the town.) But not so many one felt crowded. (Good for me!)

I bought a T-shirt with a plesiosaur skeleton on it. Took a look at fossils for sale in a tent. (Bought none. Very particularly I didn't buy the £2,000 crocodile head from Africa.) Drank a cup of coffee from a cafetiere and went to a lecture about pre-historic creatures of the Jurassic Coast.

Then content after a happy day - came home.

Sunny days at this time of year tend to end in misty evenings and it's an inadvertent tradition that I set out to take photographs for Loose and Leafy when it's dull, or rainy or otherwise not-a-good-moment for taking photographs. My last post was sprinkled with rain-drops. Ready for this one, light decided to fail early. (If you are unfamiliar with Dorset, you may find it hard to believe this is one of the hottest and sunniest parts of the UK!)

Well, anyway . . . out I went with my camera.

 Trombidium holosericeum do you think?
(Velvet Mite)

Now the picture at the top of the post . . . you may find it a surprise here. Perhaps, you may think, this would have been more appropriate on my other blog - Message in a Milk Bottle. But if you examine it carefully you will find something very specially interesting - apart from finding a plastic cherub lying on the path. This little doll was very small - barely more than an inch from top to toe - but it showed up bright and pink against the black of tar. Unmissable.

Now do you see why it belongs here? At the bottom edge of the photo, towards the left hand edge, unbeknownst to me at the time, a tiny red creature had walked into frame. The red is extraordinary but I don't know what it is. Anyone?

This next picture . . . I know it will get much blood boiling among readers. Even I, one usually more conscious of the photographic potential in things left lying around than its status as rubbish . . . even I don't like to see washing machines or tumble driers or whacking great bits of board in ditches. But it is fascinating, isn't it? That someone has gone to the trouble of trundling it to a place where cars don't go so they can tip it under a span of honeysuckle and hawthorn.

Next up on my walk . . . 

I tend to call all sorts of plants dandelions when they aren't. Here's one of them which might be . . . or might not be. I don't mean the groundsel (with the little yellow flower) but the one with the bigger leaves. You know how I'm fascinated by urban plants? This is not one, despite the path. Behind me is the sea. Ahead you can see the blur of Alexanders. This is an urban-wannabe.

Here's another thing you will have gathered over the years - that I get to like particular trees and photograph them over and over - even if, like this one - it's impossible to photograph them other than against the light. I've watched a bud from this tree morph into a summer leaf and into autumn. And its seeds ripen. Here we go again - yet more silhouettes on this friendly sycamore.

If you are a long-time reader, you will be familiar with these kind of posts. If you are new to Loose and Leafy, perhaps I should assure you I sometimes take photos of pretty flowers in bright sunlight. In summer there will be butterflies and hoverflies and . . . and . . . things like that. And come autumn there will be hips and haws and blackberries. 

And I've noticed, over time, that despite the ordinariness of what I show you here - I've never yet found anything rare - Loose and Leafy has an indefinable yet specific identity. I reckon if I were to take its name away from the header, and that you found yourself here by chance, you'd know in a trice you'd landed on the Loose and Leafy blog. (Don't you agree?)

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PRETTY AND GRUESOME

I won't bore you with too many details - though I'm tempted to. I could go on and on about laptops. The important thing though is to say I have a new one. There! Self restraint!

Given that the only thing I want to talk about is adventures with laptops . . . I'm finding it hard to say anything useful or interesting about plants.

My old one started making fizzing electrical noises. It was quite sca . . . no!

Here are some bluebells. English or hybrid or . . . ( ? ? ? ?) - yellow pollen, drooping heads, curled up edges.

The Plantlife site has information about how to tell them from Spanish ones.

And beside them are hawthorn trees. The flower buds are pretty but once they've opened they get bashed around by rain which comes in sharp bursts then goes.

But not everything is lovely. In a moment I'm going to show you something quite gruesome. If you are brave, a doctor, a nurse or a vampire you may have no trouble . . . I'm hoping you'll be interested but I'd better let you know in advance so you won't scroll too far ahead if you don't want to. (There will be a second warning so you can keep reading for the moment)

Being at last able to use a laptop (. . . why do they sell ones so shoddy one has to take them back to the sh . . . NO!) . . . having a laptop means there's been a point to carrying my camera again so I've been pottering around without a theme; simply re-visiting old places to see what's going on and where. Remember the sycamore in a drain? It's still there!

In a minute, I'm going to show you part of a dead gull and a clear photo of some of its insides. In the meantime . . . here's an ant on a front door.

The gull was on the grassy bank beside the bluebells and hawthorn trees. Its head was missing, its guts exposed and its entrails stretched straight. I'm sparing you somewhat. This is only part of the picture - but it was an interesting opportunity.

