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Mr. Richardson was our part-time gardener when we lived at the Green Walk in Chingford, north London in the 1940s.  He used to come round a couple of times a week for an afternoon’s jobbing work.  As a small boy I would often ‘help’ him with his rather set routine.  He would cut the large back lawn with a huge push mower that purred over the grass leaving it beautifully striped with silvery and darker green.  He would weed the herbaceous borders with their helianthemums and Michaelmas daisies and the vegetable patch towards the end of the garden.  He had a compost heap and a shed down there too, the latter filled with all sorts of intriguing objects like trowels, trugs, spades, sieves, forks, rakes, hoes and long, buff horsetails of bast.  This was raffia bast, used for tying plants and binding taller stems.  There were also boxes and drawers of assorted nails and screws and a strong smell of creosote used for painting the close boarded fences around the garden.

The compost heap was enclosed by large broken lumps of concrete.  These must, I think, have come from a demolished World War II air raid shelter.  Behind it, the remotest feature of the garden, was a mature laburnum tree which I regularly used to climb so that I could survey the back gardens of the houses in Mount View Road.  I remembered these from when a V2 bomb landed nearby in about 1944 and blew the backs of several of the Mount View properties, leaving them like dolls houses with one side removed. I  fell out of the laburnum once when a dead branch broke, but made a soft landing on the compost heap though I grazed my head slightly on one of the sharp edges of a concrete boulder.

One of the finest features of the garden was four or five pear trees on the fences to the east and west of the large lawn.  These had been trained as espaliers, with lateral branches reaching out horizontally, herring bone style against the fence.  In winter the year’s growth would be carefully pruned back to retain the shape of the trees and generate fruiting spurs for the summer’s pears.

This reminds me now of the well-known passage from Czech writer  Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting:

One night, for example, the tanks of a huge neighbouring country came and occupied their country [a reference to the 1968 Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia]. The shock was so great, so terrible, that for a long time no one could think about anything else. It was August, and the pears in their garden were nearly ripe. The week before, Mother had invited the local pharmacist to come and pick them. He never came, never even apologized. The fact that Mother refused to forgive him drove Karel and Marketa crazy. Everybody's thinking about tanks, and all you can think about is pears, they yelled. And when shortly afterwards they moved away, they took the memory of her pettiness with them.

But are tanks really more important than pears? As time passed, Karel realized that the answer was not so obvious as he had once thought, and he began sympathizing secretly with Mother's perspective--a big pear in the foreground and somewhere off in the distance a tank, tiny as a ladybug, ready at any moment to take wing and disappear from sight. So Mother was right after all: tanks are mortal, pears eternal.

Halfway through his afternoon stints, Mr Richardson would come indoors for a cup of tea and one of my grandmother’s rock cakes.  He usually wore a waistcoat over a striped shirt and would take his flat cap off.  He sat on a heavy slat-backed carver chair at the end of the wooden kitchen table and I was always intrigued by the fact that he had lost a finger on one hand so that he held cup and cake in an unusual way.  The chair followed us for many years, but gradually fell to pieces and finally expired on a bonfire, the kind of  bonfire Mr Richardson would have approved of, in about 2010.

Mr. Richardson, a kindly straightforward man who left a strong impression on me, lived  with his wife  (I remember no children) in Willow Street, Chingford, a small suburban road with terraced houses on either side built after the railway reached Chingford.  It was about quarter of a mile from our house. 

My first trip to Scotland was when I was sixteen.  At the end of the summer term I was asked not to return to Lancing College, my boarding school, as I was deemed ineducable.  My parents didn’t really know what to do with me but, somehow, my mother learnt of adventure training courses run by the Scottish Council of Physical Education (now Sportscotland) at Glenmore Lodge a Highland centre near Aviemore. The Glenmore Lodge I stayed in lies some seven miles east of Aviemore, and was formerly a Victorian hunting lodge.  It became a hostel when the Central Council for Physical Education acquired it in 1947. It later became the Loch Morlich Youth Hostel, and then the Cairngorm Lodge Youth Hostel (which is its name today) after a newly built  National Outdoor Training Centre was opened nearby in 1996 and was named Glenmore.

