Fatsia japonica

My attention was first drawn to this plant some years ago when I saw it growing near to Temple tube station in the heart of London. It was not long before Christmas and the creamy flowers were attacting great numbers of insects. There and then I resolved to get one for my own garden.

It is not bone hardy and may get damaged in severe weather but it is tough enough to recover and mine is doing well in a fairly exposed spot. I wouldn't be without it and for entomologists it is a must, continuing to attracting insects as the ivy begins to falter. The two genera,  Hedera (ivy) and Fatsia, are very closely related and even the non-botanist can quickly spot the resemblance when comparing the flower heads. They are, in fact, so closely related that a bi-generic hybrid (x Fatshedera) exists and is popular as a house plant.

These thought came to mind when I visited Banbury yesterday  (13th December) and saw a specimen in full bloom but with its flowers thickly encrusted with frost. Will it bounce back? This is something to be checked out on my next visit. I must also check my own garden specimen, when hopefully the flowers will be more like those shown below.

Apples and Thrushes

Byfield Pocket Park is situated on land once occupied by our railway station, sadly closed to passenger trains in May,1948. Adjacent to the station was a small orchard and a few apple trees survive, some of considerable size. They still bear a decent crop of apples and, as no one harvests them, they eventually fall to the ground to be feasted on by blackbirds, fieldfares and the occasional redwing. All these birds are types of thrush, saddled with the unfortunate Latin name of Turdus - a fact which seems not to trouble them. 

A little earlier today I visited the garden of my next-door neighbour, Margaret. She unfortunately took a fall a few days ago, fracturing her hip, and I went around with a "Get Well Soon" card. Her apple tree still bore lots of fruit, and I wasn't the only one to have noted this for fieldfares and blackbirds were tucking in. There will soon be little remaining but, in ingesting the fruit they will also have swallowed some seeds. These may be voided at some distance from the parent plant to give another source of "crab apples" (see blog for 10th December).

Holly - a more serious blog

Over the next few days people will be gathering or buying holly for festive decorations. It is a plant so familiar to us in Northamptonshire that it is worth reminding ourselves that it may not be native to our county at all. George Claridge Druce, in his "Flora of Northamptonshire" (1930) is clearly very doubtful and states (page 47): I know of no native station in Northants. (My italics). Significantly too John Clare, whose poems are liberally scattered with references to our wild plants, fails to mention it. Two other points:

!. Holly was widely used as a fodder crop in the Middle Ages, when the trees would be pollarded to encourage tender young growth (a practice apparently continuing in parts of south-west Scotland). Such a valuable tree would surely have been mentioned in, for example, John Morton's monumental work, "The Natural History of Northamptonshire", published in 1712, but its pages are silent on the subject.

2. I know of no place-names in our county - and I am open to correction on this point - referring in any way to holly. All very strange.

It is not until 1842 that we first get a  reference to holly in Northants and it comes from from the Banbury Catalogue of Thomas Beesley, a "chemist and druggist" who, though living in Oxfordshire, recorded holly from the village of Thenford.

Be that as it may, it is now common in our hedgerows and woodlands, and numerous small specimens are thriving in Byfield Pocket Park. All the seed is likely to have come from gardens in the village, or perhaps from wreaths placed in the adjacent burial ground at Christmas time. Immigrant it may be (don't tell the Daily Mail!) but it is a very welcome one. Long may it continue to thrive.

Hard Times

There was a significant overnight frost leaving the trees glistening with ice crystals and the ground iron-hard. My maternal grandmother would have much approved; in a mild winter she would shake her head. "Green Christmas, fat churchyard", was her inevitable comment. This is a very old saying, going back many centuries. Did people feel that a hard winter would somehow purge the land of pestilence, so reducing the mortality rate?                

For many of our birds these are hard times, with conditions particularly serious for tiny species such as the Long-tailed Tit. If this cold weather is prolonged the mortality rate could be high. Our garden pond is frozen but the stream is still flowing well so water is not a problem.

Holly leaves bore long whiskers of frost and the carpet of dead leaves under my feet crunched as I made my way through the Pocket Park. In these conditions tiny invertebrates tend to go deeper and deeper into the leaf litter so, scraping away the icy top layer, I brought home a bag of unfrozen material for examination. Among the species found was the extremely common woodlouse Philoscia muscorum and the equally common Carabid Notiophilus biguttatus.  The latter - a ground beetle with bulging eyes - has surprisingly not been previously recorded for the Pocket Park so the invertebrate total creeps up to 432 species.





