Riverhill Himalayan Gardens

The two specimen of the Chinese White Limes or Oliver's Limes, Tilia oliveri Szysz., on the east end of the front terrace are looking a bit tatty really, although on the plus side, the Mistletoe plants do love them - perhaps a Mistle-Thrush or two might be involved.

From above, the sub-cordate leaves looked a rather acidic lemony yellow rather than a dark green, while from below a very uniform whitish or light grey colour is produced presumably by the tomentum (stellate-downy). The base of the leaves is quite unequal, looking as though the leaf is set upon the petiole at an angle. Things I did notice were the (glabrous) smooth glossiness of the young shoots, and the quite long petioles. I didn't notice the colour of the bark.

The plants originate from moist forest in NW. Hupeh, in Central China, ranging from 1,000 to 2,000 metres altitude.

Hilliers describe it as: "Medium Tree. This is an elegant domed -shaped tree, leaves dark green above and silver-white beneath. Very pretty in wind. It has silver-grey bark which is clear and smooth. This tree is clear of aphids.". There is also an excellent article in "Trees and Shrubs Online".

It is listed as fairly narcotic to bees.

Westgate Park

There is this lovely Mongolian Lime on the city side of the river in among the collection of other ornamental trees.

It is said to be a relatively small lime with great autumn colour according to the books, with several cultivars available in the trade. It grows quite slowly at first, however the TROBI champion in Yorkshire is about 20 m high, twice the height mentioned in many catalogues (not Burncoose). The smaller branches are quite densely packed and the overall shape of the tree is rounded or oval. The mature leaves resemble (to me) birches from their shape, colour and texture all together, while the young leaves emerge bronze, reportedly quite attractive. It flowers quite early, and is said to be bee-attractive. However it may not be attractive to aphids, and may be honeydew free.

The yellow autumn colour is really good, and has therefore been used in the hybrid with the small-leaved lime, 'Autumn Harvest'.

It was discovered by Pere David in 1864 and brought to Europe in the late 19th century, seed being sent to Paris in 1880,  and the Arnold Arboretum in 1882 and is now grown in quite a few situations. Its native habitat is in Mongolia, Eastern Russia and Northern China, at about 1,000 m, the altitude of Snowdon. It is an extremely cold-hardy tree, tolerating minus 20 C.

Footling for leafmines at Broadwater Warren

Looked at the Frangula alnus and fairly quickly I located the now long-vacated small spiral mines of what I eventually found out to be Bucculatrix frangutella, the Buckthorn Bent-wing, on quite a few of the leaves. This seems to me to be a delightful oddity. When does the larva decide to straighten its mine out, generally to be followed shortly by its leaving of the mine entirely, and conversion to the habit of window-paning the leaves!

Low down on one particular bush there also appeared to be a lot of window-paning, possibly caused by the further feeding of the larvae.

Willow twigs and aphid eggs

Here are some views of Salix viminalis twigs and buds, showing the greyish hairs on the twigs and buds. The buds have just one outer bud-scale, and are flattened against the twig, as is characteristic of the genus.

In this closer view you can see the placement of the lenticels on the "shoulders" of the buds - perhaps a very useful place for them to be metabolically? It is also interesting to see the "lipped" appearance of the buds, which may, or may not, be somewhat characteristic of the species - they may have dried out a bit of course. And, is it genuinely S. viminalis?

The other thing is the three small horns on the leaf scar - the two outer ones are smaller and "sharper" and sometimes appear to have a circular scab just to the outside of the horn, and I am finding it difficult to interpret this pattern. One possibility is that the circular scab results from the abscission of a stipule - as suggested on this webpage. The horns would therefore perhaps be "now blocked off" veins? If so the two outer ancillary ones may join with the central main one to form the midrib of the leaf, but perhaps branching off again in the lower quarter or third of the blade. Or could they be for stipule venation?

Several of the twigs had aphid eggs on them, quite glossy black by now.

Here are two more eggs

This is a twig from one of the yellow-orange Crack-Willows, Salix fragilis, on the Southern side of the Ocean lake. The stipule scar is very obvious and the bud itself is quite solid-looking, almost thorn-like at this angle. So many of them seem quite sharply colour-banded.

This is another twig of Crack Willow, this time with one partly diseased bud, a not uncommon sight in my limited experience.

