january sunshine; the roof of the wood is a lattice of branches letting the blue sky in. the beech tree’s naked trunk twists and turns like a mature-bodied dryad, in the centre of its glade, floored with copper leaves
here the wood is thicker and still makes a dark shade contrasting its boundary with the open field.
the wood is dry and crackling with leaves underfoot. no signs of primrose or violet yet, although the woodpecker’s drumming rings through the trees on these sunny days and the great tit has begun his repetitive two tone song.
clumps of elm trees have died and collapsed; until the inevitable clones spring up from the roots the wood is opened up to daylight and brambles are spreading; there is less cover for the roe deer and I rarely see them. today a hare got up and ran out of the trees as we walked through, noisily cracking dead twigs and making our clumsy way, no doubt spreading alarm amongst the inhabitants.
in my garden the snowdrops are out, and the celandines. the first promise of life this year.
continuing to make pieces with plant impressions; this is clematis harvested from the tangle of dead stuff round the pillars of the verandah.
the first biscuit firing done, and now a glaze firing to prepare for the first day of february.
the first wintery weather of the year, and a high pressure system gave us pretty frost pictures today – even nettles become decorative with delicate crystalline structures drawing white lines around each vein and jagged edge.
thistles have every hair outlined.
the sun was melting everything in its path
but in the shadows frosted leaves sparkled
and pattern gleamed softly
back in the shed I have added another layer to the porcelain, by washing china clay slip over it then sprinkling on china clay powder, and gently pressing it in with the rolling pin.
three tallish bottles to fill a space in the kiln
and another rectangular piece – there are a few of these now -
the impression of stems from the garden weakens and sometimes ruptures the pot wall, making interesting non-curved planes as the slab is bent around.
these crusty surfaces on darker clays work well with the saltmarsh and chalk beach glazes, but the white st thomas stoneware clay will make a difference, I need plenty of them so I can experiment.
back from Spain at the end of November and the Bale woods and fields have so much colour and life in them still it feels like a real homecoming.
the low sun’s warm yellowy light brings out the soft rosy oranges of old pantiled roofs.
the childish joy of kicking one’s feet through fallen leaves – and the joy of noticing every luminous medallion of a hazel leaf, every tan colour oak leaf, small and large, lobed shapes all different, all satisfying.
the beech tree still has leaves, in fact most trees still have some left
the hazels in the hedgerows a shower of gold
once most of the leaves are off the naked shapes of the hazels in the grove show up their natural tendency to coppice.
hawthorn berries in abundance and birds feeding on them. bullfinches’ soft piping and the occasional black and white rump vanishing into the hedge.
in Cake’s Lane a flock of redwing flip in and out of the hedges as I pass, and several blackbirds rattle their alarm calls.
the field maple have mostly shed their leaves but the sun’s glow ignites the stems and remaining leaves
and bracken stems shine with a brassy, rusty tinge.
holly and guelder rose with bright patterns of red berries; the birds are not hungry enough yet to have stripped them as the weather has been mild through November.
oaks hold onto their leaves longest, and some of the small trees in Cake’s Lane are at their best.
burnt sienna, yellow ochre, indian yellow, gamboge, brown madder, raw umber, green-gold, naples yellow, cadmium orange, venetian red, alazarin crimson, burnt umber, permanent sap green; leaves have colours as beautiful as the old-fashioned names of artists watercolours.
early this morning the fields were all a little misty, as the sun came up through an opalescent mass of clouds low in the east. I took the camera out later, in the middle of the afternoon; low sun and damp air make the light soft and golden. a few plants have already reabsorbed most of their chlorophyll pigment and are blazing colours out amongst the green.
a whitebeam already gone yellowy orange hangs over the stubble field
the cloud of pigeons took off as we appeared from under the trees. I love this field. it reflects light when it has a pale crop like barley, and this is the bleached remnant, the stubble.
what elegant curves and delicate colours – just a sycamore leaf in the road.
this hazel has already lost its leaves, maybe it has a problem
not a native tree this, a turkey oak , its strong colours and shapes glowing in the sunshine.
and more hog weed – it’s still going strong. we have had a mild october; my japonica, a spring flowering shrub, has started flowering again.
elder does some interesting colour changes at this time of year; some of the leaves and stems lose almost all their colour, and some turn this dark red.