Mahonias in the Mist

We have a Mahonia in our back garden but it is situated in a patch of poor, stony soil and does not thrive. I was pleased therefore to chance across, and photograph, some fine specimens in Banbury yesterday morning (11th December). I suspect they were examples of that fine hybrid Mahonia x media 'Charity' and they brightened up the car park on a foggy morning. It is quite a fragrant plant too but the air would have needed to be a little warmer for this to be evident.

Mahonias, named after the gardener Bernard McMahon, are in the Barberry family and consist of about 70 shrubs and small trees. The first species I ever encountered was Mahonia aquifolium, known as Oregon Grape. It is an untidy, sprawling thing, and why it was awarded the Award of Gardening Merit back in 1930 is a mystery to me. Perhaps its chief merit is that it is a tough plant, coping with dry and shady conditions. It is widely naturalised in Northamptonshire and over much of Britain, having often been planted in en masse as ground cover for game. I often see it receive visits from bees and it is apparently also self-pollinated. It certainly produces lots of berries and these can be used for jam making, a fact unaccountably overlooked by Jamie Oliver and Delia Smith.

Mahonias are found down the western seaboard of North America and are the state flower of Oregon but are also found in south and east Asia. It is tempting to think that this odd distribution may be linked to continental drift.

Be that as it may, I must feed our struggling specimen this coming spring or I may find myself charged with neglect.

Confusing Crabs

                            When icicles hang by the wall...

As kids we had to learn extracts from "Love's Labour Lost" and I can still recall most of this famous poem. I was reminded of this on my walk earlier today when I saw some Crab Apples hanging from a branch.

                       When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl...

I always assumed that the setting was a cottage by the sea and the crabs were the familiar marine crustaceans; my teacher never explained that they were Crab Apples and for some years I remained in blissful ignorance. All very confusing. I would have been further puzzled had I been familiar with a line from John Clare:

And crabs sun-reddened with a tempting cheek. 

Even more confusing is the identification of these wayside specimens. The true Crab Apple, Malus sylvestris, is quite common but I suspect that many records may be in fact be examples of Malus domestica. Clive Stace, in his "New Flora of the British Isles" (1991) says [Malus sylvestris is] ... "much over-recorded for Malus domestica". These will have grown from apple cores casually flung aside by walkers. Crab Apples are usually - but not always - spiny; "domestic" apples never are.

I was pleased also to see several oak seedlings in a hedgerow forming one border of the Pocket Park. Earlier this year a group of us planted a "Jubilee Oak" in the P.P. so, in one way and another, there should be numerous oaks for future generations, compensating for the likely loss of many Ash trees.

Quite a few flies were on the wing along a south-facing line of shrubs. Most were Anthomyids, commonly known as...er...Anthomyids. They are very tricky to identify; I can't do it, and I don't know many people who can. I had more success with a Tachinid fly, Macquartia grisea. This species is parasitic on certain beetles and is not uncommon. However I was very surprised to take a specimen so late in the year. [For the enthusiast this fly has: a dusting of hairs on its face on either side of the antennae; bright yellow calypters and halteres; hairs on the radio-cubital node and crossed apical hairs on the scutellum.] For the non-enthusiast it is a very ordinary-looking fly superficially like a House Fly - but it pleased me! It was the 431st insect/spider I've now recorded from the Pocket Park; to be still adding species in mid-December is very gratifying. 

Paperbark Maple

About four days ago I visited our churchyard here in Byfield to photograph some of the effects of snow which had fallen during the night. Instead, however, my interest was caught by the lovely bark of a Paperback Maple, Acer griseum.

When I first came to Byfield I'm fairly sure there was a commemorative plaque at the base of this tree but it isn't there now; perhaps it was of value as scrap metal! Whatever the cause of its disappearance it is a pity, as it would have indicated the age of the tree. 

The flowers of maples are not their main attraction (unless you are an insect on the look out for nectar); it is the leaves and bark which make some species garden worthy with the Paperbark Maple vying with the Snakebark Maple, Acer rufinerve, for beautiful bark.