This is a Dogwood twig, showing the spiky opposite unscaled buds that look to me like "witch's fingers"

Alders at Leybourne

I had another look at the Alder trees this Saturday and Sunday, looking at where the trees were on Saturday and trying to be sure of the ID features, and doing rather more on leafminers and other insects on the Sunday!

Italian Alder, Alnus cordata, is present as 3 - 4 trees on the short straight Eastern boundary, and another couple of trees on the southern edge near the houses, and another actually in the hedgeline. Rarely self-sown according to Pfaf, so perhaps planted, and (just to note) the seed requires 6 week stratification.

The leaf edges are heavily damaged by typical weevil feeding notches, of an unknown species. There was a Longhorn Caddis on one of the leaves, Mystacides longicornis, identified by Chris Brooks, after I failed to see it wasn't a moth, and posted it on i-spot! Also on the leaf can be seen the white specks of what appear to be leafhopper feeding marks, as well as what look like salt secretions.

A little further on there was a large mine which looked rather like Agromyzus alnivora, which does occur on this species. It gradually increases in width, and I think I could be persuaded that it had contained, at least at some stage, a double line of frass! So, it should be a Dipteran mine, and the only Dipteran known on Italian Alder is indeed Agromyza alnivora!

Grey Alder, Alnus incana, (L.) Moench

A few large trees on the south and east sides, with young trees underneath them. The young trees under the canopy of the older ones could well be root suckers!

Going back on the Sunday I noticed another Grey Alder, planted in the first formal hedgeline. I have walked past it a dozen times without even noticing it! A fine young tree, possibly a cultivar of the species. On the side-shoot I took for confirmation there was a whitish Phyllonorycter-type mine, similar in all respects, except in lacking a brownish colour, to Phyllonorycter strigulatella, the Grey Alder midget. That is a rare leaf-mining moth, distinctly local, and perhaps still nationally  notable. although I found it difficult to assign this one mine to any other species, perhaps it is safer to leave the ID as simply Phyllonorycter sp.

The mine was about 12 mm in length on a young still-expanding leaf, only 40 mm long.

On Sunday I think I finally concluded, from the leaf shape and shoot characteristics, that the Alder by the small pond was actually the hybrid Alnus x hybrida.

This is a possible mite gall on the hybrid Alder leaf, maybe Acalitus brevitarsus, but still to be confirmed by examining the erineum and its hairs under the microscope.

There was something feeding on this Powdery Mildew on the hybrid. Could have been a very wide range of things.

More on Salix city

I walked around the Ocean, anticlockwise, more slowly than the other day, and keeping an eye on as many trees as possible between the path and the lake.

Crack Willows

The first thing I thought was that at the southern end of the Ocean there is a lot of the Crack Willow, Salix fragilis (L.), the majority of the trees on the skyline. Mixed in were Ash, Grey Willow, Alders, Hawthorn, Blackthorn. The upperside of the Crack Willow leaves at this time of year are mid-green and quite glossy, with a whitish grey on the underside. The tip is quite acuminate, while the serrations on the margin are quite prominent, and somewhat uneven. The petiole is generally over 1 cm long, the twigs glossy but of variable colour, or there may be several different types present.

Crack Willow is a complex species aggregate, both in the UK and on the continent. There are many clonal variants, generally unisexual, and most of them are likely to have originated in the catchments and other areas from human activity of one sort or another. The taxonomy is very difficult. The leaves do seem to be a bit more subject to Willow Anthracnose, in comparison to the White Willow, Rusty Willow and Osiers covered below.

I was puzzled not to see obvious glands, usually figured projecting in odd shapes from the junction of the petiole and lamina.

White Willow

Salix alba appears generally to have smaller, neater, leaves obviously glistening white as they billow in the breeze. Close up it may be difficult to see the tiny hairs, except on the edges in profile, in with the minute serrations. The stems are initially silkily pubescent as well, going yellowish as they age. No stipules visible in September, and I didn't see any glands on the petiole.

Osiers

To the south and southeast, and again to the north there are good individual plants and patches of the Common Osier, Salix viminalis, L. One plant had very narrow smaller leaves, and could perhaps have been var. angustissima, but Meikle states that almost any plant will degenerate into this state if sufficiently neglected.

