Life in the snow

Colours and sounds drain from the landscape as winter sets in with an unprecedented heavy snowfall at the end of November. Wading through drifts on the Common, I find myself in a silent monochrome world. Brittle autumn leaves scattered on the snow like golden freckles are the only flecks of colour. Birds flit as dark flecks between the trees: restless and nervous.

Near the frozen ponds I spotted a roe deer resting on the snow at the edge of the woods. A heron flew over the ice without settling at any of its favourite fishing spots.

Yesterday, as the snow and ice melted and water vapour wrapped the trees in a gentle mist, our walking group set out on a circuit of the Surrey Hills to celebrate the midwinter festival. We trudged past a field of rabbits, so intent on grazing the first patches of grass emerging in the thaw, they didn't seem to notice our presence.

Starkness gives winter a quiet beauty. A time of reflection perhaps, before life re-emerges from the cold dark earth in spring. I'm reflecting on the changes at the pond below - photographed yesterday and in mid-May.

In praise of trees

The trees have begun their autumn dance of colours here in the south east. Splashes of yellow, crimson and copper light my journey to work, even when the sky is overcast. First to turn were special cultivars of ash planted around our borough by a tree lover from another generation. A wave of vermillion sweeps across their emerald green canopy from September, creating a stunning visual effect.



Chris Packham has declared 2010 a mast year, producing a bountiful harvest of fungi, berries and nuts: a wild store cupboard for mammals and birds preparing to overwinter and a hearty reward for human foragers. I've enjoyed a few meals of ceps and stinging nettle soup and stashed away jars of blackberry jam and crab apple jelly.



Going to an arboretum to enjoy autumn colours is probably cheating, as most are planted with the Japanese acer palmatum whose deep red leaves outshine our native trees at this time of year. But English beech is the tree I love most in any season, with its sinuous grey stems and, in November, a shower of coppery foliage. It certainly rivals its colourful cousin, the copper beech, whose leaves have the hue of deep burgundy wine - not copper at all.


As Roger Deakin writes in Wildwood, "Trees have the capacity to rise to the heavens and to connect us to the sky, to endure, to renew, to bear fruit, and to burn and warm us through the winter". For me trees are an annual clock to tell the seasons by.

Crab apple jelly

It's been a bountiful autumn for berries, fungi and fruits of all kinds. The hedgerows are singing with bright red haws and rosehips, while apple trees hang laden with fruit.

I gathered a bag full of crab apples from a tree close to our conservation work party, hating to see the fruit falling to the ground and going to waste. Crab apple jelly was once a staple of the country kitchen preserving tradition and surely simple to make...

Over the next week, I learnt just how much labour and craft are required for a successful outcome - not to mention equipment. It took a couple of hours to quarter five pounds of fruit, discarding those that were rotten inside, and another two hours to boil them to a pulp. Meanwhile I had to acquire a muslin bag to strain the juices and find somewhere to hang it over a pan to drip for at least 12 hours. Not easy in our modest kitchen

Foolishly, I assumed that with all that apple content, the juices and sugar would set easily - a process which took another couple of hours and the addition of extra pectin in the form of apple and lemon peel (later removed).

The finished result is a clear, crimson-red jelly which tastes exquisite and goes extremely well with buttered crumpets or homemade bread. I can only assume that aficionados in earlier centuries kept servants to make it in suitably furnished kitchens - or that country housewives had a lot more time on their hands, which seems unlikely.

I love cooking with ingredients foraged from the wild and crab apple jelly must be one of the tastiest products from the British countryside, second only to gently fried ceps. But twenty-first century cooking it ain't!

spindle

Today, while I was wandering around the allotment, looking for good ideas to steal, I came across a spindle tree dripping with berries.

It must be one of the most beautiful and delicate shrubs in our autumn hedgerows. My Collins Guide to British Trees describes it as "slender, sometimes spreading and rather twiggy".

In autumn the spindle dangles small sprays of pink four-chambered berries - not edible to us, but loved by foraging birds. "Delicate" is the perfect word to describe it's exquisite fruits, fine forked twigs and scattering of willowy leaves.

This particular spindle was dotted with outgrowths of pale green lichen on its outer twigs: the intricate miniature cauliflower heads in perfect harmony with the fragile beauty of the tree.

I don't think I'm even going to try to identify the lichen. It looks like the sort of undertaking which requires a microscope and a good lichen book, neither of which I have at home.

Does not knowing the names of things diminish our appreciation of them? I'm not sure in this case. I do enjoy walking through woods or along hedgerows, recognising the trees and shrubs by their names and knowing what their wood was used for or which berries and nuts are good to eat.