I set off by myself from home in Robertsbridge, East Sussex with rucksack and walking boots on the 600 mile train journey, mostly through the night and was met by coach with others in that fortnight’s mixed group of students.  These fellow travellers mostly came from Scotland or the north of England but, being fresh out of boarding school, I settled in straight away.

From Aviemore station we drove through Inverdruie and Coylumbridge then followed the valleys of the rivers Druie and Luineag to Loch Morlich on the 7 mile journey to the Lodge itself in Glen More.  The road ran through pine forests both natural and planted with areas of rough brown grass, moss, bilberry and heather.  Some of the drier parts were close planted with conifers of even age giving an almost scandinoir film dimension and there were scattered boggy areas of pale green and fawn. The occasional patches of the old Caledonian Forest were characterised by the open branched Scots pines quite different in shape from Scots pines elsewhere in Britain and sometimes distinguished as Pinus sylvestris subspecies scotia.

Coylumbridge is often said to be a newly built hamlet but it features on many maps of over a century old.  Today there is a four star, modern hotel there opened in 1965 on land granted by the Rothiemurchus Estate and many new buildings housing various sports and holiday activities.

On past the grey stone of the Aultnancaber hunting lodge, now a clay pigeon shooting centre, past the layby at the start of the track to what was the Cairngorm  Sled-dog Centre opened around 2001 at Moormore.  Among the conventional sled dog options, floodlit sledging was available.  The centre closed in 2020 due, according to the owners, to global warming though they claimed that snow was not essential for sled dog action.  This heavily forested area with its rows of evenly aged Scots pines is shown on the map both as the Queen’s Forest and Glen More Forest but there are often many layers of naming in the Aviemore area.  In one of the more open areas to the south of the road there is the placename Rinraoich over open, boggy ground with a small 1,000 foot summit nearby.  Rinraoich is thought to have been the location of a heather shieling, once an area of heathy pasture.

Where the road turns south towards Loch Morlich, there is the start of track on the northern side that leads to the Badaguish Centre established by The Speyside Trust in 2006 and catering for people with disabilities. This is essentially cabin style holiday accommodation with a range of appropriate activities at a site in a remote part of the Queen’s Forest. 

Visiting the web sites and other marketing manifestations of the various attractions in the area a curious paradox emerges.  The primary offer seems to be the opportunity to relax and stuff yourself with food and drink in tranquil and beautiful places, whereas the social intention of the tourist resort dimension seems to be on activity and vigorous sports and pursuits both outdoor and indoor. The centre also offers a Speyside Kitchen with a wide range of conventional restaurant dishes and a few specialities such as locally made boerewors sausage, popular in southern Africa, with sticky onion sauce.  Elsewhere fancy names have been coined for new facilities, the Pine Marten Bar and Scran for example (scran is a Scots word meaning, among other things, take away food) at the Glenmore Centre. Then there is a car park near Glenmore Lodge strangely titled the Wanderparkplatz (perhaps to make German visitors feel at home). It is as though the lovely but unpronounceable local place names in Scottish Gaelic like Cnap Coire na Spreidhe weren’t enough vocabularic variation.  A short distance further east of the Youth Hostel is the Cairngorm Reindeer Centre. To add to the etymological circus ‘reindeer’ is a word deriving from the Old Norse ‘hreindyri’.

Not far along from the road from the Badaguish turn is the sign for Rothiemurchus Centre under Castle Hill some distance from the Glenmore road.  It offers cabin and chalet accommodation to members of the British forces and associated people and organisations.  There are also picnic sites, fishing opportunities, cycle trails and orienteering facilities on or near the shores of Loch Morlich and a large sandy area called Loch Morlich Beach, said to be the highest beach in the British Isles.  One intriguing feature is a monument marked at full stop size on the map just north of the road and the western end of Loch Morlich.  The Highland Historic Environment Bureau are aware of this  but claim to know nothing much else about it – what in commemorates and how old it is.  Neither do they have a photo or drawing of it.  However, using StreetView an object like a sundial cam be seen among the pines in more or less the correct position and is apparently known as ‘The Queen’s Forest Pillar’ a name presumably connected to the fact that the surrounding area is shown on the map as The Queen’s Forest.

