Primroses

After a few days of beautiful hot sunshine, it’s raining today. Both sorts of weather will bring the Spring galloping on.

The photos were taken on 3 consecutive days and show the opening of the flowers on a little primrose plant.

Primrose buds

Primrose buds half open

Primroses fully open

About 3 years ago I dug this primrose up from our wood and planted it under the big oak tree by the house.

It’s there each year, but it’s scarcely grown any bigger.

Yellow mistletoe

Yellow mistletoe in the snow

A splash of colour in an otherwise black-and-white world, this type of mistletoe is common here, growing on the boughs of oak trees.

I haven’t been able to get much information about it locally, other than the generalised opinion that it’s ‘bad’, and I haven’t found the internet much help either.

Young, green berries

The berries start green, and then turn yellow. They aren’t white at any stage like regular mistletoe, and the leaves are different.

Apart from that, the 2 parasites seem to behave very similarly.

Oak marble galls

Oak marble galls are the round things that are everywhere here on the twigs of oak trees and oak scrub.

They are the tree’s response to a gall wasp laying her egg in a bud. The larva develops inside the structure, eating it and sheltering from predators, then escapes out of a wordworm-like hole as an adult wasp.

The life-cycle is complicated and involves 2 different species of oak, both of which are found in abundance here.

Part of my oak gall collection

I think oak marble galls are lovely objects. At one point I picked off or picked up every single one I found, but my collection grew quite large and I never got around to painting them and making them into Christmas baubles like I intended.

So I tipped them outside by a standpipe as a kind of biodegradable rustic decoration and that’s where they still are.

Now and again I add a particularly nice one to the display.

Acorns

When you more-or-less live under a giant oak tree, you don’t half know it this time of year.

Just a few of the acorns yet to fall

There are plunks, bangs, pings, thumps and rattles at all times of the day and night, onto the roof, the wall, the gravel, the wheely-bin lids …

Acorns are friendly things except if they hit you on the head, which can be quite painful.

They also sprout. Luckily Clive had the foresight to lay a geotextile under the gravel of the courtyard, otherwise we’d have had an oak-seedling lawn rather than gravel. As it is, the stones are overlain with shiny brown acorns which of course rot down and create soil in which their future siblings can root.

Where the seedlings do grow, they can be the very devil to uproot. But when conditions are right, you can pull them up stalk, root and acorn, all in one, which is very satisfying.

I’ve discovered that if you squeeze one end of a small, shiny acorn between thumb and forefinger, you can shoot it quite a distance. Funnily enough, it works better if you squeeze the blunt rather than the sharp end.

This game can be played alone but is more enjoyable when there is someone to compete against.

Autumn view

The photo shows the view down into the valley behind our house.

It’s not the grandest view from the house, but it’s my personal favourite because it opens out beneath your feet as if you were flying over it and it’s such a perfect blend of the wild and the cultivated.

I call it the Magic Valley.

At the very bottom of the picture is the red foliage of a thicket of little sour cherry trees and the yellow foliage of 2 ancient apple trees.

In the middle distance are oaks mixed in with hornbeams and wild service trees, and beyond them, conifers and olive trees.

The dying oak centre stage isn’t so good. I guess it was strangled by the ivy which we’ve now cut away at the base and removed as far up as we can. All the finer twigginess lower down the trunk belongs to the parasite rather than the host.

All of this was farmland not so long ago, ploughed by oxen, but the forest is slowly reclaiming it, seedling by seedling, sapling by sapling.