Author: Tish Farrell

Does My Beehind Look Big in this?

Up at the allotment the globe artichokes we did not eat earlier in the summer are flowering, and the Red-tailed Bumblebees think all their breakfasts have come at once. In fact they’re trying to scoff them all at once too. The flower, after all, is a VERY BIG thistle. This makes me wonder if the huge expanse of ultra-violet attractant doesn’t over-stimulate the foraging impulse, thus explaining the manic bee rootling that has them scrabbling, bottoms up, through the petal forest to reach the sweet stuff beneath.

Those with longer legs seem to cope best, but I’ve already had to rescue two. They seem to become mired in the petals. Either that or they’re simply spaced out on the sugar rush.

Macro Monday over at Jude’s

Who Said Morris Dancing Couldn’t Be A Whole Lot Of Fun?

When we came home after eight years in Africa we lived for a time in Rochester, Kent, on the shores of the River Medway. It is an ancient town with cathedral, castle and cobbled streets. It’s also a place that goes in for plenty of fun activities.

For a start there’s a strong Charles Dickens connection. The writer lived in the area and in particular based some of the locations of his novel Great Expectations in and around the town. Every year, and to mark this important literary association, there is a Dickens Festival. This mostly involves people dressing up in appropriate costumes and parading about the streets. For some reason we have no photos so you’ll just have to imagine the fun of bumping into multiple versions of Miss Haversham out on the High Street.

Instead here we have the Rochester Sweeps Festival, an annual gathering that mostly involves Morris groups from across the land, but with a scattering of chimney sweeps plus a few Green Men thrown in. This particular event has been going for nearly forty years, but it harks back to centuries’ old festivities.

I attempted to unravel the history in an earlier post. So if you wish to know more about arcane English pursuits go here: Unexpected with bells, sticks and hankies at the Sweeps Festival

For now, here are a few more of Graham’s photos that did not feature in the original post. You can draw your own conclusions about the multiple cultural references, some more eccentric than others. The young women in black ‘Miss Whiplash’ ensembles hailed from the US:

Fun!

Today In My Garden

Never mind the Olympics, it’s all gold in and out of the garden on Sheinton Street. Over in the field the wheat is ready to harvest, and inside the hedge the Rudbeckia is towering up a good six feet tall. This morning it is rather windswept, but the yellow flowers look good against the blue.

Its parent plant once grew in my Aunt Miriam’s much loved Devon garden. That’s her fork in the first photo. The tines are twisted, making it unfit for gardening, but we keep it permanently planted as a keepsake and also as a perch for the local robin.

Beneath the Rudbeckia the feathery plumes of Golden Rod have just started to flower, and below them the red hot flowers of Helenium are making their own carnival parade. All the stems (below and above) belong to a single plant. They pretty much have the red end of the spectrum covered. The bees love them too.

Happy weekend everyone!

Cornish Christmas Seascape: Port Wrinkle

Thursday’s Special: Seascape

A Frog Whispering Kind Of Morning

And I’ve the pictures to prove it – the frog whispering that is.

This handsome amphibian and I gave each other a shock on Sunday morning. I was tidying up the overgrowth of self-sown columbines and lady’s mantle outside the kitchen door. And there he was under a columbine leaf. We both froze, until I thought to grab my camera. By then he was on the move, but froze again as the Lumix closed in. Being Sunday I was finding it hard to focus, and thinking he was about to flee, I started talking to him very quietly. And darn me, if he didn’t sit right up and listen:

I don’t know how well frog-human relations have been documented beyond that seminal work of the Brothers Grimm, but I can report there was no clinch, and thus no princely transformation. And it being an unfocused Sunday morning, as I said, I soon ran out of things to talk about and so returned to garden work, while he hopped off to his drain pipe in the wall. A brief encounter then. We will probably never meet again. But at least I have the photos. I can dream…

Weekly Photo Challenge

Incy Wincy Wenlock Crab Spider For Ark: Macro Monday

The flower is a wild corn cockle, and in real life it’s around an inch across, or two and a bit centimetres in alternative dimensions. The spider is utterly minute then, and the smallest I have spotted so far in the Farrell garden on Sheinton Street. In fact I only started noticing this species at all after Ark at A Tale Unfolds introduced me to the ones in his Johannesburg garden. Please check out his blog for more of his astonishing garden photos, though be warned – some of his close up arachnid shots might give spiderphobes a turn.

