Betony, Stachys officinalis, is as its ‘official’ specific name indicates, a medicinal herb used, without scientific proof, “to treat anxiety, gallstones, heartburn, high blood pressure, migraine and neuralgia, and to prevent sweating. It can also be used as an ointment for cuts and sores” (according to Wikipedia). It is widespread across Europe, but unobtrusive, though its handsomely crenellated leaves with their long stalks, and the largish flower with a tube longer than the calyx, make it a rewarding find. Once you know it, you’ll see it everywhere.
Lower leaf of Betony
Lower leaf of Betony: the stalk is longer than the leaf-blade, and the basal leaves form a persistent rosette.
The day dawned bright but unsettled after a stormy night that brought down many small branches, with the news that an outdoor concert in the local market town was disrupted by lightning, sending several people to hospital. One may imagine that once a paid-for concert is under way, a few rumbles of thunder and a little rain do not necessarily cause instant abandonment of the event: a direct hit is of course another matter.
I made use of the cool weather to cut a low branch from the Yew tree, giving shady space to walk and sit on the lawn. The Yew is next to a (very good) Fig, but the two could not be more different. The Fig rapidly sends out a cluster of long flexible shoots that quickly flop over and block the way; they are soft but brittle, and are easily sliced off. In a hard winter, all the above-ground parts of the tree died back, but it soon shot up again; none of the branches are specially long-lived, even the thickest of them. The Yew grows around a single vertical axis, where the seedling grew half a century ago. It is still, as Yews go, a young tree: some live a thousand years or more. The wood is tinged with a rich deep winy red, and is hard, tough, and springy. It was the perfect choice for making longbows: durable, water-resistant, practically impossible to break. Sawing through it is a challenge. Below the cut branch, I saw after felling it, was a little clump of Collared Parachute mushrooms, which Sterry and Hughes record as ‘very rarely under conifers’. I suppose Yew is not a typical conifer.
Collared Parachute mushroom
Collared Parachute mushroom, Marasmius rotula, showing off its elegant ‘parachute’, collar, and wheel effect (Latin rotula = little wheel). The stem is perhaps a millimetre thick, but quite strong and flexible.
Collared Parachutes under Yew
I carted the cut pieces to the compost heap. The trees began to rustle and shake, the sky darkened abruptly, thunder rumbled and the rain lashed down again. Parachuting to safety seemed an appropriate metaphor.
The riding stables swarmed with young Swallows, perhaps 15 of them growing strong for the flight down to Africa, twittering, swooping, perching on lofty cables.
Sunflower
On the hill, maize and sunflowers grew in glorious profusion, the bees drunk on nectar and coated with yellow pollen.
Pollen-dusted Bee on Sunflower
Along the chalk path, Common Blue butterflies skipped and perched on chicory flowers, delicate blue. In the bushy hedge, masses of darkly glossy plums blooming with pale blue yeast dangled from the trees. Above, a Stonechat rasped out his scraping call. I picked up two stones and made the exact same call by scratching them together, as if lighting a stony match: scritch, scratch. House Sparrows cheeped from the bushes; more anxiously, a yellowish leaf warbler, probably a Melodious Warbler, churred continually and flew about semi-conspicuously to perch repeatedly in the long grass to distract me from its nest – its young continually piping from deep in the hedge. I retreated gracefully.
A Turtle Dove cooed softly from high on a power line. At the stables, a Scarce Swallowtail (actually reasonably common here) drifted past; a White Wagtail hawked for flies beside the manège.
At 4pm the temperature reached 34.5 degrees: such a heatwave is called the Canicule or Dog Days, as Sirius, the Dog Star, is high in the midnight sky at this time of year.
When you see a parasitic wasp, she – it’s always a she, as the males lack the long ‘sting’, which is an ovipositor – is generally flying about searching for caterpillars or other insect larvae. She can detect them deep inside plant stems, drills down to them with her extraordinary sting, and lays one egg in the body of the luckless grub.
Another fantastic insect: Fiery Clearwing moth
Clearwing moth larvae just eat plants, including currants, but the adults are spectacular. The clear patches on the wings are where the wing scales are programmed to fall off, leaving a bare membrane. Happily the wings and tail are gloriously coloured.
Bee-Fly half-hovering on Lavender
Proof that Bee-Flies cheat: those legs are resting on those flowers, however much those buzzing wings are hovering!
