Lottery Odds

This is a female flower of a hazel Corylus avellana. In about six months time it will have developed into a cluster of hazel nuts but for now, at the base of those beautiful carmine red stigmas there are female egg cells, each waiting to be fertilised by a pollen grain that will land on one of those stigmas, germinate and produce a microscopic tube that will transport the male nuclei down to the site of fertilisation. First, though, the pollen has to reach the stigmas - and that is a very chancy business.

Tap a twig covered in dangling male catkins on a still day and they'll release a cloud of pollen grains that will hang in the air for a second then disperse. If there's any kind of wind (and there usually is in spring) they'll be whisked away immediately, diluted in a vast volume of air and fall to ground who knows where - or maybe be destroyed by rain. The chances of one actually landing on a receptive stigma is small. Very small. Which is why wind pollinated trees like hazel need to be so profligate when it comes to producing pollen.

For every female  egg cell, embedded deep within this bud, it has been calculated that the tree produces 2,549,000 pollen grains. So next time someone uses the phrase 'the economy of nature' and waffles about how living organisms are 'perfectly adapted' there can only be one response: nuts. Hazel nuts.

Spring Greens

These golden saxifrage flowers are amongst the first to appear in spring and even though they are green (except for their yellow stamens) they are a very welcome hint of what is to come. These were growing beside a little tributary of the Tees, downstream from Egglestone bridge, on Saturday.

There's fresh new green growth everywhere - these are the new shoots of silky wall feather-moss Homalothecium sericeum creeping out over their rocky substrate, in Teesdale.....

... and amongst last autumn's decaying leaves in a beech wood these pristine cuckoo pint leaves were unfurling.

Snowdrops

Snowdrops were late putting in an appearance this year. I've often found them around here in flower in mid-January, but the ground was still deep frozen at that time.Now they are at their best and today we saw some very fine displays in Teesdale. It's a plant that's most common in river valleys around here, no doubt because the small bulbs that proliferate after flowering are swept down river and thrive in the alluvial soils when they are stranded after flood waters recede. This was one of many well established patches in the woodlands beside the River Tees, between Egglestone and the Meeting of the Waters, where the Tees meets the River Greta. There were even a few honeybees around, visiting the flowers, in this afternoon's sunshine.

It's unlikely that snowdrop is a native British species. It comes from milder parts of Europe and is what would be known today as an alien species. It is known to have been cultivated in gardens in 1597 but the first record of it in the wild only dates from 1778. Today most people look forward to the appearance of the flowers in the wild in late winter but if it was a new introduction, rather that one that has been here for at least four centuries, no doubt there would be a lot of press hysteria about 'yet another alien species invading our countryside'. I wonder how many garden species that are currently escaping into the wild will be viewed with similar affection to the snowdrop four centuries from now?

Snowdrops are often associated with churchyards and it may be that they were often deliberately planted there because their pure white flowers are associated with Candlemas, the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary, which takes place on February 2nd., when the plant is always in flower. These plants were photographed in St. James Churchyard, just outside of Hamsterley village on the edge of Weardale, this afternoon.

As we were leaving (as you can see from the weak winter sunshine shadow, at 2 o'clock) I noticed this sundial on the porch of the church. The inscription at the top reads "Man Fleeth as it were a Shadow" - a timely reminder that at this time of year, on the threshold of spring, there is so much to see and so little time....."