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The more you push, the less I want to write!

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WordPress has become intrusive and irritating.

I now get sent endless stats about viewers to my blog, plus reminders of what I used to blog in the past, as if I am incapable of remembering my own life.

I loath motivational style messages and encouragement to produce more free content for bot masters.

When I started blogging it felt like I had found a secret line of connection to like minded people across the world . I am still in contact with those original friends and one ( she will know who she is!) has become a real flesh and blood friend.

I don’t want to lose contact with any of my word press friends who regularly comment and am working out a way to do this, but since I have realised that all my gentle musings on moths and gardens are simply being used to train AI machines , I have decided to reduce the amount I blog.

I am going to block the nagging, fake messages. I wouldn’t put up with it from a real person and the AI harvesters will have to go elsewhere.

I am so glad I decided long ago never to post pictures of real people as horrible aps can now undress and distort all posted pictured with truly horrifying results.

Nothing is for free.

Every click we take, every store card we sign up for every app we download that asks for details is using our data to make money for someone somewhere.

WordPress is no different. I think I feel more betrayed because I put some poetry in my blogs and some readers were kind enough to respond with encouragement and that was ineffably sweet to a person who writes alone.

Such an emotional response is illogical, but as I am human not AI generated that is to be celebrated .

To all you humans out there – keep being illogical and I will find a way to stay in touch!

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svessons copper underwing moths staying in touch.

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I don’t have a farm .

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The results of rewilding on farms are extraordinary. The numbers of insects, birds and mammals that reappear in the countryside are staggering – and can happen so fast!

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Nature conservancy has been trying to tinker here and there with protecting one species over another for so long and yet the biodiversity of Europe has continued to nose dive. We have to try something new.

Nature reserves are not enough, we need to give nature as big a space as possible, to allow it to regain its own own balance.

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Rewilding works.

Just letting nature find its way works.

Of course this means a rethink about how we grow food – you can’t grow potatoes in a forest or wheat in a bramble patch.

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I am an optimist; humans are intensely intelligent animals, I believe we can find a way of growing enough food for everyone and still leave substantial spaces for the natural world.

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Working out how to do this is far more important than many of the pointless things humanity concerns itself with and far more exciting: as the rewards are potentially so rich and so wonderful .

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I don’t have a farm, but my garden has more and more wild corners. There are badgers, foxes, martens hedgehogs and bats in my garden because I don’t fence it and animals come through it from the countryside. I was doing a bit of weeding around a young holly bush today and I realized that the uncut grass had tunnels in it. I don’t know if they are mice, or voles. What ever they are they are welcome. We have semi feral cats in the garden too, so they will all have to take their chance together. I guess this is what rewinding looks like on a small garden scale.

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I would love to have a field to let go wild, but I don’t have the money to buy one, so I will make my garden as wild as I can.

I still want to grow a few pretty flowers and vegetables for the table and there is the agriculture/nature dilemma right there in a backyard nutshell.

Making space for one another, co-existing and not wasting potentially rich spaces on dead “tidy” weed-killed concrete/plastic grass and decking is the most that we can all do, while maybe still secretly dreaming of what we could achieve with a whole rewilded farm!

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Vampire kiss.

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The local gardens are famous at this time of year for their astonishing collection of irises.

We went before it got too hot and strolled through the most lovely corridors of flowers. The names of new varieties are fascinating and the vampire’s kiss caught my eye, but I didn’t get too close! Some irises have the most intoxicating perfume of sherbet and some have no smell at all.

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I am very conscious of the scent of flowers at the moment and am struck by how many purple flowers have heady perfumes. Only the purple petunia has scent; a purple pansy is perfumed; some ( but not all) purple irises smell of sherbet and my purple gilly flowers are full of the sweet smell of stocks. Of course this theory breaks down next to a heady pink rose or a white mock orange spray drenched in perfume, but it inspires me to inhale every flower I can at this glorious time of year.

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The unexpected (and unperfumed ) stars of the gardens were the crows. They wander from flower bed to fountain with proprietorial confidence. They walk with “hands” behind their backs and tilt their intelligent eyes to one side to appraise a fallen sandwich or a faded bloom with equal care.

They take food from trays and tidily hid it in the loose clippings to enjoy later, when the visitors are gone.

I would like a pet crow. I feel an affinity with their opportunistic vigilance.

In this last shot the crow surveys the whole garden from his vantage point on the sign; I think he definitely has views on fanciful iris names, perfumes and colours and maybe even the best place to hide titbits for later.

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Being a cockchafer.

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My moth trap attracted a cockchafer this morning. Their voracious grubs might eat the roots of my lettuces, but I can’t resist their wonderful orange antennae .