And to cap it all, a large, brilliant Green Lizard ran into the kitchen.
In the afternoon the temperature reached 31 degrees. We boldly went out onto the steep Chalk grassland hillside north of St Sulpice, where the Pyramidal and Chalk Fragrant Orchids flower in quantities in the springtime.
Praying Mantis on a steep chalk hillside
At least five Praying Mantises on the chalk grassland: they are widely distributed on flowery meadows (chalk or sandy clay doesn’t seem to matter) but appear never to be numerous, so this was a good haul.
Attractive blue figwort (?) on chalkZygaena fausta on Knapweed
Zygaena fausta, a boldly marked and presumably aposematic Burnet Moth without any English name that I know of (we could call it the Devil’s Burnet), on Knapweed.
An obliging grasshopper
The sound of summer: a chorus of grasshoppers and crickets in the heat. This grasshopper was unusually large and obliging.
Handsome deep blue ScabiousThe chalk was thinly carpeted by this white starflower
The hillside was carpeted thinly and gracefully by these slender white flowers; behind it are Juniper bushes and loose Chalk scree, a scene repeated all across the hill, interspersed with bright flowers (Milkwort, Scabious, Knapweed, as well as Eryngo and various yellow composites) and the dried-out fruiting stalks of Orchids of different species.
Brilliantly coloured bug
A brilliantly-coloured bug on a grass stem. Perhaps it is an early instar of the Sloe Bug, or a similar species.
At 11 pm, our headlights revealed a Roe hind and fawn on the grassy track. The hind looked at the car and decided reluctantly to move off to the right, into the long grass of the meadow. The fawn ran away down the track before branching off to the left, its usual haunt with the cover at woodland edge where it hides up during the day.
A pair of slim, brightly striped orange-yellow and black Hoverflies with chocolate-brown eyes, mating … on a car doorMason Wasp carrying mud on house wall
This large, long-waisted and rather dark wasp is quite a shy visitor to the Fennel. She buzzes noisily into cracks in the wall, and just this once (hence the fuzzy photo) I caught her carrying a lump of mud to do her building, so I assume she’s a Mason Wasp, species not known to me (help welcomed). She is about 20 mm long and stocks her mud nests with luckless grubs to feed her own larvae. There is a similar wasp of the same size and shape with yellow legs: not clear if this is a colour variant or another species.
In the moonlight, two Nightjars churr vigorously, competitively, their odd sewing-machine song continuing for minutes at a time, ending with a few chucks and wing-claps.
In the morning, a Golden Oriole squawks and mews strangely from the woods.
Lords and Ladies (Wild Arum) in fruitAmanita mairei
Amanita mairei is an unusual Amanitopsis (Grisette) section toadstool in the mainly poisonous Amanita genus. This one is found in mixed open woodland on sandy soil, exactly the case here, and a beautiful example of just how specialized our fungi are. How do 3,500 species of mushroom and toadstool share a continent? By specializing in different habitats, living with different plants. The volva, here partly eaten by slugs, is a whitish bag at the base, often buried in the soil. The stem is slightly fleecy, the cap convex and without an umbo, the little point often found in the middle.
Large Skipper
Under the hot sun, I plant some more lavender, and some ornamental Sage (Salvia superba) plants. They are soon visited by Large Skippers, bumblebees, a Hummingbird Hawkmoth.
Female Common Blue on ornamental Salvia
On the way home down a quiet country lane, we stopped the car for a Hoopoe. It wandered unconcernedly along the road for some minutes, eventually flapping away with its distinctive ‘butterfly’ flight to a telegraph wire. A Kestrel landed on the same telegraph wire nearby, then hovered over some long grass.
Hoopoe
At 7pm, a very large Violet Ground Beetle, Carabus violaceus, about 30mm long, splendidly iridescent with a blue-black gloss, clambered up the wall of the house.
Violet Ground Beetle, 30 mm long
A Blackcap treated us to late-season bursts of musical song, brief but fluty. A Great Green Bush-Cricket fluttered a foot over the lawn, legs trailing like a wading bird’s, its four wings beating hard to keep its long body airborne. And a Wall Butterfly visited what I’ll have to call the Butterfly Flowerbed with its mix of flowering lavenders and thyme.
I disturbed a Passenger Moth while digging. This Noctuid moth’s pattern is reminiscent of the Meal Moth, a micro. The weather is as cool as Scotland: 14 or 15 degrees, ideal for working. Tomorrow is predicted to get to 30 degrees, at last.