the winter wheat has been growing like mad; looking north across to Clip Street Farm.
dangly bunches of hornbeam seeds
bright in the sunshine
the holly trees are packed with berries; the birds will start the winter fat, at least.
beautiful colours on wild cherry suckers
and field maple – some are bright yellow, but these leaves look like becoming completely red soon.
a dog rose stem with almost fluorescent pink thorns
soft afternoon sunlight across the lane
and the last of the red admirals sunning himself. I have seen more of these butterflies this year than I remember for a long time.
summer officially over now the last of the swallows have flown south. a slow walk with a recovering elderly dog presents dawdling opportunities with the camera. everywhere I look there seems to be pattern and structure capable of translation.
why have I not spotted these lichens before; growing on a cement wall, which to a superficial eye is an ugly anachronism amongst old brick and flint buildings.
using embroidered stitches on a soft grey cashmere knit this will make a very elegant design …
silvery grey lichens on soft red brick walls turn my mind more to clay and glaze than wool
all this variegated blotching over rusty reds and algae greens ….
old hogweed seed heads stand out in the sunshine like sculptural jewels
and even such a mundane and ugly thing as a recently flailed hedge still has potential for a strongly drawn embroidery.
the hedgerows are still full of charm even though it’s that stub end of summer before autumn colours get going – maiden hair ferns bright green in the cooler wetter weather -
a stand of knapweed with seedheads – all the branching stems and repeated shapes make good pattern material.
pretty field scabious
I love plantains – strongly ribbed leaves and upright flowers -
all these red stems on the elderberries – more fractals of repeating smaller and smaller patterns -
dog rose hips blaze out of the hedge, with thorned looping stems, quite heraldic.
these lime tree seeds are quite irresistible, hanging like Christmas tree decorations
and ivy stems – fat wavy branching ropes with pretty leaf shapes … perhaps a cable design?
it is ironic that as my ability to hear diminishes with age (I realised recently that I could no longer hear a bat squeak, and couldn’t remember when I last was able to), I am becoming more interested in what I can hear, especially bird sounds. I find I am scanning with my ears as well as my eyes, and listening out for what I can recognise and what I can’t.
today, along the edge of the wood in the morning sun, a lark singing over the wheat field green and high on the right, on the left the wild bank of nettles, hemlock (the seeds are the most poisonous part of this),
Jack-by-the-hedge, hedge woundwort,
and the ditch along the wood hedge overhung by hawthorn, elder, ash, elm, alder, sycamore, hazel; deeper in the old plantation part of the wood, poplar, beech, oak, Scots pine and unseen birds.
chaffinch always the most common and repetitive, plink plink notes and a rolling chirrup, then a black cap’s clear voice, not really singing at full power – it is late in the breeding season now; a wren – or is it the black cap – scolding tchack tchack – in the distance a blackbird, some sweet tremolo notes from a robin; further along another wren’s high loud trilling.
here is a video with the most beautiful black cap song, quite like a nightingale in parts, then the thrush above the orchids in the grass.
round the corner the wood gives way to a field of rough grass at the edge of an old overgrown scrubby meadow; self-heal grows,
common spotted orchid, ragged robin, meadow sweet, meadow vetchling,
goat willow, sycamore, hazel, whitebeam, silver birch, and from the depths of the wood there is always a thrush doing his thing. in the foreground a chiff-chaff, and another chaffinch, but the willow warbler I heard here the day before yesterday was silent yesterday morning. they are less reliable performers; this year there are fewer of them around as well.
this afternoon I caught him on video; his song has a little chiff-chaff mimic sometimes – I have read of this but never heard it before.
in the green lane there are some mysterious voices and some familiar ones. there is always a yellow hammer, with his “little bit of bread and no cheeeeeeese” I think the first part of his song in fact sounds like a tiny hammer ringing out. there are chiff-chaffs in the oak trees, and chaffinches, and the bullfinches I saw in the winter on the other side of the village seem to have tucked themselves away down here in the tall blackthorn and hazel hedges; I hear their soft sad fluting “heu” calls on my morning walks. there is usually a white throat or two bouncing about in the hedgerow. then there is song that could be a black cap but it is scratchier than the full sound of the black cap in the wood and up by the cemetery – could it be a garden warbler? or is that just wishful thinking?
earlier in the season I saw a pair of willow warblers at the top of the lane, calling and flitting about between hedges and trees, but I never heard the song.
a new sound for me is the “whit whit whit” call of quail in the barley at dusk, just down the lane from us.
these little birds migrate from Africa via Malta’s gun-happy shores and so are becoming rarer. I am hoping to see one – about half the size of a partridge with longer wings in proportion to it’s body, and less colourful; the male has a distinctly striped head.
