Tansy in a churchyard

 

Tansy Tanacetum vulgare, flowering in Wolsingham churchyard this week.

A wild flower species that’s often found near human habitation because it was so convenient to be able to gather it close to home.

Full of pungent chemical compounds, of untested toxicity, its leaves, at various times in history, have been recommended by herbalists -

• as an antiseptic treatment for wounds
• for enhancing female fertility and preventing miscarriages. “Let those women who desire children,” wrote Nicolas Culpepper, “love this herb, ‘tis their best companion, their husband excepted,”
• as food flavouring, in tansy cakes made with milk, eggs and flour
• as an insect repellent, rubbed into fresh meat to keep flies away
• in burials, interred with corpses to keep worms at bay

Some know the golden inflorescences of tansy as ‘bachelors’ buttons’, a colloquial name applied to numerous other wild flowers. 

Geoffrey Grigson, in The Englishman’s Flora, listed the same name, applied in various counties, to flower of marsh marigold, buttercups, columbine, red campion, white campion, greater stitchwort, shining crane’sbill, herb robert, pennywort, lesser periwinkle, field scabious, devil’s-bit scabious, burdock, cornflower and knapweed.

And that, in a nutshell, is why an internationally agreed scientific name, derived from classical languages that are universally recognised, is such an aid to communicating knowledge about the living world, avoiding confusion.

 

Chicken of the woods

 

Chicken of the woods Laetiporus sulphureus, growing on a decaying oak trunk in Backstone bank wood in Weardale’s Tunstall valley. This is the third crop of these spectacular toadstools that has erupted from this tree in recent years. Their webs of fungal hyphae are slowly hollowing out the oak’s trunk, turning it into something with the texture of a crumbly biscuit.

Woodland fungi are a furtive bunch, living mostly unseen under the soil or inside other organisms, digesting whatever their creeping threads can find: nature’s recyclers. Their public appearances are often fleeting, limited to a dusting of rust spores on the underside of a yellowing leaf or overnight eruptions of toadstools in autumn. But bracket fungi are a class apart: big, durable and sometimes a little sinister, and none more so than Laetiporus sulphureus.

Gastronomes relish chicken of the woods as a delicacy, comparable in texture to well-cooked chicken breast, with a rich fungal aroma. So do insects: these are fine young specimens but soon they’ll undoubtedly be full of maggots. Once the dinner-plate-sized brackets were past their best they become chewy and tough, having lost the plump fleshiness of youth.

Six years ago, I picked up a mature fallen chicken of the woods bracket and took it home, to see what might hatch out. Nothing for four days, but on the fifth a blizzard of minute flies swirled out when I lifted the lid of the container. Then, on the 10th day, something special.

It was, I think, a cork moth, Nemapogon cloacella, just 5mm long, scuttling across the surface of the decaying fungus. At first it seemed just another dull, brown micro-moth, but a magnifying glass revealed fringed, upswept wings clothed in scales of mottled brown, white and gold; an insect of exquisite beauty.

Heartwood of oak, created by a sapling’s sunlit leaves perhaps two centuries ago, broken down, molecule by molecule, reconstituted into fungal tissue, then reincarnated yet again as a tiny jewel of an insect.

Rats in the chicken run

 

One of a family of brown rats Rattus norvegicus living under a hen house at Home Farm in Beamish museum, entertaining visitors with their antics last Sunday, dashing out to eat a broken hen’s egg.

Rats have a liking for eggs. My grandmother, who worked on a farm, lived in what was then a very rural part of Sussex, with food stored in a larder. As a child it upset me that she prevented birds from building nests in her garden hedge, but she had a fear that rats might come for the eggs and then would find their way into her house.

We have an acquaintance who lives in a house next to a smallholding where the owner keeps several breeds of animals and stores feed that often attracts rats. They are highly intelligent omnivores and will eat most things that they can digest. Last autumn we watched them from her upstairs window, as they climbed her apple tree, nibbled through the stalks of ripe apples, then rolled the fallers downhill, through the hedge, to supplement their animal feed diet.

A sobering statistic: female brown rats begin to breed at three months old and can produce three litters of up to twelve offspring each year.