OBSERVATIONS

Jonathan Newdick has always, since he was a child when he kept a now lost 'Nature Diary', found the world about him a source of joy and inspiration. Today, even when the future of his beloved countryside seems to be under so much threat he still finds solace and inspiration there and, as he once wrote, '. . . if I want to go into a cathedral I'll walk into the forest.' These inspirations may vary from the exquisite patterns on an empty snail shell under a hedge to the morning sun shining on the tops of the trees in a snowy valley high in the Dolomites and, for him, there is no distinction between the miniscule and the sublime. Some of these pieces have been previously published elsewhere, others have been taken, usually unedited, from his notebooks.

Queen Anne's Lace

Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder are motoring from Oxford to Brideshead. The year must be about 1920. Evelyn Waugh is not specific but he does tell us that it was ' . . . a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were white with fools' parsley and meadowsweet and the air was heavy with all the scents of summer . . .'

Mr Waugh may be unfashionable today yet no-one writes better of the beauty of pathos or the futility of love. But Mr Waugh is possibly a poor botanist. When he writes of fools' parsley he is probably thinking of cow parsley, Anthryscus sylvestris, also called Queen Anne's lace. It is the ubiquitous plant of roadsides in April and June. Meadowsweet begins to flower in June so it could be seen together with Queen Anne's lace but it is more usually associated, as its name suggests, with meadows than with roadsides.

Had I been editing Brideshead Revisited, back in 1945, I would have had the car passing through banks of Queen Anne's lace and nothing else. It is a fine romantic name and one splashed with Catholic / Protestant conflict — what better floral motif for Brideshead could there be? But it's all too late. We can only accept the missed opportunity of Waugh and his editor at Chapman and Hall. Some authorities have suggested that the name of this tall but delicate perennial is far older than the English Queen Anne. Geoffrey Grigson in his Englishman's Flora suggests that the queen in question may be St. Anna, mother of the Virgin, but I have always assumed her to be, or, I suppose, wanted her to be, the Anne who became queen of England in 1702 — the tragic Anne of seventeen pregnancies and only one child surviving infancy.

This beautiful plant with the beautiful name is the food plant of several species of moth including the single-dotted wave whose caterpillars feed on it from September to April — a good reason for allowing the stems to stand in the hedgerows long after flowering — and yet another reason why local councils' obsessions with suburbanisation and tidiness should sometimes be challenged. 

Yew

It is a tree of superstition and legend. It is a tree of contradictions: it is a conifer but it has no cones; it is a softwood yet its timber is one of the hardest; it is poisonous but the one part which looks to us to be the most threatening, the crimson aril of the berry, is harmless. Indeed, for many birds, the aril is nutritious, and the blackbird loves to feed on this little sweet. The poisonous seed within passes undigested through the bird so that if you fnd a group of yew sedlings growing close together it is likely that a favourite roost of the bird will be above them.

Superstition increases with antiquity and no British native tree is older than the yew. It has been said, though it is doubtful, that, just possibly, there are some yews which pre-date Christ. In an early English carol the seven fair maidens searching for Christ will find him nailed to a yew tree, although the aspen is more usually cited as providing the wood from which the cross was made. This is why that tree's leaves continue to tremble even today with shame. 

But the yew doesn't tremble. The yew is strong, dark and fearless. Within the yew forest it is the dark which holds the power, but whether it is the dark of evil or of protection none seems ever to have decided. The darkness, which is due to the dense foliage and the closeness of the trees, prevents almost anything from growing there. One of the few to find nourishment in such darkness is the clematis, which twists among the trees in a tight embrace to climb and blossom in the sunlight of the canopy. Its white cottony seed heads which are known as old man's beard, spread over and smother the yews in autumn and winter to create a striking contrast of dark and light in a monochromatic landscape.  

The Croshole Owl 

The hedge is made of all the wrong shrubs: field maple, quickthorn, spindle, hazel, oak, ash, traveller's joy, bramble and sweet briar all tightly interwoven with ivy. It is a farm hedge and for a farm hedge it is very good. Maintained properly it would be stock-proof with little need for barbed wire. But there's no stock now and the ancient hedge is neglected and thin. Time and change have determined that this is now a garden hedge and these are not good plants with which to edge or hedge a garden. 