I am keeping my ears pinned back in the hope of hearing turtle doves purring in one of our little woods amongst the fields, but I would be very lucky. they are on the RSPB’s “red list” – Malta’s guns have done more damage to this species than to the quail.
it’s June. the cow-parsley is over, and hogweed is rampant in the hedgerows.
cow-parsley is delicate and lines the lanes with clouds of lacy white flowers. hogweed I love for its sculptural, dramatic stems, its exuberant, sharply cut and patterned leaves, the plate-size flowers of varying colour, shape and size -
but I have a love-hate relationship with it. in my garden, even in the wild-flower section, I won’t tolerate it.
although I cut some from the hedgerow and put the stems in water in my house this week (it doesn’t smell very nice, by the way), in the spring I can be seen crouching with a jar of glucophosphate industrial strength weed killer, and a paintbrush, dabbing the nasty concoction onto the leaves of those hogweed plants which infest my wild-flower plot.
I am cheered in my pursuit of hogweedless-ness by the fact that it is a biennial plant, and the seeds only stay active in the ground for five years. so eventually I may be able to get rid of them, as long as I am vigilant, and pluck any flower stems from those plants which escape the glucophosphate.
bees love them, no doubt attracted by the strong smell. I foolishly allowed them in, not recognising that the hundreds of seeds which scattered from the wonderful umbellifer seedheads would sprout the next year into a jungle of huge hairy leaves which crowded out all the more delicate flowers and grasses I was trying to grow.
a wild flower garden is the best thing to have in a drought. although the ground is hard as iron, the plants are flowering and the grasses have graceful seed heads.
there are ox-eye daisies, yellow rattle, ladies bedstraw, plantains, sorrels and several different grasses.
this small heath butterfly is sunning itself on a daisy head, pausing before flying onto the purple knapweed flowers. there aren’t as many butterflies as I thought there would be by now, no influx of painted ladies – the spanish bad weather probably prevented them – and very few of the aristocrat butterflies – peacock, red admirals and so on ..
today I have a biscuit firing, and good news about the firing of my spanish cono. Antonio sent me an email – the kiln god must like you, he wrote, your tinaja has come out perfectly – and sent this photo of the kiln. my pot is the one in the second row with the gap in front.
the first real clouds from the west in weeks this weekend … will we really get some rain? our local climate has a lower rainfall than Israel, but no rain for eight weeks, and no real soak for weeks longer than that is a little unusual.
spring is early because of the weeks of sunshine, and warm weather in late March and early to middle April. the ash trees have not joined in the general surge and are still only just putting out tender little leaves and fringes of flowers. they say oak before ash – in for a splash .. well we haven’t even had a splash.
everything is in flower – this guelder rose in the hedge is magnificent, covered in creamy saucers.
cow parsley and pink campion framing a gap in the woodshore.
a speckled wood butterfly in Cake’s Lane. the season seems quite promising for butterflies; I have seen quite a few orange tips, one pair attempting to mate in my garden, the wind and a particularly bouncy blade of grass prevented the male from settling though.
oilseed rape everywhere, creating havoc amongst susceptible humans, who have been sneezing, coughing and complaining of headaches and lethargy. it makes bees aggressive, and the honey has to be collected straight away as it crystallises very quickly. never mind the chemicals they put on it, killing the pollinators …
buttercups are flowering already in damp spots. my wildflower garden usually has plenty but it is very free draining so I don’t expect to see buttercups until later.
the shady hedgerow under 30 year-old tree planting in Sharrington road has fountains of pink campion amongst the bracken, superseding the primroses very quickly
and in my garden a testament to the warm spring – my apple trees are covered in tiny bulbous shapes; it looks like all the blossom has set to fruit. if there is enough water this summer there will be a bumper crop.
but no willow warblers this year. they paused on the way through; I heard them singing and calling a few times in late April. perhaps the paddock and garden were not overgrown enough for good nest sites. I heard one down here on Sunday morning, but in the depths of the wood; maybe it will stay. the black caps you can hear on this clip seem to dominate the soundscape this spring.