A large green European Tree-Frog was roosting high on a door.
A good-sized picture-winged fly with a yellow head landed on my arm, seemingly trying to bite.
Sooty Copper Lycaena tityrus on White CloverItalian Striped-Bugs mating on Fennel. Assorted Cantharid beetles, Rose Chafers and bees visited the flowers.
Mass of Dodder on Gorse at Carnac megalithic alignments, BrittanyStonechat hawking for flies from the great stones, to the song of Cirl BuntingsXanthoria (orange scales) and Ramalina (grey tufts) lichens on megalithLarge heavily weathered megalith, older than the others in the alignment, i.e. incorporated into a redesigned or expanded system of stones at Le Menec, CarnacCambridge Milk-Parsley Selinum carvifoliaCantharid and Oedemera beetles on umbelBrown hairy aposematic Grass Eggar (Lasiocampa trifolii) caterpillar crawling on ground
Richard Kerridge’s personal story of life with cold-blooded animals (he wisely doesn’t say ‘poikilothermic’ anywhere) tells how he makes contact with nature for comfort at times of crisis – the first snog with a girlfriend after spotting a Grass Snake, delicately and wittily narrated; or the escapes from his troubled father, who has recurring nightmares of being again in a tank battle in Normandy.
It’s a skilfully told story, with interesting facts about Britain’s native newts, frogs, lizards and snakes, interspersed with personal encounters, mainly from Kerridge’s boyhood, when it was still possible for boys to find, catch and keep these now heavily-protected animals in and around London. It is a shock to realize that Natterjack Toads, now confined to a few wardened sites in the whole of Britain, were a century ago common even in the capital, and everybody knew and seemingly liked their call. Thursley Thrushes, was one of their names: Thursley remaining a fine place for lizards, but sadly too acid for the little toads – did acid rain combine with the natural acidity of the bogs there? All these events are complex and too little known.
I really enjoyed the boyhood adventures, and the boy’s mixed feelings on jumping on a pregnant lizard, only for her to shed her tail, leaving an unhappily bloody stump, a wriggling tail, and disappointment. Kerridge is very good on such moments. I’m less sure I really needed his agonies with his father: not quite convinced there was any organic connection with whatever the wildlife did. Perhaps he was trying a little too hard to make it all into a single story: life can just be untidy. But the fifty-year sweep from the sixties to now, from confused but reptile-rich childhood to mature enjoyment of nature and sober reflection on how much has been lost, is well done. ‘Field herping’ (herpetologising, i.e. finding and photographing reptiles by disturbing them, flipping up stones and the like) is a new term to me: and the fact that it’s illegal in Britain, and pretty much futile given how few species we have, and how rare they have become, triggers another melancholy moment. It’s a matter of everyone’s experience that there is more to see on the continent: that nature in our country is seriously damaged, despite our extraordinary concentration of nature-lovers.
For all that, and the ‘cold blood’ in the title – not exactly a passion-stirring phrase, perhaps – this is a book with plenty of joyful moments, one that gives something of the flavour of what it means to be English and obsessed by nature. As such, it is a book that people who do love nature can read for self-discovery; and people married to nature-lovers can read for explanation.
Marine in St Malo: Plush Soft Toy Lobster and Crab
In St Malo, even the soft toys are marine invertebrates: lobsters and crabs, dressed in nautical striped shirts. The people are called Malouines: Malvinas in Spanish. The name is from Saint MacLaw, presumably a Scot, though that might not be sufficient grounds to claim that Las Malvinas, the ‘St-Maloers’ – better known as the Falkland Islands – are therefore inherently British.
Coastal vegetation zones at St Malo: from top: grassland with gorse; the orange sea lichen Caloplaca marina; the black tar lichen Verrucaria maura; green algae; (dark) brown algae.
Around the walls of the old town, black redstart, house sparrow, jackdaw, chaffinch, rock pipit, herring gull, lesser blackback, black-headed gull, oystercatcher, swift.
Set-aside meadow beside saltmarsh on estuary of La Rance. Egrets, Kestrel, Turtle-Dove, Wood Pigeon, Wren, Swallow, House Martin. Butterflies in the meadow Large White, a Fritillary, Small Skipper, Meadow Brown, Gatekeeper, Marbled White.
The English seem unemotional … except for their passion for nature
