Dragonfly and drone fly by

A beautiful dragonfly taking a rest before whizzing off somewhere else. And a drone doing much the same just a few minutes later (operated by some local lads).

Widmer Fields, Hazlemere, Buckinghamshire.

July 2019.

Rosebay Willowherb - the Fireweed

The fields and meadows near where I live are looking pretty sorry for themselves at the moment. An extended period of dry weather and a mini-heatwave have leached all of the green from the grasses and everything is brown and tinderbox dry. Which makes finding the occasional cigarette butt all the more concerning. 

Do these people have no concept of risk? It's stupidity at worst and unthinking and reckless at best. One little ember and a bit of a breeze and these fields could easily be ablaze. 

This isn't scaremongering - this year alone England and Wales have suffered 442 wildfires, compared to 247 last year. Surely smokers can wait until they're away from the fields before they light up? And what's the point of going for a lovely walk in the countryside if you surround yourself with smoke? Isn't part of the pleasure the sights, sounds and smell of the great outdoors?

Anyway, rant over. 

And, as it happens, the subject of fires allows me a nice segue into today's featured wild plant - Fireweed, also known as Rosebay Willowherb (Chamerion angustifolium). 

You'll know it even if you didn't know what it was called. It's that striking pink flower that grows in clusters on top of a tall stem and rises up above the dry straw-coloured grasses. You sometimes get a mass of them growing altogether in a stand and it's quite beautiful. The bees and butterflies certainly think so and the flowerheads are usually covered with nectar-loving insects.

But the plant isn't just a pretty face - it has a number of uses. 

Firstly, you can eat it. 

The young shoots that pop up in the Spring are a pleasant wild vegetable that tastes a bit like asparagus. However, the harvesting period is only a matter of weeks - the stems quickly get tough and stringy if you wait too long to pick them. But, once the stems have lengthened and toughened, they become the source of a second edible - the pith. You slit the stem length-wise and scrape it out with a knife. It's sweet and tastes of cucumber and makes a great addition to soups, stews and smoothies. Or you can just eat it raw. 

The leaves, meanwhile, make a nice tea. Collect a good pile of them - especially when they are mature and just starting to turn from green to ruddy yellow or brown. Then bruise them and lightly ferment them by leaving them in a carrier bag in a warm place for a few days. Then dry them gently in a greenhouse or in an oven on the lowest heat. The resulting caffeine-free tea is delicious, with the smell of green tea, and much of the richness of traditional black teas. They drink a lot of it in Russia so it's often known as 'Russian tea' or 'Ivan's tea'. 

Finally we have the flowers. These can be used to make jams, jellies and syrups - in parts of Canada and Alaska, Fireweed Syrup is quite popular and there's a flourishing cottage industry making it. 

If you fancy making jam, you start by steeping the flower heads in a little boiling water until the colour leaves the petals and goes into the liquid. The more flower heads you use the stronger the flavour and colour. I made some a couple of years ago and was disappointed by the colour. I then learned from a foraging website that it's a good idea to add a little lemon juice during the steeping process and the results were much improved. Last year the colour was beautiful. The flowers don't have a terribly strong flavour but there is a hint of rose.

In late Summer the flowers start to wilt and die and long thin seed pods appear on the tall stems. Once they have reached a sufficient size they pop open along their length releasing clouds of candy floss like seeds to be dispersed by the wind. One plant can produce over 80,000 seeds. Outdoorsmen and women know the value of these fluffy seeds. They make fantastic tinder when you are trying to make a fire from scratch. 

As the plant reaches the end of its life, the leaves become a beautiful blaze of yellow, orange and red. It's quite a stunning sight. Here's a free photo I found on Pixabay by Natalia Kollegova of a field of late Summer Fireweed in Alaska. Just wonderful.

And a photo by me.

The reason it's known as fireweed isn't to do with its colour or its seeds. It's because of the plant's ability to colonise land after a catastrophic fire. In 1980 it was one of the first plants to appear after the eruption of Mount St Helens in Washington State, USA. And, in the UK during WWII, it was one of the first plants to grow on bombsites after the Blitz, which gave it another of its common names - Bombweed. In fact, it was the two World Wars that provided just the right conditions for it to expand its range. The clearing of huge areas of forest and the many fires that resulted from bombing raids in both town and countryside turned it from a scarce woodland plant into a wildflower that we now see pretty much everywhere. 

But at least that means that, if some lazy smoker does set the local fields alight, we know they will be a riot of pink again the following Spring.

Important Note: There is a related species called Hairy Willowherb (Epilobium hirsutum) which looks fairly similar but should not be eaten because there have been rare instances of people having seizures. However, as the name suggests, the stems and leaves of Hairy Willowherb are covered in downy hair whereas Rosebay Willowherb has no hairs at all. It is, therefore, very easy to tell them apart. 

As always with foraging - if you have any doubts at all, don't take the risk.

Bekonscot Model Village

Britain is known the world over for its history of notable eccentrics, collectors and obsessives. And almost nothing screams 'British!' like a superbly detailed model village, especially if it has working model trains. 