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He was the wrong way up on the patio, but once righted, he trundled away very slowly until I took pity on him and gave him a leaf to cling onto before depositing him heavily on the lawn.

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The wall flowers are in full perfumed glory. Two plants self seeded under my plant stand and have grown there since last year. I resisted the urge to pull them out and they have rewarded me with a riot of flowers. I don’t think I can let them go to seed in situ, as I like the stand for small summer flowers, but for now they can have all the space to themselves and shelter the cockchafers.

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Behind the shed.

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Behind the shed is shady and cool. I’ve tried growing showy things here, but even mint has turned up its aromatic nose at this location. So it has been left to a wonderful male fern (who has not been tempted up by the unseasonable warm weather) and is only now starting to unfurl his hairy bishop’s crosier into long glossy leaves.

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Behind the shed is a place for discarded things and one of these is a plastic panel from a box. We used it to make a path, but the outside cats have colonized it for sleeping on in warm weather and underneath slow worms have raised whole complicated families in the warm dark. I carefully raised the sheet to get this photo of the slow worm beneath.

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We also have an apple tree that was given to us in a pot. It is shaded by sloe bushes and birch trees, but it reaches up for the light and the pink tipped white petals are the most lovely of all fruit tree blossoms.

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The hawthorn bush is just along from the shed and has been lured into early flowering by the warm weather. It might be called May blossom in Britain, but here it shows in April. On looking closely at this flower you might think it has red spots on the white petals, but infact you are looking at the red pollen anthers on white filaments against the white petals.

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There are surprising things even behind the shed if you look closely!

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10 years!

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Apparently I have been blogging here for ten years which is hard to believe!

It does explain why my enthusiasm for posting has waned a little, as I seem to have already written a post on each seasonal change in the garden; the cats are sick of being photographed and the woods are as lovely as ever.

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But ………

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I don’t take the spring for granted however and am blown away anew each year as the cherry blossoms explode and the tree leaves wash the dark trees with impossible green. Winter always seems far too long. I have no desire to hurtle down mountains on lumps of plastic despite living so close to Switzerland. Bracing walks on cold mornings and rain on mud can only get you so far, but a spring morning in April can surpass everything.

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This morning there were willow warblers and blackcaps; a starling that imitates a golden oriole; radish seedlings showing in the vegetable garden; gigantic impossible red tulips and pink lipped apple blossoms in the neighbour’s orchard.

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My neighbour across the street has just cut down his only remaining bush, my neighbour up the slope has installed a noise scarer that pierces my ears every time the grass moves in order to actively deter all wildlife. My neighbour to the left has just drowned his pavement in illegal weedkiller again and I still feel hopeful about spring!!

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Am I insane?

No, in the confines of my garden, I am still using every millimeter to encourage life and I am determined to enjoy it ( even if this now requires earplugs!)

Last night a badger came by and a fox found a worm. The first bats ventured out and I watched three leopard slugs move very slowly past each other on none intersecting trajectories of silent slime.

What ever we throw at it, nature is still astonishing.

As long as I have eyes to see it, ears to listen to it and breathe to absorb the perfume of wisteria, wall flowers and apple blossom I intend to go on glorying in it – so here’s to the next ten years!

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Das Scheena land.

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Chrysosplenium oppositifolium is a marvelous Latin mouthful for a lovely modest spring flower. Its English name is opposite leaved golden saxifrage, which is equally cumbersome. To me it is an early harbinger of spring and every spring I look for it in exactly the same bit of woodland.

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The woodland is actively managed and in some years the edges of the paths are thickly covered in felled trees awaiting collection for the sawmill. The spring flowers are virtually unable to bloom in such years, but this year the felling regime is elsewhere and the golden saxifrage are absolutely everywhere — blooming all the way along the paths !

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The woodland is full of bird song. Blackcaps and chiffchaffs have arrived. The song thrushes are loud and lovely, woodpeckers drum in the still bare canopy.

On the edge of the woods there are sturdy clumps of ox slips . I have a few plants that have found their way into my raspberry patch and seeing them in their natural woodland habitat makes me appreciate that the raspberry canes mimic the woodland canopy for them.

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It has been dry here for a couple of weeks and frogs and toads will not have been out and about making wholly. So after the first night of rain it, was good to see the first clump of frog spawn in a pool . I wish they would find my little garden pond too, but I think I have to be more patient!

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On a sunny bank,beyond the woods, there was a huge group of violets, nothing shrinking about them and glorious to see after a long winter.

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Further still there was a wooden bench to sit on. Every winter someone takes this bench in and repaints it with wonderful scenes. The motto is in Alsatian, which is rich local language derived from German . I think it just invites the reader to sit and enjoy the beautiful land.