For a garden the best of it is the ivy. The honours for the worst are shared between the ash, for it grows so fast and so thin, and the briar which, like the flame haired woman, can be both lovely and cruel. You cannot cut this hedge in summer or you will lose her blossom, nor in the autumn when you will forfiet the delights of her scarlet hips. It has to be a February job but by February the ash sticks are a couple of metres long, are woody and have to be cut individually with long-handled secateurs. They are all entwined with briar and bramble — the armed guards of the hedgerow. But it must be done. It is a frosty winter morning with a promise of spring sunshine. Already, as if they know this, the great tit and chaffinch have begun, but not yet perfected, their territorial songs. Yes, it must be done, the day is right and as soon as there is a good supply of short, dry sticks the imperative fire is started. You can't do hedging without the spit and crackle of twig and flame.

Soon, on the cold ground around the fire, there is a circle of green grass within the field of frost and you can understand how it was that our early ancestors so revered and worshipped the fire. A column of blue smoke in the cold air as bloodied hands pull bramble, briar and wild clematis along with last year's brittle nettle stalks and dry goose grass to feed the hungry fire. This job will take all day and they say 'Let the farmer's contractor do it' and he would. It's tempting, but he would flail the lot in ten minutes — an unselective cut — ash and ivy receiving the same rough treatment but ash and ivy demand quite different approaches. The worst of the flail, however, is that the hedge would be cut horizontally across the top leaving a surface of shattered sticks like stubble and so allowing, in the spring, all the nests — blackbird, song thrush, chaffinch, hedge sparrow, robin and the rest — to be clearly seen by crow and magpie.* So I will cut my hedge the old way, the slow way. By mid day the job is half done and we have a bowl of garden soup by the fire. The frivolous breeze means that we are kept moving, but it is a sweet smoke for we are also taking the opportunity to prune the bay tree.

From time to time during the afternoon the high-revving Japanese two-stroke trims out and brushes the small stuff but mostly it is hand tools — bill-hook, sickle, secateurs. By late afternoon the heap of hot ash has the form of a minature volcano, an array of charred sticks radiating around it like cigars round a giant ash tray in a gentleman's club. The light falls fast in February and, as we scratch the cigars to the volcano's crater, I look up to see a great ghostly moth beating silently towards us. Seeing us, he suddenly wavers away at right angles and flops on to a fence post just over the now lower hedge. He is a barn owl and lives in the unused hovel down in the shallow valley called Croshole. The hovel was once part of a stockyard surrounding a fine timber barn but the barn was burned down twenty years ago and now there is only the hovel, as natural a part of the landscape as the brambles, burdock and elder that surround it. It has been the home of this owl for some years now but he is alone and I wish he had a mate. He has time on his side, I suppose — according to the Oxford University Press Birds of the Western Palearctic (nine volumes of dense and difficult text often as skilfully camoulaged as the subjects discussed) — the oldest recorded barn owl was aged 21 years and four months.

I refer to this bird as 'he' although I haven't a clue whether he is male or female, the sexes being too similar for me to say. It is odd that I should read a creature so soft and rounded and female as masculine but I do. So do the Italians, with their gender-based nouns. To them he is 'barbagianni', 'barba' meaning beard and 'gianni' being Italian for John, but who was bearded John? I couldn't say. The old baptiser perhaps?

None of this is of any importance as I stand by that late bonfire only ten or so metres from this bird so silent, so wise and seemingly weightless. Clinging to his post he stares at us with all the animation of a statue carved in marble — an all-knowing gargoyle. His white face almost the shape of a heart with large black interrogatory eyes. Then something distracts him at the base of his post, a beetle perhaps, or a vole, and he turns from us and peers down at this small disturbance. Although I say he turns from us it is a turn inseen. His head moves through ninety degrees but it is as a piece of film with a few frames missing and I take the opportunity to move from the fire — my new Wellingtons are getting warm and soft — and a little closer to the owl. He clicks back to us, missing frames again, the heart face with its black eyes piercing the thickening light as if he is playing gramdmother's footsteps with us. And again he turns away, this time through ninety degrees and further (the barn owl can turn its head through nearly 180 degrees without difficulty). Now the white face is replaced by a softness of honey over which a grey like the ashes from our fire has been thrown. And again he turns and returns his stare to us. Just checking .This continues for ten minutes and more and during this time his body and legs are motionless, only the revolving head betraying the knowledge that this is not the all-knowing and misplaced gargoyle. Then, for no reason that we can see, he flops from his post and silently, and surprisingly quickly, is flying along the lane, a pale shadow between the hazels in the deepening dusk. He turns and sweeps under the eaves of the hovel, his home.

