Holly … Flowers … if that seems an oxymoron, you’re not alone! Holly is a flowering plant, despite its spiky evergreen leaves. Another curious thing is that it is dioecious: it has separate male and female plants. This plant is a male, and each flower has four anthers producing pollen.
Tree Pipit singing sweetly. Its perch has been well drilled by Woodpeckers.Wide views over heath, hill, and woodland as far as the eye can see: Puttenham Common from Hillbury Hill FortThe Tarn on Puttenham Common, a remarkably big body of water surrounded by beautiful Oak – Birch – Holly forestAn enormous coppice stool of Holly, a most surprising tree to find coppiced, beside the main forest track running north from the Tarn. It must be ancient to have grown to such a size. A fabulous big moss, I think AtrichumAnother gorgeous big moss, surely Polytrichum
A beautiful set of Grey Squirrel prints on a path well wetted by the autumn-showers
The squirrels didn’t get all of them yet! Yes, it’s autumn, and the squirrels are busily snipping off little stalks with berries on them all over the reserve.
Puffballs, well mature and splitting, showing their grainy surface and stalks
Digging out wet woodland in Gunnersbury Triangle, seen from the boardwalk bridge. The “carr” steadily silts up with mud, leaves and roots. Here the team is carefully preserving the rushes and gypsywort, removing mud to a spade’s depth. The mud will be graded to form a gentle transition from the deeper areas, which only dry out in midsummer, to the dry bank that’s covered in holly.
The English seem unemotional … except for their passion for nature