A sentiment I heartily endorse this spring morning!

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Thank God.

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The black redstart is back.

It flew in from far away

Flying at night : stocky and purposeful 

On short pointed wings

It pulled the electric crackle of its song

Into my garden

On to the still bare branches of the apple tree.

I am here. 

It is spring.

Thank God.

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A Coal Town Reborn.

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I grew up in a village near Liverpool with a conical slag heap and I thought everyone had one and associated its pyramid shape with home. The coal mine is long gone and the heap too.

When I lived in South Wales I saw what amazing wildlife refuges old slag heaps could be and how hard life still was for ex- mining communities; so I was fascinated by this wonderfully hopeful article .
— Read on reasonstobecheerful.world/france-coal-town-reborn-loos-en-gohelle/

I’ve been data mined again!

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This is a screen shot from my word press account today and the referer is even shown as datacentre.aminer.cn.

I noticed an unusual increase in my views again today.

I normally only get a few hits and that is usually after I have posted something new. Lots of my old posts had been viewed, none of the posts were linked,they were not topical or seasonal and no one liked anything. The apparent viewers were nearly all from the USA.

As one of the referrals was actually from something called data.centre miner, it looks pretty clear that another scoop of my words have been hoovered up by the AI machine.

This makes me very uncomfortable. I think I might delete my account completely, but I am not sure that it would not continue to exist in cyberspace anyway. I do not want to feed AI – I don’t understand machine learning and doubt if anyone does, but I feel instinctively that using my blogs like this is an infringement of my privacy.

I chose to publish on this free platform and to be surprised that they get read is obviously absurd; however I imagined I was posting for like minded people interested in gardens, nature and moths, not to feed AI.

I think we will all have to revaluate our digital naivety in the light of a very fast changing AI environment. Staying private is soon going to be come a full time job !

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On a lighter note – the storks have returned and are rearranging the sticks that make up their nests. Spring really is coming!

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Listen.

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Having posted recently about the benefits of forest bathing, I thought I ought to do some!

This is my favourite walk along a stream in a local wood. There is something magical about how the little valley swallows up all extraneous noises. Traffic is gone, tractors and endless construction are gone and even forestry is stilled . The only thing it is cannot cancel out is the sound of aircraft endlessly taking someone, somewhere else to see something different that probably looks just like where they came from ( but they won’t tell you that).

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The sound is burbling water falling over limestone . It is endlessly variable. It fills up all the spaces where intrusive sounds normally lurk. It is cool and white and deliciously lovely.

The wood is at its most wintery. There is no snow, all of the understory died down months ago and rain and wind has flattened what was left until the stream is completely visible. You can see the white bottom of the water, where the limestone is washed clean of silt and mud and only the water runs. In the summer the water sinks back into the rock, in the spring and autumn the banks are tall with growth; only in the winter can you see the snaking course of the little stream and hear it as it runs over the rocks.

Not all the vegetation is gone however, under the bare beech and hornbeam there are the shining green pennies of hazlewort leaves. I like this unassuming plant that makes use of the February sun to grow and even flower. It keeps company with the stream and the sleeping trees. It knows that soon everything else will be clamouring for its patch of light, so for now it baths in the little forest light that it has all to its February self.

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Asarum europaeum.

Hazelwort.

“January – sick and tired, you’ve been hanging on me …….”

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So go the immortal words of Pilot in my head on a cold uninspiring January day.

It seems unreasonable to even begin to think of spring until February and so the end of January drags by very slowly.

It is however the time of the garden bird count here in France , organised by the LPO, which is like the RSPB in the UK.

The idea is simple – record how many of each species of birds visit your garden in one hour. This involves staring out of the window (far too cold to go out!) with binoculars and doing nothing else.

Problem number one is the ‘doing nothing else’. My cat wants to see why I am just stood at the window and so blocks most of it by sitting on the window sill purring and demanding to be stroked. Then I notice that my spider plant needs watering and then I might as well water all the other plants on all the other window sills and then the other cat wants to see what I am doing and tries to stand on the binoculars that I have just put down.

Problem number two: my neighbour is pruning the trees in his garden. He must surely think I am watching him with my binoculars, so I sheepishly stand back from the window and hope he doesn’t think I am too weird, (I did once tell him that I had a dream where he was eaten by a lion).

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Problem number three: how to count birds that keep moving around. I had no idea how many blue tits I had in the garden until I tried counting them. My husband is quicker at counting than me and got to an astonishing 35. It seems filling up 5 peanut feeders regularly really does make an impression on the visitors . Sharing the stale bread each day with the sparrows also brings a surprise – as 21 of them were counted on the table, bushes and floor.