A precious moment, this. A scene we can see on television every Sunday evening but the difference is that with the telly the viewer is a voyeur whereas we were part of a dialogue. Another problem with the broadcast picture is that it appears often better than the real thing and so becomes a substitute for a reality which seems increasingly hard to find. When we do find it, or when it finds us, it leaves a mark as indelible as a tattoo. A memory as long lasting as the television picture is ephemeral.

By the bonfire we turn and look to where the setting sun had been, the trees now black and twiggy against a still pale sky. The blue smoke from the fire hugging the ground low in the valley. We gather our tools and turn towards the cottage, privileged to know the beauty of simplicity. Already a frost is falling but the fire will glow all night.

*We are supposed now to call the hedge sparrow the dunnock but I am happy with the less scientific name with which I was brought up.  

Sticklebacks

'And that, best beloved, is the reason why the stickleback hangs in the water with his tail curled to one side.' Rudyard Kipling might have been moved to devise a whimsical and entertaining reason for this phenomenon but why does the stickleback invariably rest in this position? Probably because he is constantly in readiness to dart away from a predator — his foot on the accelerator as it were.

Looking down from the plank footbridge into the slow, green water you see a group of small brownish fish. 'Group' seems a more apposite word than 'shoal' which suggests a more purposeful gathering with all the individuals facing in the same direction. These fishes are all pointing in different directions, like pine needles on the forest floor. And most of them have their tails curled to one side — they must be sticklebacks. Minnows or the young dace would be straight of body and gently moving, while the sticklebacks hang motionless with only the gently fanning pectoral fins to tell us they are alive. But put your net into the water and they are all gone. You do not see them move. They are just gone. That's all. 

The three-spined stickleback, which J. Travis Jenkins also called Jack sharp, prickleback and sharpling in his classic work of 1925, is common everywhere — in enclosed ponds, clear streams and even in brackish and salty lagoons. In Myles Birket Foster's genre painting Rustic anglers you can be sure that the catch in the little child's jam jar will be sticklebacks.

Standing on my little plank footbridge the group of sticklebacks is confused among the reflection of celandines and the lush young leaves of hemlock water dropwort. These leaves are a beautiful green and look to be as appetising as a fresh salad in an expensive restaurant, yet they are as toxic as anything you'll find in the countryside as Keats well knew: 'My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, / Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains / One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:'

Beneath this lush spring canopy of yellows and greens the male stickleback will build his nest of plant matter which is bonded together with a gelatinous secretion from his kidneys. At this time he develops a conspicuous red belly which must help to entice a female to lay her eggs in the nest. Once this is done he will guard the eggs and young until they are ready to leave the nursery after a few weeks.

When the breeding season and the celandines are over and the hemlock is beginning to come into flower, the narrow plank bridge will be impassable and the stickleback will return to his life of hanging in the green water, darting from time to time at some unsuspecting daphnia or other tiny organism, but mostly he will just hang there, his tail curled to one side. 

The Poetry of the Vernacular

'Scilly Pearl and Lady's Finger. Cornish Aromatic, Gillyflower and Plympton King. Devonshire Quarrendon, Crimson Costard, Sweet Coppin, Michaelmas Stubbard, Slack ma Girdle, Tremlett's Bitter and Sweet Alford, Camelot, Cheddar Cross, Beauty of Bath, Hoary Morning, Lambrook Pippin, Harry Master's Jersey and Dunkerton Late Sweet.' A list of just a few west country apple varieties cited by Peter Beacham in Beacham and Ravilious Down The Deep Lanes, The Bardwell Press, Oxford.

The use of scientific names for plants and animals is essential in academic study, of course, but in everyday life surely Lady's bedstraw and Camberwell beauty must be preferable to Galium verum and Nymphalis antiopa. Each of these names is a unit of poetry. Not Milton, perhaps, or even Spenser, but surely there is something of Keats here. The following vernacular names of 28 English moths (admittedly taken not at random but with not much consideration either) seem to fall easily into a sort of poem:

The Seraphim and the Vestal,
The Alchymist, the Geometrician,
The Maiden's blush and the True lover's knot.
    The Autumnal.
The Beautiful gothic and the Burnished brass,
The Quaker, the German cousin,
The Chimney sweeper and the Old lady.
    The Suspected.
The Blood vein and the Heart and dart,
The Beautiful carpet, the Buff footman,
The Dark bordered beauty and the Drinker.
    The Lackey.
The Annulet and the Argent and sable,
The Scarce merveille-du-jour, the July highflyer,
The Heath rivulet and the Pretty chalk carpet.
    The Confused.