early spring brings some butterflies I haven’t seen here before, like this Spanish festoon, a wonderful creature. it looks freshly emerged with its very furry body. the other I saw earlier, last week, was a Southern orange tip, a much more gaudy version of our northern one, mainly bright yellow with orange tips to its wings, whereas ours is white with orange.
also plenty of this one, the small copper, darting about busily.
and a common blue, the colour of the gas flame under the kettle, whizzing in zigzags along the muddy path, very difficult to catch; I got this image as a still from a video clip I filmed, so the resolution is very low and I can’t show it any closer up.
also I have been seeing small heath, gatekeepers, and small whites, maybe a green-veined white, and a comma.
a lovely big dung beetle, shiny, about two and a half centimetres long.
tadpoles in a puddle …. one wonders whether they will have had time to grow into frogs before the puddle dries up.
and a very handsome locust (I checked out my identification and found that a bush cricket would have had much longer legs and antennae) who was so sure he was beautifully camouflaged that he let us get really close.
cork oaks are part of the landscape here. the trunks before harvesting are fantastically convoluted, dense with stripe and pattern.
taking the bark off keeps them healthy apparently; it is done every ten years.
just an appealing picture – someone has been rooting up trees and has a very nice stack of firewood.
below the Montanchez citadel the rock falls away very steeply into a deep arroyo, lined with orange trees and olive groves. a stream rushes down here and it must be quite a fertile, sheltered spot. casetas cling to the terraces, old tiles and dry stone walls making picturesque little views, full of the sound of nightingales trilling at this time of year.
now the sierra is full of nightingales singing. imagine this – a walk up a steep path paved with worn granite stones and smoothed boulders, studded with wild flowers and grasses, edged by yellow and white broom, in the cool morning before the sun strikes you with its heat.
each turn brings a new view – white cows hiding amongst white broom in flower;
a white horse amongst yellow broom and spikes of moth mullein. and birdsong – always the gentle toot of the hoopoe in the background, sometimes two or three together, all at different pitches, making an oddly musical medley. the slip sliding, bubbling song of the nightingales predominates, often three or four challenging each other across the little grassy meadows in the hollows between crags, but the explosive buzzy crackle of dartford warbler song emanates from several trees and bushes.
the purple viper’s bugloss is starting to flower now.
these pink flowers are some sort of field geranium
in the deep grass of my finca several flushes of flowers have come and gone in the past few weeks. one I can’t find in my flower book has tall hatted seed cases, like a larkspur but much more exaggerated, so a mass of green spikes sticks up above the flower heads. I have pressed a few of these in my thick Spanish cookery book.
it is late march and the white broom has flowered all over the sierra, and in my finca, its faint bittersweet scent flavouring the air. it is fading now, as the yellow broom starts to take over, brilliant yellow and stronger smelling.
the winter has been quite wet and the sound of water starts after about five minutes walking up the camino, rushing down the steep slope in this torrent which flows under the track in a culvert, from a deep valley full of bracken and scrub oak. this morning I heard a nightingale there, as well as in several other places – near the orange groves at the top, just under the castle, nearer my finca, and in encina and boulders that make a rocky outcrop about halfway down.
we walk in the cool of the morning, in the sun it is too hot for my fifteen year old dog. the camino is all grass between the stones, and several muddy spots have water flowing through them, beautiful clear water. the pure chilly air is delicious.
on saturday we encountered two short toed eagles, fighting behind a rocky wall. first of all there were strange sounds, perhaps partridges, I thought; T looked over the wall – then came huge white wings sticking up from behind the stones – storks? but then I could see they were eagles – as they realised they were being disturbed by humans, the two birds flew off and I couldn’t get the camera out fast enough to catch them.
these white feathers in the grass were all that I could record after missing a shot behind the tree.
for a couple of weeks there has been a love triangle trying to settle and nest above the house in the steep cliffs, two males and a female. in the afternoons we can hear their seagull-like cries as they display.
nightingales and eagles, hoopoes and cuckoos, and all the usual little birds, tits, sparrows, finches, starlings, blackbirds …. a warbler I must try and identify ….. the bee eaters are beginning to arrive, I heard their bell-like calls this afternoon.