Problem four: what on earth is that tiny bird at the top of the silver birch tree? Unsurprisingly most of them were bluetits or sparrows en route to the feeders, but a few were chaffinches and one was a greenfinch. The very smallest were siskins which leads in to problem five.

Is it OK to include birds that Merlin the sound app has heard, but you didn’t actually see?

The sound app instantly identified the flock of little birds as siskins, it also heard a firecrest, linnet and a hawfinch – is this AI cheating?

Some birds pose no problems : a robin, some blackbirds, magpies and crows are all unmistakable and so are the sounds of raven, green woodpeckers and buzzards all of which I heard from the open window.

The final problem of course is technology. How to send my records in? I send bird and moth records in daily electronically but I couldn’t work out how to send in these records to count as part of the special garden survey.

As I was sitting on the sofa at the end of yesterday cursing at lost pass words etc , I looked up briefly at the window and thought I saw a flock of crows going home to roost. I called for my husband to do his quick counting trick and we both realised that they were not crows. What we were watching was an astonishing flock of 26 red kites streaming over the house in the last rays of light. They were on their way to a communal roost site somewhere very close by.

A few weeks ago we had spent two very cold days in the snow looking specifically for red kites as part of the annual LPO red kite survey – we found a measly two birds – but just when we were looking for sparrows and blue tits we found the holy grail of 26 red kites! This is probably the whole population of the county and they danced briefly over our house in the twilight.

What a January day!

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Add red kites!

Capturing the amazing.

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There are virtually no real moths about to marvel at in January, so I went to the wildlife photographer of the year exhibition which is on in many cities at the moment.

There were so many extraordinary photos of birds and fish, mammals and fungi that I was dazzled by the skill and endless patience of the photographers who captured them. As everyone who has tried to snap a moving wild creature on their phone will know, it takes more than just luck to produce anything better than a receding blur.

Even photographing moths is difficult when they are still.

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I was particularly impressed by this beautiful moth camouflaged on a tree trunk in China. I was even more impressed that it had been spotted by a real youngster and taken with just an iPhone

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You can read the details if you enlarge the image

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The other photo which captivated me was a much more carefully produced shot of a hairy catapilliar . The lighting shows the firework magnificence of it beauty, face on, and is an incredible example of the detail that a wonderful photograph can allow you to appreciate.

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Again the details of the photographer and the species can be seen if you enlarge the next shot.

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Photographing nature is far more skillful thing than the cases of pinned bugs and butterflies that collectors used to indulge in and allows the observer to teeter on the lovely line between art and science and wonder.

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A beautiful hook tip – from the garden – definitely not pinned!

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Happy New Year

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It’s New Year in Kiribati and very soon it will be New Year here too!

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2025 is leaving on cold feet.

It was – 10 this morning which is pretty cold for here. I put boiling water out in the bird bath to keep it ice free for the birds. The sparrows were waiting hungrily for their bread crumbs. ( I’ve given up putting out couscous for the birds as the water in it freezes hard too fast!)

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Plants are frozen hard too – some look good for it :

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Others look affronted!

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I always imagine I am going to get a really beautiful picture of the garden in the frost, but somehow the beauty of a cold white morning alludes me when I take out my phone. Here are a few attempts.

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The oddest is the algae on the pond, which has bulged up out of the ice -intriguingly revolting really!

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The cold is forecast to continue for quite a long time, so I need to get used to it all and find more beauty in it!

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I wish you a 2026 full of beauty and intrigue. Let’s make our green spaces as full of life as we can manage and our hearts full of as much peace and generosity as we can conjure!

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Bright green

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On the shortest day, the sun came out and illuminated the moss.

I know virtually nothing about moss and can name only one type – sphagnum. I can name the birds, plants and of course the moths in my garden, but not the mosses. There is something restful about not being able to identify them – naming everything is a bit like unweaving the rainbow, so I just decided to look closely at what I had through a hand lens and make my own observations.

I decided I had four different species in the garden , possibly five.

Now to check with a book, but there are remarkably few books to help!

I remembered a very old book up in the loft and managed to find it amongst the cobwebs and was as fascinated by the antiquity of the book, as by the mosses I had collected .

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The book was written before Darwin published the Original of Species (1859) and the author often interspersed his observations on moss with observations on the glory of God’s creation. This book has remained the “bible” of moss for over a hundred years and it is still possible to get reprints of it now.

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This is a favourite page

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I love the detail about the climber who perished in Switzerland!
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All books should have inscriptions in them and this is no exception.

It was obviously given as a present just after its second imprint in 1861 and has been well used. It is water stained from damp moss hunting excursions and dog eared from tweed pockets and canvas collecting bags

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Now, to see if I can actually identify my mosses by using the wonderful book!

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