When I found a dead goose on a beach I was able to photograph it in detail and I would have liked to do the same with this bird but instead of the trees protecting me from a new onset of rain, the onset of rain was knocking drops from an earlier shower onto my camera. So I beat a retreat.


I photographed this first. I don't know what body part it is. Do you? I've never seen the inside of a gull before!

And a few footsteps further - more bluebells.

It's all nature!

It's good to be back, it's good to be back, hello! hello!

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We go way back with the sycamore in the drain. Click here and you'll see it in April and May 2012.

TREE FOLLOWING OCTOBER - SYCAMORE BY THE SEA

I'll begin by zapping you with colour.

This is 'my' sycamore - the one I'm following; taken in the evening.

I was going to say "It's not really that colour" when I realised I don't really know what colour it is. If I were nocturnal, daytime colours would be an aberration. And in the rain it's something else.

Here it is on the morning of the same day.

Yet this isn't exactly right - for the sun was ahead on the right and not only was it lighting the tree in a morning-way, my camera and I were seeing it differently from each other..

Approached from another side, it was gently green and yellow and brown. From another a silhouette. From another it was almost wiped away in the white glare.

I can't get right close to its trunk because it's surrounded by brambles. Of the ones nearby (and there are many) these blackberries are the last to ripen. The sycamore's shade and a curve in the path combine to keep the sun away. They are sweet though.

(I know this because in a spirit of scientific enquiry I ate all the ripe ones I could reach.)

Quite a few leaves are falling onto the path before they are brown - maybe because the tree is exposed to strong, easterly winds which drive straight at it from the length of the English Channel.

Its seeds are blowing aside too. This one was a few feet beyond the over-hanging branches. One of the helicopter-blades has broken in the fall.

Peering closer one can see that while autumn hits the tree, little plants are growing through the dry and un-nutritious soil. They will be trodden down before they get very tall but for such plants the year is a perpetual spring, regardless of the official season.

We can see that one of 'our' pair of seeds on 'our' tree is broken too. I have photo after blurred photo of this same seed because the tree wouldn't stop waggling around in the wind. But I've followed the progress of this particular seed over the last couple of months so I kept going back. (One day, I'll go and they'll be gone.) 

I can't say this tree is lovely at present. As the leaves change colour (and some fall)  tightly packed clusters of seeds are revealed either against the sky or against the new yellows and paler greens. Individually they are fine - it's almost impossible to walk by without picking them up from the path and throwing them in the air to watch them spin round as they fall. But bunched up they can be ugly and unpleasant. These clusters here are looser and smaller than most - prettier.

(The reason I am able to identify one particular seed again and again is that the seeds on one low-hanging branch have developed farther apart from each other than those on the main part of the tree and one hangs at an odd angle.)

Slightly beyond the tree's shadow other plants are turning into skeletons. These dried stems will stand like this all winter.

But chicory is still flowering and hoverflies are fighting over individual flowers; dive bombing each other even if there are vacant ones on the same plant.

Why? Perhaps some flowers are already drunk-empty of  nectar and pollen? Or maybe hoverflies are jealous of each other and can't stand to see somone else on something good. Or maybe they don't like hoverflies who look different from themselves? (See below.) Anyone know?

Are you
Following a Tree?

Do join us! There's more information on the Loose and Leafy Tree Following Page.

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WHY DO LEAVES CHANGE COLOUR IN AUTUMN?

Wonderful, easy to grasp first time and brilliantly short explanation from Peter Gibbs of the BBC.

HOVER FLY SITES

Royal Entomological Society
"Over 250 species have been recorded in the UK, and more than 85 species have been found in a single garden."

British Hoverflies - Useful for ID because there are masses of pictures!

Nature Guide UK - I've only just found this site and have added it to the Loose and Leafy list of helpful and interesting ID sites. Even bigger pictures! It has other insects too. Well worth a browse.

Nature Spot

also on Nature Spot

Some Loose and Leafy blog posts where hoverflies make guest appearances.

The Next Box for Tree Following Links

will open at 7am (UK time) on 7th October 2015

and close at 7pm on the 14th.

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STREET PLANTS IN JUNE

Black Medick (Medicago lupulina)

There's a street I know where nothing ever changes. Of course, it must change. Indeed, I know it does because I went looking for prickly lettuce against a wall and it wasn't there.

But somehow the seasons get left behind. There's very little rubbish but there are always autumn leaves. How can there be leaves when other things are swept away?

Small Petty Spurge (Euphorbia peplus)

It makes it a pleasant place to walk. The houses are strong and practical but not necessarily beautiful. There are pensioners' bungalows along one side; council houses on the other. Close by there's a well-kept green with a post-box. Around the corner there are lock-up garages.

