Winter fragrance

I cut this winter heliotrope Petasites pyrenaicum (syn. L. fragrans) flower from the garden just before the snow arrived. Despite being native to the Mediterranean region it is very hardy in Britain, where it's widely naturalised, and produces new foliage and flowers in winter. The flowers have a delightful scent of vanilla, or maybe marzipan, depending on your sense of smell. Only female plants have ever been introduced so it never sets seed, but the creeping rhizomes can be very invasive so its root growth needs to be confined. Its widespread occurrence on road verges is most likely the result of fly-tipping of garden waste, by people who planted it in open ground and wish they hadn't.

Winter honeysuckle Lonicera fragrantissima is native to China and has a wonderfully intense fragrance during the day, unlike our native honeysuckle whose scent only develops at dusk, to attract crepuscular pollinators like hawk moths. This particular specimen is planted in a front garden in Durham city and scents the air for passers-by.

Stranglers

In tropical rainforests strangler fig seeds germinate in the tree canopy and send roots downwards until they reach the soil. Then, as their roots grow they strangle the tree that originally supported their seedling stage. You can watch a video of the whole process by clicking here.

Here in our temperate woodlands we don't have anything quite that dramatic, but we do have honeysuckle that sometimes strangles trees from the ground upwards.

When honeysuckle seeds are voided by birds that eat the berries they often germinate close to trees that the birds were perching on. If they can't twine around the tree honeysuckle stems will twist around each other, becoming mutually supportive as these three have, forming a rope-like trunk but ....

... if they can find a sapling tree to coil around, so much the better. This one coiled around a young rowan and its grip is so tight that it has already distorted the swelling trunk of its host, which is still growing rapidly, so .....

.... if you fast forward a few years, this is the result. This swelling rowan trunk, distorted into a spiral by the tight grip of the honeysuckle, has grown out over the climber's stem, so that it's now embedded inside the trunk of the rowan along part of its length. The rowan has engulf the honeysuckle, but both are still growing well.

One day this might make a good walking stick!

Hedges

Thursday's Guardian Country Diary is about hedges - well, about one old, overgrown hedge,  a favourite that has produced a spectacular crop of autumn fruits this year.

Most old hedges date from the period of the Enclosure Acts, when tracts of common land were enclosed, usually via the planting of hawthorn (aka quickthorn) hedges. The exceptions are much older assarts - remnants of ancient woodland around the edges of fields that were hacked out of the Wildwood by our distant ancestors.

Hawthorn is an ideal hedging plant- fast to establish, tolerant of cutting and forming a thick, stock-proof boundary if it's well maintained. So that it remains densely branched at its base. This was originally achieved by laying, a process that involved a great deal of skilled manual labour. The technique, which is seldom seen these days, is described and illustrated here.

Almost as soon as a new hedge was established it would have attracted birds that arrived to eat the hawthorn fruits and they in turn would have left seeds of other succulent fruited plants in their droppings, including ...

........brambles (this wonderful crop, beyond the reach of bramblers, was cascading down the overgrown hedge that's mentioned in the Country Diary), and also .......

.... elder, which has produced a massive berry crop this year.

Sloe (aka blackthorn) was occasionally used as a hedging plant but has the disadvantage that it spreads laterally into fields, via sharp-pointed suckers that grow from its spreading roots. On the other hand, those sloes are great for flavouring gin.

Like brambles, briar roses scramble up through hedges, using their thorns for support, adding to the autumn berry crop ....

.... along with bird-sown honeysuckle which twines around stems of supporting hedgerow shrubs, producing berries that blackbirds are very fond of .. and ....

..... often producing a few flowers right up until the first frosts.

So gradually planted hedges naturally acquire an ever-richer flora, together with herbaceous plants that used the hedge as a refuge from surrounding cultivation.....

........ along with a wide range of invertebrates, like this snake millipede that we found coiled up and asleep at the top of a tall brome grass stem in the hedge ....

............ and these nettle tap moths. They breed on hedgerow nettles and feed on hogweed flower umbels, that often continue to produce a few flowers and some nectar right up until the first frosts.

