The judges of the Best Kept Village competition deduct marks for litter and weeds. Especially street weeds, the ones that pop up in pavement cracks and walls. Before they are sprayed, can I put in a word for the weeds? Some of them are attractive once you take a good look – far more so than the cars clogging up the streets. The poppies on the High Street spell summer and match the swifts whirling overhead; they are not the poppies of corn fields but a rarer kind with long pods and yellow juice. The tufts of Wall Pellitory and little red stars of Herb Robert brighten up the street, as does the little yellow Oxalis on Oxford Street, with its strange golden-brown trefoil leaves. The Thale Cress with its skeleton build and needle-thin pods may not be a beauty but it is a landmark in modern studies of genetics and plant development, as seminal in its way as Gregor Mendel’s pea plants. And by the Post Office I was happy to spot the dainty, finger-like leaves and pure white flowers of Rue-leaved Saxifrage. These are all fully wild plants that have found a niche in manmade places. They are nature’s entrepreneurs, ready to spot any opportunity and exploit it. I think they deserve a bit of credit.
Oak before ash, in for a splash. Ash before oak, in for a soak. The joke is that ash is almost never in leaf before oak. Ash responds to day-length, not temperature, and so comes into leaf at the same time every year. Oak, on the other hand, reads the temperature, and responds accordingly. In the absence of hard frosts, bud-burst was early this year. So, like every year, we are ‘in for a splash’, and it has certainly a splashy spring. But which is wetter, a splash or a soak?
With the everlasting rain and cold winds, our insect life has had a hard spring. The flowers are out but where are the pollinators, the butterflies and the bees? One group that seems to defy the weather are the shieldbugs. Being chunky and fingernail-sized, they are often mistaken for beetles. They are colourful, harmless, and walk with a friendly clockwork waddle. What’s not to like? One species lives its whole life among forgetme-nots. Another looks like a tiny little tortoise, and a third resembles a bishop’s mitre. And one can easily imagine the emerald-like Green Shieldbug inspiring a jeweller
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