Tony's Blog: Dawdling

Now I'm not one to boast and people who know me well often remark on the fact. 'He has a lot to be modest about,' people often say. I am for example, modest about my dawdling. I had been tipped to represent Team GB in the dawdling event in Tokyo his year but Covid-19 means my chance has now gone.

Having said that, I did an hour's dawdling in our local pocket park today and in fact I earned bonus marks for the most boring observations of 2020.

One observation was of interest to me (but not to anyone else). There is a hedgerow of hawthorn bushes adjacent to the park's only pond, consisting almost entirely of Common Hawthorn, Crataegus monogyna, but with a single specimen of the Midland Hawthorn, Crataegus laevigata. As I have mentioned before, blossoms of the former have a pleasant enough scent but C. laevigata smells of stale fish. Whether it was a one-off atypical observation I'm not sure but the latter was attracting numerous greenbottle flies to its flowers but I saw none on the Common Hawthorn. Is this the function of the rank odour?

A greenbottle, probably a species of Eudasyphora, delves into a flower

of Midland Hawthorn, perhaps attracted by the smell of stale fish.

Stefen Hill Pocket Park, 4 May, 2020

I was recently discussing the Horse Chestnut in one of my blogs, but I failed to mention the park's other 'species', the Red Horse Chestnut, Aesculus x carnea. Rather than being a true species it is a hybrid with the common Horse Chestnut and a North American Red Buckeye, Aesculus pavia, as parents.

The appearance of Aesculus x carnea is distinctive.

Stefen Hill Pocket Park, 4 May, 2020

It is a lovely sight and, although it is attacked by the Horse Chestnut Leaf Miner, it seems rather less ravaged than the common species. I have never found viable 'conkers' inside the smooth casing.

The flowers are spectacular.

Incidentally Aesculus pavia is rarely seen although it is an attractive species in its own right.

Aesculus pavia is a relatively small species from North America.

A specimen of Prunus was bearing unusual 'fruits'. The shrub is probably Bird Cherry, Prunus padi, in which case the swollen, misshaped fruits have been attacked by the fungus Taphrina padi. This is the first time I have met this fungus.

What else? Well, not a lot really. The leaves of alder trees had, here and there, been attacked by a mite, Aceria nalepai, the resultant galls appearing as a series of symmetrical swellings down the midrib. It was not new for the park.