As outlined above the Glenmore Lodge I stayed in in 1954 is now the Loch Morlich Youth Hostel.    It later became the Cairngorm Lodge Youth Hostel.  A new build, Scotland’s National Outdoor Training Centre, a short distance to the east of Glenmore Lodge, was opened 1996 and appropriated the one word name Glenmore.  This complicated nomenclature means that many of the maps and other manifestations of the area’s geography are incorrect and/or out of date, ironic for institutions one of whose major aims is to teach hill walking visitors how to use maps.  The web site of the Reindeer Centre at Glenmore also claims that SatNav directions will take you to the wrong place – all part of the magic of the Highlands no doubt.

When we rived at Glenmore Lodge males were separated from females and we were allocated bunk beds in dormitories of half a dozen people.  Very utilitarian with bland pale blue and cream walls and rough blankets.  We all had to stow our walking boots and other outdoor accoutrements and then assemble in the dining room for our first meal for which we sat on benches on either side of long trestle tables.  Then we were mustered for briefing before outdoor activities began.  This walking, climbing, sailing and kayaking I will cover in another chapter

On some of the evenings there were social activities and I particularly remember everyone singing this song with its words and tune ringing through the ceilidh on the last evening of the course.

From Perth up to Dalwhinnie
And on to Aviemore
The hills and aw there splendour
Would set my heart a glow
You’ll make the open highway
And head for old Glenmore

The tune appears to be The Lights of Lochindaal a Scottish dance tune about Islay and I like the version on YouTube by Jack Sinclair's Television Showband.  The words I knew are thought to have been written to the tune perhaps by someone at Glenmore Lodge.  The song is a couple of lines short but the last two lines can be repeated at the end of the verse,  The hills and aw there splendour should perhaps be The hills and all their splendour.

Despite the healthy and invigorating activities, the young people on the course soon tended to form into male/female pairs.  Somehow, by the end of the first week, I found myself increasingly involved with a girl from Edinburgh called Faye.  We had very innocent, fully clothed wrestling matches on her bunk bed.  Being an only child and at boys boarding school from the age of twelve I knew very little about women either mentally or physically and, I am sure, Faye knew very little about men in those far off days when sexual relations were still very restrictive and contraception unreliable or non-existent.  I had never had a sex education lesson or a biological chat from my mother or father.  Faye was a lively and warm young woman with a posh Edinburgh accent and now, after all these years, I particularly remember the soft and fluffy very feminine pink jumper she often wore and her bright scarlet lipstick.  After we returned to our respective homes from Glen More we wrote love letters to one another from time to time and hers would always be drenched in perfume and have SWALK inscribed in that bright scarlet lipstick on the back of the envelope.

For details of varieties I am growing see end of this post

Ribes is the scientific name for plants of the currant and gooseberry family.  Ever since I was a child I have had an interest in these plants.  It started at The Green Walk in Chingford (north east London) where my grandparents lived and to which I was a frequent visitor, staying there for much longer periods after my father went into the army in the early 1940s.  I no longer visited The Green Walk and its gardens when, as a family we moved in 1951 to Bush Barn Farm on the outskirts of Robertsbridge, East Sussex.

The Green Walk had a large garden behind the house and towards the end of the plot there were tidy rows of red and black currants and gooseberries, all of which were regularly pruned by our gardener Mr Richardson and bore reasonable crops of fruit in summer which were welcome in those lean, wartime and post war years.  I remember sitting on the kitchen table helping my grandmother top and tail gooseberries with their green, oval fruit veined with white.  The dark brown remains of the petals - the front end of the gooseberry - was pinched off between the finger and thumb nails and the operation repeated on the remains of the stalk at the rear of the fruit.  They were used to make gooseberry tart and jam.  

I also spent much time crawling around and beneath the bushes and towards the end of my days at the Green Walk spent much time looking for currant clearwing moths whose larvae bore in the stems of the plants.  I saw the adult moths on one or two occasions drifting like smoke, or large mosquitoes, among the currant stems. 

