On The Edge: I’m Offering A Mixed Bag And Being Nowty
Today’s images are linked by featuring edges of various types. I never saw the wonderfully scenic, 300 year old Sycamore Gap tree which has been felled this week by vandals with a chainsaw, but I recently encountered the word ‘solastalgia’ which expresses the shock of the thousands of people who loved this tree. Along similar lines to nostalgia, solastalgia is the distress we feel when much-loved surroundings are altered and we are powerless to do anything about it. It’s a form of homesickness where we are at home, but sick because our home is no longer the same.
In contrast, my fallen tree with splintered edges is an unsung one. I fully feel the outrage about Sycamore Gap, but while it was leading the headlines, the UK’s State of Nature Report 2023 was quietly published, with little attention paid to its reminder that ‘the UK is now one of the most nature-depleted countries on Earth.’ Continue reading “On The Edge: I’m Offering A Mixed Bag And Being Nowty”
Wordless Wednesday: Fern Shadows
A Snowy Darwen Moor
Following up my frosty rose pictures, I thought you might like to enjoy Darwen Moor in the snow vicariously without freezing your fingers or nose. Continue reading “A Snowy Darwen Moor”
Poisonous Red and White Spotted Toadstools: Fly Agaric
Early autumn is a great time to hunt for fungi, so I have spent some time searching for the most atmospheric of all, red and white spotted toadstools, in all the likely and less likely places I could think of near where I live. As often happens, when I was not searching, I glanced up and had the thrill of seeing twenty or thirty of them growing on a hillside in a narrow strip of mixed, light woodland on the edge of peaty moorland.
Toadstools are the fruiting bodies of underground mycelial networks. Happy to return to earth, they emerge only briefly after a rain, swelling rapidly to full size then rotting back after releasing spores from white gills on the undersides of their caps.
Continue reading “Poisonous Red and White Spotted Toadstools: Fly Agaric”
Festival of Leaves: Red Acer
Dawn Miller is hosting a weekly Festival of Leaves challenge to celebrate autumn that will run for the next 10 – 12 weeks. I’d have felt more concerned my first offering might not count, being counterfeit autumn leaves, had Dawn’s first not been chrysanthemums.
Wilde Weelde, Floriade: a Partnership Between Humans and Nature
While your eye may naturally pick out the flowers, when I was face-to-face with this memorable landscape, I marvelled at that long, structured wall of tree trunks and re-purposed construction materials in the background. The fauna wall was by far the biggest insect hotel I’d ever seen.
Broad swathes of the Wilde Weelde garden’s boundary are made from small sections of logs of different diameters, stacked leaving gaps between them – the log version of a dry stone wall, you might say. The effect reminded me of the ramparts of a castle, except these walls have gaps that a raider could saunter through. Continue reading “Wilde Weelde, Floriade: a Partnership Between Humans and Nature”
Susan Rushton 