The shoots are generally upright, on what to me seem quite rounded bushes. The short indumentum covering the underside of the leaves and the stems and next year's buds is very attractive. On the stems the indumentum extends about half way down the current year's growth, making the younger stem a lovely silky dull green, but as it wears away, leaving a glossy green epidermis on the older stem. Last year's growth has an matt olive-brown bark covering it. The upperside of the leaves is a dull green, hardly lustrous at all. The revolute margins and the undulations are quite obvious. The underside of the leaves are silky grey with the thousands of tiny apressed hairs, and lots of small veins curving strongly towards the tip, which project downwards below the lamina, so leaving a tiny dip on the upperside of the leaves, and repeating the pattern along the incredibly long laminas. The leaves are often tattered and damaged, perhaps by leaf beetles and/or leafhoppers.

There are, but quite difficult to spot, very long, lanceolate, almost linear stipules. The canaliculate (not very obvious in September) petioles have large boat-shaped bases covering a large proportion of the bluntish woolly catkin-buds laid down for the following year, giving the string of pearls effect noted in the Collins guide. The indumentum of the stem is pierced by orange-brown stomata, generally with a central split. 

Cherry or Myrobalan plum - Prunus cerasifera

The hedge-line of trees between Rhubarb and Great Court is in full blossom at present and definitely seems to be Cherry Plum, Prunus cerasifera, rather than the rarer "Wild Plum". 

Greenwich Park

Red-Crested and Rosy-billed Pochard on the duck-pond, together with c 50 Black-headed Gulls and 4 - 5 Common Gulls, Larus canus.

The Battle of Bossenden Wood

Bossenden Wood is a woodland area on the Western side of the Blean Woods complex around Canterbury. It is infamous as the site of the last pitched battles fought on English soil (albeit by small numbers of men on both sides).

In the battle Tom Courtenay (aka Sir William Courtenay) was killed with 8 or 9 others of his activists, together with two government soldiers (1 by "friendly" fire). Tom Courtenay had set himself up as a leader of a local revolt, attracting local fairly desperate malcontents deeply affected by the withdrawal of charitable payments, and the loss of farm-work due to the rapidly increasing mechanisation of farms, and the consequent threat of the workhouse for them and their families. There was no local charitable giving to support them, as the area was extra-parochial, with no church and no school for the children to go to. The judges were relatively lenient with the survivors, expressing a degree of sympathy for their grievous situation.

This is the Crooked Oak, a local landmark at Bossenden Wood. David Shire said that the name probably represents the summit of the hill where a succession of one or several oaks have got wind-damaged over many years. It seemed to be more like Quercus petraea than Quercus robur, purely from the apparently petiolate leaves.

In the picture above you can see the point where the large branch pictured below has been ripped from, apparently quite some considerable time ago.

The general vegetation around appears to be at least in part Sweet Chestnut, Castanea sativa, an Archeaophyte species, commonly  managed as coppice or "spring" (spring is sprung??), known in the Domesday book as "silvia minutia". Coppice may also be written coppy, coppis, coppse, copse, copy.

Along the old woodbank, this tree was considered to be a "stub" or "stubb" perhaps acting as a "cant" or "panel" marker according to David Shire, which it may well be, cut at about waist height. Alternative terms for the "panel" are "sale", "fell" or "barrow". However as far as I can see, with my very limited experience, from reading Rackham, it is just as likely to simply be a boundary marker. This tree is a Hornbeam, a very useful marker species, I could only take a wild guess as to how old it was:

This the same stub, from a different angle, noting some failure of regrowth, perhaps of an older coppice stool, perhaps indicating that the creation of the stub form of the tree came rather later:

The asexual stage of an Ascocoryne sp on a birch stump, possibly Ascocoryne sarcoides.

And here is some Candle-snuff fungus, Xylaria hypoxylon. in general it seems to be very variably branched. These individuals are quite dumpily rounded, but you also get stag's horn shapes or quite narrowly rounded tips. The bodies should release either white conidia (when you tap them?) or black ascospores:

There were very good numbers of fungi across the site, including these pretty dark flesh coloured mushrooms growing amongst the moss on this tree stump (pictures uncropped and cropped):

We also found these, which I think are Sulphur Tuft, Hypholoma fasciculare, or one of its relatives: 

Dene on the 16th

This is a five or so year old ash tree by the side of the ride leading from Ringlet corner up to the Victorian Pond junction. It is suffering severely from Ash Bacterial Canker, or Bacterial Knot, which used to be regarded as a form of Pseudomonas syringae, but is now said to be Pseudomonas savastanoi pv fraxini. This actually looks quite appalling, but is probably quite good for wildlife.