In front of the house at Bush Barn Farm there was a field of currants and blackberries about 10 acres in extent.  In our first year of residence a group of local pickers was employed to harvest the fruit, but the bushes were subsequently dug up and the area converted to grass pasture.  I was allowed to drive an old Fordson tractor during clearance operations and the two farm hands would attach a lentgth of chain to each bush which I would then haul out of the ground with tractor power.

I thought little about currants and gooseberries until we arrived at Pomfret Avenue in Luton.  There was a tiny back garden here and one of the things I thought I might grow was one or two cordons of red or white currants.  For some reason the appeal of cordons had lodged in my head somewhere along the way and I had developed an enthusiasm to create them.  But we left Luton before I could do anythink g about it.

My next currant memory was during the years at the start of this century when I worked as a consultant ecologist.  Many of the sites I visited had currants (usually redcurrant, Ribes rubrum) particularly along stream sides.  Once though I discovered a bush in fruit (see below) close to the old keeper's cottage near Brede High Heath in Brede High Woods, owned and managed by the Woodland Trust.  This was possibly a cultivated survivor from the time when the cottage was lived in during the late 1920s or early 1930s.

Ribes-watching became a major preoccupation after this.  Another spur was my purchase, in summer 2022, of a dwarf raspberry called 'Yummy' which seems to have overwintered very well in a pot.  Partly too I liked the idea of them because I think my two year old grandson Remi, who visits often, might enjoy the development of edible fruits on reachable bushes.  It also gives me the opportunity to train some cordons or double cordons if I have long enough left.  If not other members of the family will be able to inherit the plants..

During March and April 2023 I really started to get into ribesology.  First I bought a white currant, then a dwarf gooseberry called 'Giggles Red' , a dwarf blackcurrant, and a much praised variety of redcurrant called 'Rovada'.  These came from different nurseries via Amazon and the leaves were mostly in bud, or just breaking.  I wondered it the nurseries that supplied them had some way of holding growth back.

One of our first problems was with the blackcurrant as a family of voles (see below) insisted on tunnelling into the soil of the pot, though they didn't touch the currant itself.  The problem was solved by Tana spreading a mulch of urine-impregnated cat litter over the soil.  The voles fled.

Some of the St Leonards redcurrants down the garden are coming in to flower.

And I photographed this wild, self-sown redcurrant bush also down the garden.  These are quite common in the Sussex countryside here but rarely, if ever, bear fruit.

Below I have listed our current currant collection and will add to it as occasion demands.

Blackcurrant 'Summer Pearls Patio'  Early April 2023.  Thompson and Morgan

Gooseberry 'Giggles Red' 24 March 2023.  Thompson and Morgan

Gooseberry from Churchland Wood

Redcurrant from The Green, St. Leonards

Redcurrant 'Rovada'.  10 April 2023.  From Fruits of Perthshire.  One of the most popular varieties, .  Rovada was developed in 1980 in the Netherlands by L.M. Wassenaar of the Institute of Horticulture and Plant Breeding.  It is the product of Fay's Prolific x Heinemann's Rote Spatlese.

Whitecurrant 'Summer Pearls White'.  23 March 2023. YouGarden

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I tottered round our dank and droopy garden this Boxing Day.  In the summer we grew, quite successfully all sorts of vegetables on old hay bales.  Any remaining were recently covered in snow.

1 May 2022.  I normally take a walk every day ranging through field, wood, lanes and footpaths within about half a kilometre of home (TQ782188).  I always take the camera and usually find something to photograph.  Here I thought I might try a sort of daily picture diary.

Germander speedwell (below) in flower is now quite abundant.  The name 'germander' comes from ancient Greek, via Old French and Old English, and means 'oak leaved'.  The leaves were thought to resemble those of oak bu, as you can see in the picture, it is not a very good fit.

 April this year has been very dry (the forecasters say we have only had about one third of the expected amount) and some of the plants locally have been showing signs of stress due to lack of water.  Insects have been scarce, though I have seen the usual spring butterfly species: red admiral, brimstone, large white, orange tip, peacock, speckled wood and comma (below).

