Titanic struggle: Garden spider versus bumblebee

 

We witnessed a titanic battle between an unfortunate bumblebee and a female garden spider Araneus diadematus that had spun her web on the flight path to Michaelmas daisies in the abbey garden, Hexham, Northumberland last week. For a while it looked like the frantically buzzing bee might escape, but then the spider’s poisonous fangs found a weak spot and the struggle subsided.

Then the spider suspended its prize on a thicker thread and spun it round and round with its feet, wrapping it a silken shroud paid out from the spinnerets on the tip of her abdomen.

Oxford ragwort - rail traveller extraordinaire

 

Oxford ragwort Senecio squalidus, growing on the wall of Hexham Moot Hall. 

A native to the volcanic cinder slopes of Mount Etna in Sicily, introduced into Oxford University Botanic Garden in the 17th. century where its plumed, airborne seeds soon carried it over the garden wall. It didn’t get far until the railways arrived, when the ballast between the tracks proved to be a good substitute for Etna’s volcanic slopes.

 Its buoyant seeds, wafted along in the slipstream of passing trains, carried it along the route of the great Western Railway, then beyond along the tracks of other railway companies. Sometimes it even travelled inside trains: Geoffrey Grigson, in his An Englishman’s Flora, recounts the story of botanist George Claridge Druce watching a seed drift in through his train window in Oxford station, travel with him suspended in air then drift out again when the train reached Tilehurst in Berkshire. It’s now a common sight in towns throughout Britain, brightening up our walls and pavements.

Oxford ragwort’s population was boosted by the German Luftwaffe blitz on Britain’s cities during World War 2 when, along with rosebay willowherb, it colonised rubble-strewn bomb sites.

Autumn crocus Colchicum autumnale - beautiful but deadly

 

Beautiful but deadly poisonous autumn crocus Colchicum autumnale, cultivated in a woodland garden near the main car park in Hexham, Northumberland. Sometimes known as meadow saffron but not related to the Crocus sativus whose stigmas are the source of saffron spice. 

Used medicinally in the past in poultices for treating gout, but there is a fine line between a therapeutic and a fatal dose when used as a drug and there have been many fatalities. 

A native wild flower that is now rare and largely exterminated from pastures where it poisoned cattle. Flowers in autumn but the leaves don’t appear until spring, when they could be fatally mistaken for wild garlic (ramsons).