If you want to see exactly what I mean you must visit Bekonscot - the oldest Model Village in the world.

Bekonscot is a village locked in a time warp. Opening for the first time in 1929, it boasts very few nods to the modern age - even the Underground Station borrows its design from Art Deco stations like Chiswick and Redbridge in London. Elsewhere you'll see manor houses and village shops, fox hunts and cricket on the village green, a small fishing port and a castle, all firmly stuck in the 1930s. It also operates a massive model railway covering over one and half acres of gardens, all controlled from a genuine full-sized vintage signal box. Over 15 million visitors have been captivated by the charm and eccentricity of the place, including Queen Elizabeth when she was a child. 

The village was the creation of a wealthy London accountant called Roland Callingham. His house in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, sported a swimming pool and tennis courts and was a favourite  country haunt for his society friends. The story goes that Callingham was a passionate model railway enthusiast but his hobby had began to take over the house. So much so that, in 1928, Mrs Callingham issued him with an ultimatum - either the indoor model railway went, or she did. And so the model railway moved outdoors. And it grew. 

And grew. 

One of his neighbours was his great friend, Enid Blyton - creator of Noddy and The Famous Five, though whether she played tennis there (and, in particular nude tennis of which she was, allegedly, a fan) is unrecorded. In 1946 she wrote a short story entitled The Enchanted Village which described a visit to Bekonscot with her niece and nephew. Her house, Green Hedges, was demolished to make way for a development of new houses aptly named Blyton Close. But the model village does have a model of her house (with a figure of her on her porch, typing) and a original full sized sun dial that she owned.

Many of the buildings at Bekonscot are based on real buildings in the area but Callingham was never concerned with precision – Bekonscot was never meant to be taken too seriously. 

I was lucky enough to have a behind the scenes tour of the place back in 2018 ad met some of the maintenance staff and the talented model makers who create the buildings and the tiny people.

In addition to the miles of toy train tracks, there is a ride-on 2ft gauge railway that drives around the site. The track and tipper wagons are thought to have come from the contractors who built the Great Central Railway through Beaconsfield in 1908. The narrow gauge railway was used to move spoil around Bekonscot during construction, and later to move plants and ice creams around to serve tourists. 

Every so often the model village produces special models to mark important anniversaries, such as the 100th anniversary of the end of WWI. On that occasion, Bekonscot boasted a Zeppelin and a tiny diorama of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.   

Bekonscot is now operated by The Roland Callingham Foundation, which continues the tradition established by the founder of welcoming visitors to the village and supporting worthwhile causes. To date it has donated over £5.5 million to various, mainly local, charities. 

Here's the website.

Life finds a way ...

A few posts ago I talked about hazel copsing (here) and the fact that you can cut it back to a stump but new growth , or 'rods', will soon shoot up from the base. 

Another common tree that seems almost indestructible is the ash. Here's one that, for whatever reason, has been chopped down. But does that deter it? Not a bit.

    

Ash trees are like the Lernaean hydra of Greek myth - cut off one head and two grow in its place. 

Life finds a way.

In the lime light

If you've ever parked your car under a lime tree for any length of time you might have noticed a kind of sticky residue on the roof. This is not, as some believe, tree sap. It's a substance called honeydew, a sugary secretion excreted by aphids (greenfly) that's very popular with bees and ants and other insects. But it also makes a mess of your car and, if you don't remove it, it will attract mould growth and damage your paintwork. 

It's a shame that the tree gets the blame because lime trees are actually pretty useful. The stringy fibrous bark - known as liber - was traditionally used to make rope. And the wood is soft and finely textured and is used in wood turning and carving. The great British woodcarver Grinling Gibbons (1648-1721) worked mostly in lime wood. I once spent two years working in a country house that had Gibbons' carvings on some of its walls. These aren't a patch on the work he did for some of the great country houses and royal palaces, but they are still exquisite. 

Lime wood is also used by furniture makers and, because the wood doesn't warp, it's still used today to make sounding boards for stringed instruments and piano keys. One rather more unusual traditional uses of lime wood is the making of sticks for Morris Dancers.

 

The leaves make pretty good eating - especially when they are young and look almost translucent. You can use them as a salad leaf and they are rich in protein and vitamin C. Meanwhile, the flowers and the fruit (including the attached leaf bracts) can be eaten too but are best when they're dried and used to make Linden tea (Linden is alternative name for the lime tree). 

There's a lot of folklore surrounding the tree. They were associated with protection and fertility. The leaves were used to fight fever and colds, and to promote sleep and serenity. In the Middle Ages, they were planted near hospitals because it was believed that they purified the air. In times of food shortage such as during the Second World War, dried lime leaves were ground into flour because of their nutritional properties

It's quite sad to see that many of the leaves on my local trees have already started to go brown and are falling to the ground.  But we have had an extended period of dry weather with barely any rain to speak of for weeks. 

In fact I've noted a lot of fallen leaves in general this July, many of them still green. But a tree will shed them if it needs to conserve water.

And it can always grow new leaves.

Platinum piñata

Marlow, Buckinghamshire. 

June 2022.