1 March 2022 It has been a generally rather cold and drab start to the month with the mood not being helped by Russia's war on Ukraine.  I am lucky in having a small area of wood, lane and field to enjoy away from the news.  In his speech to the Commons on 8th March Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said his people would fight in the fields, the forests and on the riversides perhaps indicating how important these places are as emblematic of a home country. However, when the wind comes from the north, rattling the bare branches in Killingan Wood, it is difficult not to be saddened by the plight of those distant people in much deeper cold who have no home left to go back to.

9 March 2022  A gratefully warm day at last.  There was enough afternoon sunshine to warm my back. On my walk my spirits were lifted by the patches of sunny celandine flowers along the verges of the lane.  In the woods the white anemone flowers are a landscape feature and some of them have pink reverses to the petals and occasionally they are wholly pink. 

I found several rosettes of heavily spotted early-purple orchid leaves and the Euphorbia robbiae (Mrs Robb's bonnet spurge) is at its best in the patch by Churchland Lane.  New leaves are greening many of the trees like this hornbeam.

The garden in brightening up rapidly with several camellias now in flower as well as the Pieris 'Firecrest' at the end of the garden.  In my Square Metre Mark 2 I found a small plant of bristly ox-tongue.  This is, I think, the first time I have noticed this species in the garden and I wondered where it might have come from.  The camellia below is the white semi-double 'Yuki-botan'.

15 March 2022  At last the weather feels more spring than winter and today I saw the first brimstone butterfly on the wing - a male.  That flake of intense citrus yellow searching the garden air, looking for bluebells and buckthorn is like a flag from a starter  - spring cannot be stopped now.  In the garden it found our only plant of the grape hyacinth Muscari armeniacum.

Yesterday I found a large patch pf spring snowflake on the wood bank at the end of Churchland Lane.  A surprise as I have been past the spot a thousand times without noticing it.  

Later I ventured into Churchland Fields where the gorse is at its best and photographed a grey willow that stands alone.  One seldom sees a free-standing tree of this species as they are normally muddled up with the scrub vegetation in regenerating secondary woodland.

 9 February 2022. Although the daytime temperature has been hovering between 9 and 12 degrees, I managed today to do some useful work in the garden.  Quite suddenly snowdrops have appeared on the far side of our lane and there are several lesser periwinkle flowers by the pond.  I pottered about in the Square Metre, propping up the Cotoneaster franchetii and pruning hazels, oak, holly and hornbeam into more manageable shapes.  On the holly I though I had spotted a leaf mine of Phytomyza illicis but it is very small and I will have to wait a bit to be certain.  

31 January 2022  The end of a cold, dry month though with few frosts, all of them light.  The lack of any significant rain for many days is, I think, affecting wildlife locally.  Hazel catkins seem slower to expand, I have seen no celandine flowers, fallen leaves remain on the woodland floor like a fluffy, dry eiderdown.  Still, there have been plenty of things to see and record.

We have several mahonias in the garden and these provide nectar rich flowers from November to February inclusive.  One of the most magnificent is Mahonia x media 'Buckland' which flowers right through December and January.

Rather more modest but still an attractive plant is Mahonia japonica which flowers here from late January through March.  It often attracts bumble and honey bees and blue tits raid the flowers for nectar, or I assume this is what they are finding.

17 January 2022  Cold nights but sunny and cool days.  A badger has been digging for worms in the newly exposed stretch of verge alongside Churchland Lane

The hazel catkins in the picture above mostly are closed, though higher up the bush they are starting to open (see below), while on the opposite side of the lane, in another bush, they are fully open.

14 January 2022  

A sharp frost overnight whitened the grass in Churchland Fields and covered creeping buttercup leaves in my second Square Metre with Ice crystals like a scattering of sugar.

I noted two leaf mines in a frosted bramble leaf halfway down the garden.  I am pretty sure these have been made by the larvae of the tiny moth Stigmella aurella (there are some similar species that mine bramble leaves).  The larvae and pupae can survive frosts and, if occupied mines are brought indoors and kept in a jam jar, the moths like sooty, black sparklets will emerge often quite quickly.