This is the street where the horse chestnut grows that went with the list of Tree Following posts for June. It's a plain and ordinary residential street - where leaves always stay in the kerb. Some must be taken away or the place would have silted up long ago and no-one would be able to pass in and out through their garden gates.

And for whatever the reason, it's a sure fire place for street plants. Maybe they are protected by the leaves? But it seems more the other way round. The leaves are caught among the stems of the plants which grow there in profusion and variety.

It's not as if there's something special about this street compared with the ones around. There are more pensioner's bungalows than in others but why would that make leaves stay? And it's not that older people are less likely to have cars to squash plants in the kerb. There are cars. What's more, some other streets have fewer because the houses there are provided with their own parking places.

Shepherd's Purse (Capsella bursa-pastoris)

I can't fathom it. But what I do know is that I could have filled post after post after post with plants which grow in this one, ordinary, residential street where the wind and sweepers leave eaves and the elements provide the best place possible for an abundance of plants in the kerbs.

* * *

You know the tree in a drain we visit from time to time? It's thriving still. This year it's filled the hole beneath the grid with leaves. Here's a new sprouting.

Sycamore tree with new, scrumpled leaves

Are there plants in the streets where you live? Or where you travel around? 

Do join us by putting your post in the Loose and Leafy Urban Wild Plant link box which will open tomorrow (21st June) and close June till 7pm on the 25th.

For more info. go to the Street Plant Bloggers Page.

Do you know the Nature Gate site? 

I really do recommend it. It's elegant and informative. It's based in Finland but many of the plants and creatures on it can be found in other countries too.

Here are it's entries for plants in this post.

Black Medick

Shepherd's Purse

Petty Spurge 

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A WALK BY THE SEA IN AUTUMN

If you are looking for the Tree Following

 Link Box for October, click here.

Usually I show you plants. I'm going to show you plants now.

Usually the pictures are silent. You don't know what I hear. What you may not realise is that in one of my favourite spots for plants, if I pop up below hedge level the sea is what I see. Often it's silent because this bit of sea is contained within a massive harbour. But today it was noisy. So were the birds. But the birds were boring. They were taking it in turns to sing or croak or caw. There were Dunnocks. (Pretty.) I think there were Robins. (The best singers of all.) There were magpies squabbling and crows shouting randomly in what they may have thought was a chorus. So I decided that in terms of a sound-scape the sea was best of all. After a couple of minutes of magpies I want to ask in an irritated way if that's all they have to say. Click, click, shriek, click. But I never tire of the sea.

Here, then is a sound track to go with the pictures. I'll not say much about the plants in thm. They're the kind you are familiar with on Loose and Leafy. So I'll leave you to listen to the sea while you scroll down the page. If you don't have the kind of computer which can cope with video clips I apologise. You'll have to imagine a gentle but persistent hum rising and falling with the wind interfering every now and then.

This is one of those plants one forgets what they are once the flowers have gone. At least I do. I find white umbeliferous plants hard to identify even in the summer.

(To see what this seed head looked like in September, click here. You'll see some seeds are still hanging on.)

Haws are falling.

Quite a lot of them are still on the trees. They are crinkling up and going brown and waggling around on their branches because they are camera shy and the wind is rising.

The round things are ivy flowers. Another mystery.

Lichen which is orange (I'd say yellow but it's called Common Orange Lichen - Xanthoria parietina) is changing to green as it gets wet in the rain and general autumn dampness. When the weather is dry, it reverts to yellow. If you look carefully you'll see the lichen on the upper part of the branch is greener than the lower part. In the summer all of this was a mixture of bright orange and yellow. (Here's a picture I took of the same lichen on a nearby branch on a dry day in January last year.)

Do I understand what lichen is? No. To me it's a science fiction creature (I say this every time because I don't get much further forward it's sort of unbelievable - a combination of algae and fungus. When it's damp the algae element (green) shows through the fungal element which contains a chemical (xanthorin) which protects it against the UV rays in sunshine. 

This is what flowers come to!

Blackberries are falling, leaving brown whirls behind. They look rubbish from a distance but are beautiful close to. (You might want to click the picture to enlarge it.)

And on the way home, out of the way of the sea, the sycamore in a drain we've been following for the last couple of years. It looks a bit tatty but autumn hasn't reached underground just yet.

* * *

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Xantharia parietina on Nature Spot

Xanthoria parietina on Wikipedia (if you're in the mood for really, really concentrating).

STUCK FOOT POST

What is a Stuck Foot Post?

