A treecreeper visits

Three o’clock on a freezing November afternoon. In a few minutes the sun will sink below the hedge and the garden will be plunged into deep shadow.

There’s something climbing up the trunk of the old crab apple tree, about fifteen feet from the window. At first it looks like it might be a field mouse, but it’s a small brown bird with claws like crampons and a long, slender, curved beak like surgical forceps: a tree creeper.

It’s searching every nook and cranny for insects and there are plenty of them - the tree has been infested with woolly aphids all summer and their nymphs are overwintering in bark crevices.

Biological pest control at its best.

Just time for a few quick pictures through the window as the bird climbs through the the last glimmer of sunlight on the crab apple trunk - and then it vanishes.

Half a minute of magical birdwatching, from the comfort of a settee.

Return of the milk thistle Silybum marianum

 

You've got to love a plant whose Latin generic name is Silybum, more prosaically milk thistle Silybum marianum. I’d never seen it until seven years ago, when a friend asked me to identify ‘a triffid growing in some builders’ rubble in the corner of a field’. 

It was impressive, with a height and spread of over a metre, with beautifully marbled leaves and a corona of spiny bracts around the flowers that was reminiscent of medieval weaponry. 

I brought some seeds home and tried to germinate them, with no success, and must have chucked the contents of the pot onto the compost heap. Now, seven years later, this seedling appeared in the garden. Beautiful foliage, but I’ll be a little apprehensive about the plant when it reaches full size, next year. Meanwhile, the young plant has begun to flower, just before the first frosts of winter arrive. Definitely a plant to handle with care: milk thistle has spiny bracts around the flower heads that look as though they could cause serious pain.

The 'mouse' hiding in the fir cone

 

This a Douglas fir Pseudotsuga menziesii cone, easily recognisable by the papery bracts, resembling the hind legs and tail of a mouse, above each scale. Native American folklore has it that mice climbed the trees and hid amongst the cone scales when fires swept across the forest floor.

 The tree’s common name commemorates David Douglas, the Scottish botanist and plant collector who, in 1826, introduced it into cultivation here. Douglas led a colourful life before coming to an unfortunate end when he was gored to death by a bull in Hawaii, at the tragically young age of 35. The Latin specific name commemorates Archibald Menzies, another great Scottish plant collector who discovered the tree in 1792.

Douglas fir’s wind-dispersed, winged seeds are only about a centimetre long but grow into a giant tree in its native Pacific North West of America, where some are believed to have grown even taller than giant redwoods, reaching almost 400ft., before the finest specimens were felled for their exceptionally fine timber. Douglas firs planted in Britain grew very rapidly, with some now exceeding 200ft., making them amongst the tallest trees in the British Isles.