One of my favourite books Birds and Berries by Barbara and David Snow (T & A D Poyser, 1988) says that black bryony berries are eaten, usually after they have been on the vine for some time, by blackbirds and thrushes, though robins will occasionally tackle them though they are rather too large to swallow in one go.

Black bryony berries (below) are toxic to humans but perhaps simply rather unpalatable to birds.  The problems with humans and, presumably with other mammals, is that the berries (and root tubers) are full of calcium oxalate that forms tiny needle-sharp crystals that can penetrate skin and cell walls causing irritation which can be dangerous internally.

Two hollies in particular have caught my eye this autumn and winter .  One was an example, probably of garden origin, with an exceptionally rich crop of berries hanging over a fence in Broad Oak Brede (below).  

The other is a young plant on the fringe of my Square Metre project where it has been bird-sown from the overhanging medlar tree (see below).  It looks like a form of Highclere holly, Ilex x altaclerensis,  Judging by the shape and texture of the leaves and the prickles it is probably a hybrid between a garden form of Highclere holly and our native species, what is known as introgressive hybridisation.  The I. x altaclerensis of horticulture is a hybrid between Ilex perado (probably from Madeira) and our native species.  It is widely planted in gardens usually as a variegated clone with almost or completely spineless leaves. 

10 January 2022   

8 January 2022  Cold, hard rain all day and all night.  I didn't venture forth.  Instead I took this picture, blurred with rain, through the French windows out into the patch of garden I spend much of each day contemplating.  

I wondered where the birds I usually see were sheltering.  The commonest species (I don't have bird feeders) are blackbirds, hedge sparrows, wrens, robins, thrushes, wood pigeons and magpies.  All the finches, except that occasional goldfinches and bullfinches, have disappeared and, of course, there are buzzards and things flying overhead that I cannot see. Indeed when the windows are covered with raindrops and my glasses are dirty I cannot see very much at all. It's cold indoors too.

6 January 2022  A sharp overnight frost leaving a white sheen over the lawn and silvered fallen leaves on the wooden ramp outside my window.

The terminal leaves of the spurge Euphorbia amygdaloides ssp. robbiae (Mrs Robb's bonnet) start to expand, in their bent over way, at this time of the year like narrow hop cones and contrasting with the old, darker green foliage.  In a few weeks they will have grown into flower heads. This is one of the earliest signs that things are starting to move towards spring.

5 January 2022  A sunny, mild morning.  In the hedge on the eastern side of the lane I found a single plant of Berberis darwinii.  Though not very obvious, I was surprised at the number of times I must have walked past it without noticing it.

We have a very active thrush, perhaps a pair, in the garden that looks as though they will soon be starting to build a nest.

3 January 2022  A change of walking route took me right to the end of Churchland Lane (nearly half a kilometre from home). A few metres up Hurst Lane, in the front garden of Tresco, I stopped to look at the fragile blossoms on the winter flowering cherry, Prunus x subhirtella 'Autumnalis Rosea'.

New Year’s Day, 1 January 2022

Must get more done this year.

On the western side of Churchland Lane there is a 30 metre stretch of verge that has been cleared right back to the hedge. This has left a 2 metre wide stretch of somewhat disturbed, dark and rich looking soil with a variety of low growing plants and the saw-shattered stumps of young trees and shrubs. A distinctive feature on New Year’s Day was the many shiny green tufts of emerging Arum maculatum, cuckoopint, leaves perhaps a hint that this newly uncovered section of this verge will reveal much of interest in coming months.

In the garden the pink, single camellia (Camellia × williamsii 'J.C. Williams') always the first, has started flowering. My late wife used to refer to this as "her camellia", though there were many more varieties in the garden. I assume it was because she could see it from the kitchen window.  The wintersweet (Chimonanthus praecox, là méi) in the flowerbed where the old shed used to stand is in full flower and casting its powerful scent on the air on milder days.  This year it has perhaps the best display I have seen but the blossoms turn to a dowdy speckled yellow if there is much frost (so far this winter we have had only one or two nights of light frost and today the temperature reached 14°C, very high for the time of year).