A quiet and muddy Dene Park

Late on in the afternoon I took the Western boundary path of Dene Park and had a look at the boundary features of the different paths and component woods. Birds singing included Great Tits, Blue Tits, Long-tailed Tits and Robins. Magpies and Wood Pigeons were also noted.

Working on the convention that at a wood boundary there should be a bank with a ditch to the outside of the bank (so that the ditch spoil gets thrown inwards onto the woodsman's property) the boundary on the outside of the wood appears to be facing outwards on the inner side of this track!

The sign that claims the track as Fairlawne property is therefore apparently accurate, at least at this point! Here is a traditional hornbeam stub a little further along the same bank, where the bluebells appear more profuse or earlier on the bank itself than on the lower ground further into the wood.

I followed the track around, which dog-legs around in a curve to avoid the acute straight lines of the property boundary of the forest lodge. The ditches would seem to indicate straight lines to tie in with the existing outer fence boundaries of the property - in other words the track and the current wood edge seems to have seeped out from the sharp angle to form a more gentle curve and "fill in" the corner of the Fairlawne field. The bank along the second line is lined with oaks, not sweet chestnut.

I then followed the track further on the drive along the edge of the old wood and around the corner, with what may be a newer section of wood to the outside of the track which included sweet chestnut, a sallow and, further on, some planted horse chestnuts. The sallow bark is very broken up, but attractive in its own way,

This planting contrasted with the section to the inside of the track, which had chestnut coppice and then some quite good beeches in it further along. The older section had a good really substantial wood bank fronting on to the track, but without a good line of edging trees, just a boundary to the sweet chestnut coppice. I wonder why this bank is so sharp and deep as it drops down to the track.

In the horse-chestnut section of the wood to the outside of the track, there was a half-buried branch of unknown origin. This is typical habitat for the scarlet elf cup, Sarcoscypha coccinea, which I stumbled across on my second traverse. It had about five fruiting bodies visible, generally a bit worse for wear due to the ravages of time and maggots. I don't think this fungus has been officially reported as present at Dene Park as yet - its not on the species lists I have seen to date.

This fungus, sensu latu, is found across the Northern hemisphere, and is frequent in the UK from early winter through to early spring. The scarlet inner surface, broken edge, outer tomentum and short stipe were all found, but the spores with their elliptical fruiting bodies and oil droplets are microscopic and were not sought today. I must get that microscope up and running!

The Horsechestnuts themselves looked to be in deep trouble, perhaps from a combination of Cameraria, likely rabbit damage and possible blight.

The tree's bark above this is in a terrible way, cracking and peeling away,

and this is an interesting sap run on the same or a different horse chestnut, which could attract some hoverflies later in the year perhaps,

Still further along, the track becomes a bridleway and again there is a bank to the right hand side indicating an original wood boundary.

On the track something appears to have ripped off a few twigs with sallow catkins. I wonder what could have been responsible? Earlier on there was also a collection of freshly broken open and chewed up sweet chestnut fragments on the mossy ground.

Plum blossom at Great Court

There was a robin singing in the Green Lane Wood just beyond the footpath junction. Is there a ring on its leg - I couldn't see it in a couple of later photos? The buds on this tree looked ready to break and there was plenty of Pleurococcus algae or look-alikes on the branches. There were a very few patches of lichens also visible.

The weather was still pleasant and the plum blossom was well out along the hedgerow. Its interesting to see the gradual unfolding of the sepals and petals to reveal the cluster of stamens with their tawny anthers, the lovely white of the petals and the eventual reflexing of the sepals. There is a single stigma and style in there as well!

The bumblebees were working the blossom well. Most seemed to be Bombus terrestris, like this individual with a thick necklace of parasitic mites. I think you can see its tongue seeking nectar. There doesn't seem to be any pollen in its leg pollen baskets.

There were quite a few Blue-tits deliberately seeking out the blossom. These may have been taking the pollen (internet sources, and also a couple of anthers were caught on camera "flicked" into the air) or the nectar (Birds of the Western Paleartic source). It looked more like nectar, but this needs further investigation.

And there was also a bullfinch or two moving more quietly and deeper in the branches.