Wildlife friendly allotments

On a bitterly cold grey morning at the end of January, the allotment was looking bleak and devoid of life, but birds were singing from the hedgerow and a great tit was checking out one of the bird boxes on the fence: time for my first step towards a wildlife friendly plot. I put up the RSPB bird feeder requested for Christmas and filled up containers of seed and mealworms.

It wasn't the first step really. I've grown fruit and veg on this plot for two years without using any pesticides or artificial fertilisers, and while I had to clear some of the scrub against the fence, I left a decent patch of nettles for ladybirds and caterpillars and a bit of bramble to shelter other creatures. The ladybird larvae gobble up all the aphids on my runner beans and sometimes get loaned out to neighbours when they're overrun with blackfly.

Most of my neighbours are excessively tidy growers, removing every weed and cutting back the grass around the edges of their plots. Sometimes I feel a tiny bit ashamed of the messy bits on mine - but the shame disappears when I encounter a giant frog sheltering under a grassy bank.

Blue slug pellets seem to be de rigeur in springtime, especially around infant pea plants on my neighbours' plots. All the slugs end up in my little organic sanctuary - at least until they tumble into my beer traps. I don't like to kill them, but at least I'm not poisoning the birds and amphibians which eat them. My efforts at persuading fellow growers to shun the poison seem to fall on deaf ears, but I did manage to rescue a clump of teasels from the autumn tidy-up next door, so there must be some kindred spirits around.

Roots

"You are old, Father Oak", the Sapling said,
"And your bark has become very gnarled."

I'm lucky to live close to one of the best collection of veteran trees in England, with thousands of carefully tended ancient oak pollards. Walking among them on a winter's day, I see contorted old men and women lifting their craggy arms towards the sky.

Few of the human characteristics of old age fit these trees. They are not decrepit, frail, senile, past their sell-by date...

In the winter of their days, after a lifetime of 500 years or more, these veterans have reached the peak of their majesty, strength and usefulness. They have become living pillars of the landscape, sheltering bats, birds and hundreds invertebrates in their trunks and limbs.

Many of the great oaks have hollow trunks, rotten branches - all have cavities, cracks and crevices in their bark. But they have weathered the storms of centuries and seen many generations of mankind born and die. In that time they have given timber (through pollarding), shade to people and livestock, homes and food for wild creatures.

Their steadfast presence in the landscape engenders a deep sense of place in me and, in middle age, a desire to put down strong roots. As something of a nomad and a keen traveller in the early part of my life, I've always been driven by a restless spirit. Looking at these old men and women of the woods, I feel a growing urge to settle in one place and let the flotsam of life settle in my branches. For the first time I am in awe of rootedness.

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.