Killingan Wood was calm and damp, a silent army of grey trunked hornbeam trees, with a carpet of decaying fallen leaves braided by muddy tracks.

On my walk I saw very few insects. Over most of my life warm winter days like this have seen numerous small swarms of many insect species that are adapted to flying only in the winter months. But they seem to have gone. This will affect birds and spiders as well as the many small creatures that must have fed on their fallen bodies and earlier stages. The consequences for biodiversity are unknown.

Many writers reflect on the decline of the cuckoo, or the pearl bordered fritillary, but this morning I would like to pay homage to an absent friend: Gymnometriocnemus brumalis a winter flying, non-biting midge.

Maybe, if we have a cold spell, there will be a belated emergence, but I hope 2022 will not be the year when we have to say goodbye to this small winter flying insect.

 It is warm but a thin mist hangs over the countryside on this last day of March.  The forecasters say it is partly composed of dust from the Sahara desert.  Here is the view from Churchland Wood across the plough to the distant Fairlight ridge buttressing against the sea.      

 In an obscure corner of the garden the light caught a small conifer maybe 5cm tall.  An adventurous seedling that is probably a yew, but possibly something else. The leaves go all round the central stalk, though I expect this is just a characteristic of a seedling. In Bean's Trees and Shrubs it says of the mature plant "leaves spirally attached to the twigs, but by the twisting of the stalks brought more or less into two opposed ranks."  This made me look more closely at the mature yews in the garden with their bipinnate branchlets unlike the newly found seedling.

Not far away from the conifer there is a mound, the remains of many bonfires.  Tana grew potatoes on this last year and there is a fine selection of weeds each summer, well nourished by the chemicals in the ash.  Wood ash is a variable substance but usually composed mainly of calcium carbonate.  However, there is often around 4% potash and 1% phosphate plus various trace elements.  But I digress, the find of the day was a solitary flower of coltsfoot (Tussilago farfara) growing on the side of the mound.

Coltsfoot flowers appear at this time of year before the large leaves (shaped vaguely like colt's feet) and they are not at all common in our immediate area, preferring heavy clay soils.  I have never seen any in or near our garden.  A piece of root might, I suppose, have been brought in from somewhere else, but that seems unlikely.  As it is a native plant, arrival by seed would seem the most probable explanation. 

An infusion of the leaves was once widely used as a remedy for coughs and, in some places, the dried leaves were used as a substitute for tobacco and smoking it was said to help asthma sufferers.  The plant is also used to flavour coltsfoot rock made, over the last hundred years, to a secret recipe by Stockley's Sweets of Oswaldtwistle in Lancashire.  The aniseed/liquorice flavour is said to be 'strangely addictive' and it appears to be quite popular still.

Tana put some scraps out on a log just outside our back door the other day and it was not long before they attracted the attention of a vole, a bank vole, Microtus glareolus, kindly identified by British mammal expert Dr Mark Hows  (It is not easy to distinguish them from field voles, Myodes agrestis.) It was a very nervous animal but I was just able to take a snap of it through the rather smudgy glass of the kitchen window. 

There is some hopeful anticipation that the current boisterous weather will win the next storm name on the 2021 list - 'Evert' (a short form of the German name Eberhard most frequently used in Sweden and The Netherlands).  Here the wind came in strong gusts overnight and during the following day, with heavy rain showers. Sitting down the garden in the middle of the day, I was surprised that I could hear many birds singing over the deep roaring of the wind, like treble voices over a bass choir.

Great masses of air boomed over the garden from the south west keeping the tops of the trees in Churchland Wood (which I can see from my window) in constant motion.  Bright sunshine picks out much of the detail: there are fading hazel catkins, goat willow flowers and the magpie's nest in one of the rowan trees.  The birds are nowhere to be seen and may be sheltering in their insecure looking twiggy retreat, or perhaps they have a foul weather hideaway somewhere nearby.  Most mammals are hiding too but one grey squirrel went hopping over the roof of the hut.

The two tallest trees in the garden are a wild cherry grown from a fruit I found in Orlestone Forest many years ago and the silver birch in my Square Metre project,  The uppermost branches of the cherry are permanently bent over to the north, pushed that way by successive storms I suspect, especially as the trunk does not seem to move in the wind..  The birch, on the other hand grows ramrod straight though it sways, often quite violently in the wind.

