going for a walk

We went for a walk after lunch, once the hailstorm had passed, to see the bluebells.  We can see two ancient woods from the sitting room windows, and a footpath lets you cut down between them, though there isn't public access into either of them.  Bluebells are an ancient woodland indicator in Essex (though not in all parts of the UK), and the woodland floor to either side of the path was thick with them.  In bright light they shine a vivid, luminous blue, while when the sun goes in they go dull, grey and half invisible.  We were lucky and as we got to that part of the walk the sun shone through, and the ground around us gleamed back at it.  The individual flowers of the native bluebell are narrow funnels, which hang down along one side of the stalk, whereas the Spanish bluebell is larger and coarser in all its parts, each flower is wider and more flared at the mouth, and they are carried all around the stalk.

The verges were thick with cow parsley, and a little white flowered thing I have known since childhood without ever learning its name.  It used to stud the hedges on the walk home from school at this time of year, back in the 1960s when infants were allowed to walk themselves a mile home from school.  At Cockaynes Wood, where what was until recently a working gravel pit has just been turned over to the Essex Wildlife Trust, we saw a lapwing.  The bluebells in Cockaynes seemed to be going over compared to those in Captains Wood and Fratinghall Wood, some already setting seed or partly obscured by the emerging bracken, though it may partly have been an optical effect because at that point the sun had gone in.  The Systems Administrator was slightly disappointed, having wanted to show them to me after tracking them as they came out, but I was quite happy, having already seen a generous display further back.

Many of the fallen trees still lie along the south-west, north-east axis, relics of the 1987 hurricane.  Some have successfully thrown up strong new trunks from the sides of their fallen original boles, the part of the root plate still in the soil being enough to support life, while the fallen trunk rooted where it touched.  Professional forestry managers will now admit that they were too quick to clean up the mess after 1987.  Wind-thrown broadleaf trees have a considerable ability to regenerate.

Skylarks were singing above the cornfields.  They seem to hold their own in this corner of Essex.  Whether the farmers clear patches for them to nest in the middle of the crop, which is a good place, relatively secluded from predators, or whether they manage in the field margins and headlands, I don't know.  We saw several hanging above the fields, and a couple dropped down into the middle of a field of some sort of grain.  We agreed that it was wonderful to see the larks, and that what we needed was an idiot's guide to the farmed countryside, since we couldn't tell wheat from barley, and don't know whether the stuff that looks like rye grass is a recently sown grain crop that just hasn't grown much yet, or whether it really is rye grass, and if so why.  It is a rather unbalanced state of knowledge to go for a walk, and be able to identify quite a few of the birds, flowers and trees, and recognise an old pollarded oak and understand why it looks like that now, without being able to identify the major economic crops growing on either side of you.

Outside Arlesford we turned a corner, and a view to the river Colne suddenly opened up.  It took me a couple of minutes to get my bearings, then the unfamiliar sights fell into place and became a landscape that I knew, with the barrier across the river at Wivenhoe, the quarry dock at Rowhedge, and the bulge of the Fingringhoe reserve.  The landscape around here is a patchwork of old quarry workings, with abrupt changes in level, and the grassed over bottoms of previous gravel pits providing thin grazing for horse paddocks.  The horses, wearing rugs in this weather, must all get supplementary feed, so the grazing is only to amuse them.  They are the lucky horses in this recession, the ones whose owners can still afford to keep them.

We met no other walkers until the home stretch, when we passed a cheerful spaniel and an old codger going in the opposite direction.  The SA and the codger exchanged courtesies about the weather, and the spaniel looked as if it would have liked to jump up at me, but its owner told it sternly that if it did he would bop it with his stick, and it desisted.  It was a nice walk, and I said that we should go again.  The SA often walks, and knows the paths around here far better than I do.  I have to be prised out of the garden, but I like it once I get going.

snowdrops

The Systems Administrator returned from Cheltenham, having had a good time catching up with old acquaintances, and hoarse with shouting after staking the modest winnings of the first three days on Synchronised at 8 to 1.  That made this year's festival self-supporting financially, after paying for the cottage, the petrol to get over there, and some extra seats for friends.  It's sort of a pity that Kauto Star didn't win, what with him being a legend in the making, and Christy Moore's The Ballad of Ruby Walsh being our new favourite song, but there you go.  I'm glad I didn't go, as I really don't like it when horses are killed, and this was a dreadful year for casualties.

The rain had lifted to a light drizzle by after lunch, so I set out to plant my 1000 common and 100 double snowdrops.  If they don't go in this weekend I won't be able to do it until Thursday, and I don't want them to sit sweating in their plastic bags for that long if I can help it.  I got this year's plants from a little family firm called Chapelgate Bulbs.  I hadn't used them before, but their website had a good feel to it, and I'd rather buy direct from a grower than via an internet retailer, as the plants should spend less time hanging around after lifting.  Chapelgate sent me an e-mail to alert me when the snowdrops were dispatched, and they arrived very neatly packed and looking healthy and fairly fresh.  In an ideal world I've have started planting them on Thursday afternoon when they arrived, and finished the job yesterday (they'd have gone back into the ground sooner and it wouldn't have been raining then) but in the real world you do gardening jobs when you can.