A stuck foot post is where you plant your foot firmly in a roughly random place and see what you can see without moving. Best is when you plant both feet but sometimes, as in this post, where you are on a slope or some other kind of difficult ground you may need to move the other around for the sake of balance. But you mustn't move the 'stuck' foot. You can bend your body this way and that. You can lean forward and twist at the waist - but you mustn't swivel that stuck-foot.

For Loose and Leafy I tend to look at plants and insects but the idea works anywhere. Perhaps I should do a non-plant stuck-foot-post for my other blog sometime. ('Message in a Milk Bottle')

There's a Path I Know

marked by a Sycamore tree, or maybe a Maple. Either way, it produces pretty key-seeds. The base of its trunk is below the level of the path so its seeds and leaves are close over-head. I used to go there often but the cliff below is sliding towards the sea so it's no longer safe to walk there. It's tantalising.

That's where I stood. And while I stood there, a hoverfly arrived and flew between brambles (blackberry bushes) and wild clematis.

Wild clematis (Clematis vitalba) flowers are small and pretty and round and spiky. Pale yellow. Or maybe rich cream. Borderline colours are hard to describe. They are called 'Traveller's Joy'. Remember them. We'll re-visit in autumn and see their seeds.

The hoverfly went. Then it came back. Well, I can't guarantee it was exactly the same one. I'm not sure what it's doing in the picture - but it's fun to see insects getting on with their everyday lives instead of posing scenically on the flowers.

When I put a photo of it on iSpot, Wildlife Ranger commented that we can tell it's a Myathropa florea because it has a Batman sign behind its head and a hairy fringe along its abdomen. See them?

And while I stood there, taking pictures of the hoverfly, a tiny green spider came down on a thread from the sycamore, landed on my camera, hung on, then dangled below it. Gently, I lifted it by its web and put it on a bramble bush. I don't know whether it wanted to be on a bramble bush but if it didn't I expect it would have liked me to take it home even less.

I would call this a Cucumber Spider - but that's because I'm not very specific. You'd only be able to tell the difference between it and similar spiders at a micro-level. Going for the Latin - it's some kind of Araniella. BUT if I see another, I'm going to call it a Cucumber Spider regardless. It's only about 4mm long and it's bright green.

Twisting down to my left, right under the bushes, was a little chicory flower (Cichorium intybus). Chicory grows tall. On other plants the flowers are my-head-high. It was a surprise to find it at ankle level.

Swinging up and round to the right - there was this blue bit of something caught on a thorn. I don't know what it is. I didn't touch it. I left it there. It was 2 - 3 millimeters across. I doubt it has anything to do with plants. But it was there.

That's the point. It was there.

Have you written a 'Stuck Foot Post'? I'd be happy to put a link on Loose and Leafy.

All photos were taken on 26th July 2014.

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THE TREE IN THE DRAIN REACHES ITS SECOND SPRING

You may remember that as well as observing trees and bushes and plants in hedgerows and seeing what there is to see along the shore, I'm also interested in the trees and bushes and plants which grow and thrive in towns - and that one of them which fascinates me specially is the sycamore tree in a drain.

I first noticed it a year ago and wrote a post about it HERE.

This is how the tree was on April 16th 2012.

Its leaves were already quite large.

To see what it was like in  May 2012 - Go to the post

Tree in a Drain.

You will see it was already reasonably tall and healthy so talking about its second spring is not quite accurate - more, it's the second spring I've noticed it.

This post is a catch up. We'll leap from May 2012 to August - then see what's happened since. 

August 8th 2012

The tree grew so well, the space available to it became a little congested. At the top of the tree (which, I would guess, is about two feet high) leaves would rise above road level, only to be sheered off by the tyres of cars running over it. It isn't a busy street so leaves would have time to grow and poke up - but they never lasted. It wasn't an entirely healthy situation but . . . 

November 15th 2012

. . . it survived - and in November 2012 this little tree hit Autumn.

April 11th 2013

Like its larger brothers, sisters and cousins, it stayed dormant over winter. I wondered if it would grow again - indeed, for a while I mourned it, certain it wouldn't but - here it is on April 11th 2013 - leaf buds beginning to turn green. (Compare with last April - at the top of the page!)

April 23rd 2013

Towards the end of the month, the leaves are opening. Compared with last year, they are small - but the tree is older and taller so its leaves are emerging from the top of the drain sooner.

April 26th 2013

Very soon, the leaves are growing fast. The drain is filling with greenery - but above ground - little hope of rising tall. Already the leaves at its crown are squashed and torn. (See bare stalks sticking up in the middle and the flattened leaf above them in the picture?)

Pretty amazing, no?

I'm a Tree Follower - Are You?

For the same tree April/May 2012

- click HERE.

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