An unusual effect of the wind is the way the path to the wood is strewn with pink camellia petals as though for some Oriental festival.  The petals are being blown down from a Camellia 'Garden Glory' which has been in bloom since early January and still has many more flowers to come.

Underneath a large wild cherry tree (Prunus avium), in a small open area enclosed by protruding roots, I found a large horde of cherry stones.  Each one had a hole chewed in the top.  These holes had been made by a wood mouse, or mice, (Apodemus sylvaticus) to extract the kernel within.  In summer the ground beneath this tree is strewn with fallen fruit and I wondered if the mice had collected these, maybe eaten the pulp, and then stored the cherry stones for later use.  Though there were no stones that had not been opened, considerable effort must have been involved in making such a large midden, so maybe each one was brought from a store concealed nearby and dropped outside once its contents had been consumed.

Cherry stones have a reputation for toxicity as they contain amygdalin which converts to cyanide in the body if ingested.  The amount of amygdalin in the kernels seems to vary considerable and there is a wide range of commentary on the Internet as to their relative danger to humans.  One commentator claims that "A single cherry yields roughly 0.17 grams of lethal cyanide per gram of seed, so depending on the size of the kernel, ingesting just one or two freshly crushed pits can lead to death".  Others recommend they are used to flavour cherry jam.  

However, according to Adriano Chan et al., mice are more resistant to the effects of cyanide than humans (see https://tinyurl.com/2snymrvy) so it would appear that our wood mice have not been in danger of poisoning themselves.

The old sallow tree in the middle of the garden died last summer and is now sporting a fine crop of Daedaleopsis confragosa the thin walled maze polypore or blushing bracket, the second name referring to  the pores (botanically described as 'daedaloid') on the underside that 'blush' pinkish if they are pressed with a finger.  The fungus is often found on willows and sallows (Salix spp.) but also occurs on many other trees where it causes white rot.

Enchanter's nightshade (Circaea lutetiana) is once again flowering here and there in our garden and local woods.  It is a small and modest plant with delicate pink and white flowers followed by  small burrs, each containing a seed, which cling to one's trouser legs.

It appears to have very few virtues as an edible or medicinal plant but most people wonder how it came by its mysterious English name.  This has been much discussed in various online places but generally it seems to have originated in the 16th and 17th century when many of the great European herbalists were writing about the medicinal and magical properties of plants.  Among other things they explored the works of classical authors like Dioscorides (De materia medica, AD 50 -70).  He wrote of a plant called 'kirkaia' in Greek which becomes 'Circaea' in Latin and can be translated as Circe's (plant).  Quite what this was seems uncertain but enchanter's nightshade is one candidate.

The French name for Enchanter's nightshade was, at the time of the 16th and 17th C herbalists, 'circée' and this is still current in France, Italy and French-speaking Switzerland.  The herbalists assumed this associated the plant with Circe, the enchantress of Homer's Odyssey who attracted Ulysses's men with her siren song then used a magic potion to turn them into pigs.  The derivation of circée as a plant name may be correct but I have not seen any direct evidence that this was so.  There are, however, some accounts of the plant being used by women to arouse men, though this may not pre-date the 16th century.

When the French herbalists were writing they often called Enchanter's nightshade 'circée de Paris'.  This was not only because the plant grew commonly in the Paris area (and elsewhere in most of France) but to distinguish it from upland enchanter's nightshade (Circaea alpina) known in French as 'circée des Alpes'.  Circée de Paris was written in Latin as 'circaea lutetiana', the second word deriving from 'lutetia' a Roman name for Paris, and Linnaeus used this when formally describing the plant in his Species Plantarum.

All that more or less explains the enchanter's part of the name, but why 'nightshade'?  This is quite simply because the plant was thought to be a nightshade due to the shape of its leaves resembling woody nightshade (Solanum dulcamara).  Gaspard Bauhin the 17th C Swiss botanist  called it Solanifolia Circaea (nightshade-leaved circée) for example.