The double snowdrops are for the ditch bed in the back garden.  I've planted half of them so far, reflecting regretfully as I did so that their dying leaves are going to look tatty for a while, just as the primroses and violets are springing into life.  Bulbs that have been lifted in growth nearly always die down faster than undisturbed ones, unless you can replant them incredibly quickly, and this is why I leave ordering snowdrops until the main display is going over, so as not to spoil the look of the existing plants by dotting new and wilting ones among them.  The back garden is looking very nice, at ground level.  I've planted as many violets as I could afford every year for years, in a range of colours, and they are starting to seed themselves about quite generously.  The same applies to primroses, and this year a jolly little pink flowered corydalis has seeded lavishly around the border.  The Anemone blanda are just coming out, as is Omphalodes verna.  Some unspeakable creature has eaten most of the leaves of my smart evergreen ginger, but overall it's a good display, and getting ever closer to my ideal of an intricate sheet of mingled low growing plants, which between them will smother out weed seedlings before they have a chance.  Indeed, the Omphalodes is so vigorous that it is within a hair's breadth of starting to become a nuisance.  Unfortunately this year there is another fine embryonic crop of goose grass, so I need to weed that out.

The single snowdrops are for the wood, some to go where the rhododendrons were, the idea being that we will look out of the bedroom window on to a carpet of snowdrops, and some to bulk up existing groups.  My method of planting snowdrops in the wood is to space little groups of two or three bulbs at 30-45cm apart in the first instance, and see how well they do.  Areas where they bulk up quickly, make big fat leaves and look happy and healthy are clearly good places for them, and in subsequent years I can fill in the gaps.  Places where they only make miserable small leaves and never flower a couple of year down the line must be wrong for them in some way, too dark, too dry, too wet, or too something.  Bulbs can have very definite ideas about where they will and won't go.  It is fascinating to walk through a long-established bluebell wood (bluebells in Essex are frequently associated with ancient woodland.  This is not true across the whole country) and see how the bluebells grow in patches, thick as grass in some places and completely absent in others, often with sharp demarcation lines between the two.  They are a plant map of changing growing conditions on the woodland floor.  I reckon there's no point in lovingly dobbing in snowdrops ever 15cm at great effort and expense, if they are going to dwindle and die out over subsequent years.

There is a risk with this method that if they fail completely then after a few years I'll forget I ever had snowdrops there, and try again in the same place.  On the other hand, conditions change over the years as trees grow or die, and the water table is unstable, so places that were unsuitable five years ago might be fine now.  I hope that over the years, as they fill the areas where they are happy and I learn to leave the places where they aren't alone, that they will look increasingly un-planted and natural, like the bluebells do, which appear utterly right and at home in their setting, as of course they are.

When I did smoked mackeral pate on rye bread for the music society, the SA expressed a wistful desire for smoked salmon on rye.  Fortunately there is some of both left from yesterday, so we will have posh nibbles before our supper tonight.  That doesn't happen very often.

bluebells

The bluebells in the wood have opened.  It seems to me that they are early this year.  I'm sure that bluebell open days around here are normally held in early May.  A few years ago we went on holiday to Cornwall at almost exactly this time, from around 18th to 25th April, and on the last day we went to Enys, a very old, beautiful and decayed garden with a benign microclimate, famous for its bluebells, and were too early for the main display, instead just getting a tantalising hint of what it would be like in a few days, when we were back in Essex.

Anyway, the bluebells are lovely and I'm pleased to see them, early or late.  They are the native English bluebells, with flowers down one side of the nodding spikes.  The intensity of blue of a large bluebell wood is like nothing else.  Ours is not that large, and the bluebells are very particular about where they will and won't grow, so patches of blue erupt here and there where the ground conditions are precisely to their liking.

The bulbs go very deep, and are difficult to lift.  It is illegal to take bluebells from the wild anyway, but as the landowner I was trying to remove them from the line of the path and reuse them in the meadow.  They were having none of it.  The leaves will not stand trampling, so you need a path through your bluebell wood to go and look at them without treading on them.

Bluebells in Essex are strongly associated with ancient woodland (technically, woodland that has been there continuously since 1600 at the latest, though the wood may be much older than that), but in some parts of the UK bluebells aren't markers of ancient woodland.  Our little wood divides into two sections, the alder carr which I've tracked on maps back to the 1730s and is presumed ancient, and the northern section which reverted from farmland in the last century.  The bluebells stop short at the edge of the old part, and show no inclination to travel further.  I have read how this is because they lack a good seed dispersal mechanism, and find it difficult to spread.

Now this is very puzzling, because they do pop up in the garden, in the most unexpected places.  There are several thriving clumps in the gravel, under the boughs of a crab apple, and some in the borders.  Richard Mabey suggests in Flora Britannica that patches of bluebells in the countryside can show where a wood once stood, but the garden has been farmland since at least the 1730s, and is definitely not the remains of ancient woodland.  Some of the places they have chosen to live are very dry and arid and not at all similar to woodland soil.  They seem to like the company of a shrub.  Or else their seed dispersal mechanism is that some bird eats the seeds then craps while perching.  They look a bit random and unthemed growing wherever they choose of their own sweet will, but I don't mind them.  I've heard other things about bluebells.  They need shade.  They don't need shade, but hate grass, so thrive in light shade which suppresses the grass.  But I've seen them growing in grass too.  Heavy shade reduces flowering, and they persist in a leafy state multiplying by division only, which is why coppicing woodland is good for improving the bluebell display, by letting the light in.