Also please visit Jude at her Macro Monday slot for more wonderful work. She’s featuring geraniums whose intricate beauty we perhaps do not appreciate enough.

Now here’s a less macro shot of the spider though it’s still larger than real life: hard to spot it beside the dewdrops:

Sun And Shadows On The Linden Walk And Olympic Games Connections

The Olympic Games begin in Rio today – cue views of Copacabana Beach and Corcovado Mountain with its astonishing statue of Christ the Redeemer. Now switch scenes to a small town in rural England, to a meadow in Much Wenlock, and turn back the clock to 1850, for this is where it began – the source and the inspiration for the modern Olympic Movement.

The town’s physician, Dr William Penny Brookes was the man behind the revival of the ancient Athenian games. His objective was clear:

for the promotion of the moral, physical and intellectual improvement of the inhabitants of the town & neighbourhood of Wenlock and especially of the working classes, by the encouragement of out-door recreation, and by the award of prizes annually at public meetings for skill in athletic exercise and proficiency in intellectual and industrial attainments.

He had already started the Agricultural Reading Society and been hard at work raising funds from Shropshire’s gentry to establish a working man’s reading room, while lobbying every famous writer of the day to donate copies of their works to the cause. Much of the library still exists in the town’s archives and includes some heavy-going and esoteric histories of far-flung lands. It is hard to guess the appeal of such books to farm hands and quarrymen after their long day’s labours, but at least they would have had decent light to read by. Brookes was also behind the founding of the town’s gas works.

Wenlock’s Olympian Society grew out of the Agricultural Reading Society. The very first games were held on the town’s race course but in later years took place (as they still do every year) on the field below Windmill Hill, now known as the Gaskell Recreation Ground, or as Penny Brookes himself called it, the Linden Field.

Nor was it any rustic village fete affair. The local MP J M Gaskell provided seating on Windmill Hill to give everyone a fine view, and the event was heralded with much ceremony, the town streets decked out from end to end, a parade of competitors, flag bearers and officials all marching with the local band. From the start, then, pageantry was a key part of the games, lifting people from their humdrum, hardworking existences. And although there were many fun contests and traditional country sports, the athletic events were taken seriously, and attracted competitors from all over the country. Prizes included silver cups and ink stands presented by local worthies and Penny Brookes designed elaborate medals – gold, silver, bronze, and had them made at his own expense.

News of the games spread far and wide, and indeed were spoken of in very high places. In 1890, when the French aristocrat Baron Pierre de Courbetin had been charged with finding ways to improve the fitness of the French Army, he was advised to go and see the Wenlock games. He stayed in Brookes’ house on Wilmore Street during his visit, and what he saw and also learned from Brookes inspired him to found the International Olympic Committee. The IOC held their first games in Athens in 1896, and although Brookes did not live long enough to see the extent of his influence, de Courbetin gave him due recognition:

If the Olympic Games which modern Greece did not know how to establish again is revived today, it is not to a Greek that one is indebted, but to Dr. W P Brookes.

We the people of Much Wenlock are also indebted to Dr. Brookes for his planting of the lime tree avenue alongside the Linden Field where the games took place. As I’ve said before, it is one of the town’s enduring treasures. The trees are over 150 years old, and still in fine form. There is no time of the year when this avenue is not beautiful. In winter it is deeply mysterious, a colonnade to another reality. But whatever the season, there is always a play of light and shadow. And there is windrush in the high canopies, and crow call. And in summer the soporific scents of tiny green lime tree flowers.