But sometimes I experience a greater sense of wonder, stumbling across a plant for the first time, my head filled with the input from my senses: sight, smell, touch, sound - rather than searching its memory cells for learned information.

toxic pennies

Somewhere on a secret and rather unexpected site in south-east England, a red data book species is thriving. In the middle of a civic park, Pennyroyal (Mentha pulegium) is attracting a lot of attention from honey bees, but completely ignored by an unsuspecting public.

It is a highly aromatic plant, with delicate and intricate mauve-blue flowers, and is known to like damp places where the surrounding grass or other vegetation is short. According to the Joint Nature Conservation Committee, it declined in England and Wales by 80 per cent between 1958 and 1998.

This member of the mint family has a rich history: used as a culinary herb by the Roman and to flavour wine by the Greeks, it is also a powerful toxin said to deter fleas (pulex in latin, hence the botanical name).

For hundreds of years women have turned to Pennyroyal tea to end unwanted pregnancies. While there is no medical evidence of its abortive powers, its lethal toxicity to the liver is well documented. A woman died in the US after taking the tea for a number of days in 1995. Yet the tea is still widely available on the internet as a herbal remedy.

After a lot of effort I managed to snap a few photographs of honey bees feasting on pennyroyal nectar. I wonder if their honey will contain any of the plant's toxins?

Nirvana wrote a song called Pennyroyal Tea for their album In Utero in 1993. The meaning of the lyrics is a little hard to fathom but you get a general sense of nihilism.

But back to the endangered status of the plant in England and Wales... According to the UK Biodiversity Action Plan website, pennyroyal has suffered one of the worst declines of any UK plant in the past 50 years. It thrived on lowland commons when grazing kept other vegetation short. Since grazing in these areas has largely disappeared, other plants have shadowed it out. Its stronghold is now in the New Forest (not local parks).

Old folk names for pennyroyal include Run by the Ground, Lurk in the Ditch and Pudding Grass (it was used to season stuffings for hog's puddings). It may be deadly, but it's beautiful.

See past the sting

This wasp is "sharing" my plate of free range roast pork on a summer's day in a pub garden - with my consent! Most people fear and hate wasps and tend to swat at them wildly, making them much more likely to sting in self defence. I find them fascinating and beautiful and most of my friends and colleagues think I'm strange.

But not all of them! Buglife is running a campaign to educate people about all the helpful things wasps do for us and trying to persuade people to stop swatting them. Have a look at buglife.org.uk .

Social wasps - the kind which try to share our picnics and cream teas in late summer - eat a lot of garden "pests", including aphids, flies and caterpillars. They build intricate nests of hexagonal cells by chewing up wood and turning it into paper and there the sterile female workers tend and feed the growing grubs.

By late summer the grubs have developed into adults and left the nest. The workers are no longer being fed sugary liquid secreted by the young and need to find other sweet feasts. This is when they are most likely to come into conflict with people.

In my experience, wasps rarely sting unless provoked. If you want to lure them away from your plate, try giving them a drop of sweet drink or jam on a far corner of the table. Then you might get the chance to watch and wonder from a more comfortable distance. (don't try this if someone in your group is genuinely allergic to wasp stings.)

A pint of badger

For the first time in my life I came nose to nose with a wild badger last week - just a thin pane of glass between us. My partner had organised a surprise outing to celebrate our anniversary and it was going to be down in the woods at dusk.

The hide was sunk into the earth at the foot of a hill in the woods: a hill riddled with badger holes. Once a large sett, it was now home to one sow and two boars. A cub born early in the year, after an exceptionally hard winter, had disappeared and is thought to have died.

A ranger sprinked peanuts in front of the window and we waited for the badgers to appear. A frog hopped over the woodland floor under some bracken, a wood mouse scurried nearby and tawny owls hooted from the tree tops.

A black and white mask flashed from the top of the hill. The sow lifted her snout repeatedly to scent the air and after a few minutes followed a round-about trail down to the peanut larder in front of the hide. Eventually she was joined by one boar, then the other - both with broader shield-shaped heads.

I'm sure they sensed our presence behind the glass, even though their eyesight is poor and we were sitting in darkness. From time to time, one would stop suddenly and look up in our direction, disturbed by a slight noise - their hearing and sense of smell are very acute. But mostly they busied themselves snuffling in the leaf litter for precious peanuts.

One of the boars stood up on his back legs and reached up with his front paws onto a half hollow tree stump directly in front of us. With surprising agility and lightness of movement, he pulled himself onto the stump and spent ten minutes picking nuts out of the hollow with his snout and claws. Somehow he looked very pleased with himself.

As the darkness thickened, the badgers made a final sweep of the area for any overlooked nuts, then trotted off into the woodland for their nightly forage. What a privilege to watch them from a front row seat. We retired to the pub over the road and ordered a round of Badger ale.