Sadly many old hedges have been grubbed out to enlarge fields. Some hedges are still being planted, like these that were planted in mitigation on land that had been opencast mined. They are mainly a double row of hawthorn, with a sprinkling of other shrub species like hazel, with a standard tree - usually ash - at regular intervals.

Annual mechanical cutting, with a tractor equipped with a cutter bar or a flail cutter, trims them into neat, uniform, dense stock-proof hedges but severely limits their value as a wildlife resource;the annual trim removesmost of the current year's grow that will bear the following year's flowers and fruit, so the value of hedges that are maintained like this is much less than a hedge like ......

........... this, which has been allowed to grow, has a broad margin and retains all its flowering potential, so that in summer ......

.......... it will look like this. Dense, overgrown hedges have the potential to act as wildlife refuges and wildlife corridors. 

It is important that hedges are maintained, otherwise they simply develop into lines of trees but cutting hedges rotationally on a three-year cycle, rather than annually, would greatly improve their value as cover for birds and mammals, providing a supply of pollen and nectar for insects and autumn fruits for birds and mammals.

Simply planting more hedges isn't necessarily a particular effective wildlife conservation measure, although it's better than nothing. It's the quality of hedges that really counts, and that depends on how they are maintained.

The Strangler

Back in 1597, writing in his Great Herbal or Generall Historie of Plantes, the herbalist John Gerard observed that " “Wood-binde or Hony-suckle climeth up aloft, having long slender woody branches........oftentimes winding it selfe so straight and hard about, that it leaveth its print upon those things so wrapped”...........

... just like this honeysuckle, growing in Hollingside Wood in Durham, is doing. It's climbing up a young rowan and the end result looks like a life-or-death contest between two writhing serpents.

The tightly coiled honeysuckle has scarred the rowan trunk but as the tree trunk expands it's beginning to grow over its strangler....

.... and lower down, near the base of the tree, the bark has almost completely healed over the top of the honeysuckle's stem. Give it a few more years and the honeysuckle stem will be absorbed into the lower part of host trunk entirely - a climber inside its host. So who is strangling whom?

The tree is struggling but the honeysuckle is thriving - and coming into leaf nicely.

For more on honeysuckle, click here.

Portpatrick and the Southern Uplands Way

The little harbour of Portpatrick on the Galloway coast is the starting point for the Southern Upland Way, but before climbing the steps to the cliff top at start of the route it's worth taking a look around the harbour because....

.... there are usually black guillemots fishing there, and if you're lucky .....

.... they'll be posing for a photograph on the harbour wall.

...... where there is often a vigorous exchange with others ...

..... that nest in cavities between the building blocks of the harbour wall. These are birds with a startlingly simple colour scheme - sooty black and pure white plumage and wonderful crimson feet with matching interior colour scheme in their bills.

Very approachable birds - although there didn't seem to be as many as when we first visited, in 2006.

There's also a well established herring gull breeding colony on the cliffs as you leave the town, with some vulnerable chicks on narrow ledges ........

.........protected by fierce-looking adults

The first mile or so further on the path skirts a series of sandy bays and in one - Lairds bay , marked as Port Mora/Port Kale on the Ordnance Survey map - lies this fascinating telegraph station, built at the landfall of the first submerged telegraph cable to Donaghadee in Northern Ireland, across what is now known as the North Channel but was then the Irish Channel, in 1853. More recently the building has been a visitor centre but now seems disused. You can still see the frayed cable partially buried in the shingle on the beach: an interesting fragment of telecommunications archaeology.

There's a fine cliff-top flora along this stretch of coast that includes the almost hemispherical umbels of wild carrot. Once these begin to set seed the stalks of the outer clusters of florets elongate and curl inwards, so the ripe seed head resembles a clenched fist.

The cliffs here are festooned with honeysuckle and as you climb the path up from the beach the scent is glorious on a fine summer evening.

Slender St. John's wort, with red undersides to its petals, is also a feature of the cliffs here, as is ...

... the sea spleenwort fern with its leathery fronds, that grows in rock crevices close to the beach, well within reach of salt spray. Fresh water trickling down the cliffs is probably the antidote to this saline assault.