Here, then, are a few more views, and so when you see the grand and glamorous opening of the Rio Olympics, give a thought also to this place and the Shropshire doctor, who with the well being of his townspeople in mind, inspired the modern Olympic Movement:

This post was inspired by Paula’s Thursday’s Special theme ‘shadow’. Please visit her blog and join in this week’s challenge.

#2016OlympicGames

And It’s Another Bee And Poppy Photo…

The opium poppies that have been growing behind our sheds (aka the old privies) are on their last gasp now – one or two blooms amongst a phalanx of seed heads. But there’s still plenty of bee forage along the fence – pale mauve spires of spearmint, purple tufts of wild knapweed, the oregano coming into flower.

And there’s also much to entice them inside the garden.

These ornamental strawberry plants have colonized the gravel path. I might have to move them at the end of the summer. They definitely have world domination in mind. And although they make tasty Alpine type strawberry fruits, the blackbirds always seem to get to them first.

Purple Toadflax is another bee favourite, and it also grows itself around the garden.

And finally, here we have a bee in clover, wings all of a dazzle in the midday sun:

Now for some really good close-up photography, please buzz off to Jude’s Macro Monday

Traces Of The Past ~ The 330-Year-Old Hedge

It’s hard to imagine that this gigantic bastion of ancient yew trees began three centuries ago as a formal terrace row, each tree cut into a neat, small cone or obelisk. Back then in the 1680s, when these trees were first planted, the taste in grand garden design was for the linear and geometric, following the French notion of strict plant control.

A hundred years later it was all change. In keeping with the new romantic landscape style of English gardening, the yews were allowed to grow as they pleased. The aim was to create vistas of idealized nature.

But this more liberal attitude did not last either. Around the time of the yews’ two-hundredth birthdays, Victorian garden men armed with sickles and step ladders intervened, and began creating this arboreal rampart of free-form topiary. Both fascinating and overbearing, I feel. The gardeners apparently hung onto to their ladders with one hand, while pruning and shaping with the other.

Today, the effect is still maintained by National Trust gardeners, now using electric hedge trimmers. Every year four of them start work in late August, and keep on trimming until mid-November – three months’ toil.

The yews are to be seen at one of the National Trust’s outstanding properties – Powis Castle, near Welshpool in Powys, just over the border from Shropshire. We called in there on our way home from our recent stay on the Mawddach Estuary in mid Wales. I’m afraid that on this occasion it was more for a good cup of coffee than for culture.

The castle dates from around 1200 when it was the stronghold of the last Welsh princes of Powys. In the sixteenth century ownership passed to the English Herbert family who acquired the title Earl of Powis. Indeed, they appeared to have acquired it on three separate occasions through history until the title eventually stuck fast to the family.

One of the Herbert daughters married the son of Clive of India (Robert Clive 1725-1774) – he who plundered the subcontinent under the auspices of the British East India Company. The Clive fortune paid for repair and development of the castle, and Robert Clive’s collection of valuable arts works gathered during his India days are on display there. You can tell I have very mixed feelings about this. But scruples aside, the house is well worth seeing and it contains many treasures.

The garden, though, is the best part. The setting is magnificent, with stunning views of the Welsh borderland. A whole day (and indeed several days at different seasons) could be spent exploring the many layered terraces, the lawns and woodland walks. The planting is on an epic scale with many unusual herbaceous varieties deployed. Specialist garden history talks are also available, and when energy flags (and as intimated earlier) there’s a good restaurant-tea room for re-charging purposes. Although to be on the safe, take your own picnic as well. It’s a long way from the grand lawn to the courtyard refreshment station.

Please visit Paula at Lost in Translation for more traces of the past. This theme is going to be regular every-other-month challenge on her blog, which is good news. Thank you, Paula. I have lots more traces in my archive.

A Peculiar Pursuit? Listening In On Star Land

It was a frequent and rather sinister feature of my childhood: Sunday afternoon drives around the Cheshire lanes. Always winter. Flat fields empty of their dairy herds. Neat hedges and the metal railed fences typical of this county. Then the sudden glimpse of it – the great grey dish in the sky: the disturbing scaffold-like armature that held it aloft – sometimes the dish tilted one way; other times in quite another position. So that the first sight of it across the flatlands would always be a shock to the system. Science Fiction in action then. Scenes I remember only in black and white.

But if the sight of it aroused feelings of vague anxiety, as a five-year-old I was also quick to register the awe and excitement in my parents’ voices. It might be worrying to me but, I concluded, this monstrous machine was clearly ‘a good thing’.

This, the Jodrell Bank steerable radio telescope, had only just been completed. It was the largest in the world back in 1957 – the dish 250 feet (76 metres) in diameter. Sir Bernard Lovell – a radio astronomer at Manchester University – was its creator. He had worked on the development of radar during World War 2, and now wanted to study cosmic rays. The gun turret parts of two British warships were apparently re-purposed to drive the telescope.

It became operational in time for the launch of Sputnik 1 in October 1957. This was the world’s first artificial satellite launched by the Soviet Union. My parents were very excited about this too. While Jodrell Bank tracked the path of Sputnik’s booster rockets, my parents were staying up into the small hours, standing in the garden of Love Lane House, Sputnik spotting. They saw it too, and got their names in the local paper. Whizzy spinning sputniks on strings were, for some time to come, the toys to have. I received several. Cardboard ones came free in Cornflakes packets. In fact Sputnik was a frequently uttered word in our house. Perhaps it’s what predisposed me to want to learn Russian a decade later.

In 1966 the Soviet Union actually asked Jodrell Bank to track their Luna 9 moon lander spacecraft. Thus it would seem that the Cold War had its lukewarm moments, although relations were not so well fostered afterwards when the British Press got hold of, and published the Jodrell Bank photos ahead of the Russians giving their permission.

Later, in concert with US surveillance, the telescope was used to monitor Soviet spy satellites. And yes, in between spying activities, there was also some serious scientific research – time spent observing those esoteric out-of-space entities – pulsars, quasars and gravitational lenses. And please expect no further explanations of these matters. My studied viewings of the TV programmes by the very excellent theoretical physicist Professor Jim Al-Kalili have left no residue of knowledge in my brain cells, or at least none that I am aware of.

Today, the Lovell telescope has been joined by several others on the site – all part of Manchester University’s Jodrell Bank Centre of Astrophysics. It has a visitor centre, and all manner of exciting things going on there. This photo, by the way, was captured by chance last year when I happened to look out of the window of the Manchester to Crewe train. A veritable blast from the past then, but this time in full colour. I still find it worrying though – that great grey dish eavesdropping on space.

And before I go, there’s also a literary connection with Jodrell Bank. As a pre-teen I was a huge fan of Cheshire children’s writer Alan Garner, and in particular of his 1960s titles The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and its sequel The Moon of Gomrath. Garner didn’t think much of the first book, and it was only in 2012 that the third volume of the originally planned trilogy was published. But then Boneland is not for children. It is a fusion of science, prehistory, fantasy and psychotherapy whereby Colin of the first two books is now a professor at Jodrell Bank, trying to resolve the loss of his twin, Susan, and the loss of his memory. It’s a haunting work with many layers. Perhaps, like me, Alan Garner found Lovell’s Telescope a disturbing sight on the Cheshire Plain, raising more questions than the ones it was intended to answer.

For more Thursday’s Special posts please visit Paula at Lost in Translation. She asks us to pick a word from the following: Pursuit, Veneration, Effervescent, Personal, Peculiar. And then post a photo or photos. I think I’ve scored the 3 ‘p’s’ in this post plus a bit of veneration for Alan Garner.