The heart of dreichness

For last night's blipfoto entry, I felt I wanted to share with you, especially if you live outside of Scotland, what the old Scottish word "dreich" actually looks like. "Dreich" means wet, overcast, cool and generally unattractive, particularly in respect of weather!

You can read more here.

Happy New Year!

Thank you continuing to read my blog or, if you've only just arrived, then welcome! Whatever your visiting status, today seems as good a day as, or even a better one than any other, to wish you and your loved ones a Happy New Year. In comparison to last New Year, this one is remarkably mild, concluding one of the mildest and wettest years in the UK since records began (which for very reliable observations was the year 1910, I think).

The past Autumn was extremely mild. Here in Stirling, we've only had two or three mornings with frost and December temperatures reached double figures Celsius on a few occasions. There have been numerous media and social media comments about ongoing flowering from this year or the early emergence of next Spring's flowers. We have just spent Christmas with family in West Wales where we saw cow parsley in the hedgerows either still flowering or flowering early. Red campion was also extensively still in flower, as this post's only photo shows.

And it isn't just the flowers - the birds and bees are doing what they ought not to be too. I saw a Twitter comment this morning about queen bumblebees in southern Britain being active today (unfortunate, as they won't survive any sudden temperature drop such as is forecast for the next couple of days). When I was walking the dog in the park this morning, the woods were alive with wood pigeons giving their courting calls and I saw collared doves displaying in flight yesterday.

We're all doomed, I tell you, doomed!

Signs of the times: Autumn #13

More comparisons between the British countryside of today and that from 1959-1961 in the paintings of Charles Tunnicliffe in the Ladybird "What to look for..." series of books.

"Then the sudden rush

Of the rain, and the riot

Of the shrieking, tearing gale

Breaks loose in the night,

With a fusillade of hail!

Hear the forest fight,

With its tossing arms that crack and clash

In the thunder's cannonade,

While the lightning's forked flash

Brings the old hero-trees to the ground with a crash!

Hear the breakers' deepening roar,

Driven like a herd of cattle

In the wild stampede of battle,

Trampling, trampling, trampling, to overwhelm the shore!"

Henry Van Dyke (from: "Storm-Music")

 

(Copyright: Ladybird Books)






Autumn Picture 13


Well, when I started this set of blog posts on these Ladybird books, I had rather hoped to be able to keep pace with the four seasons as I progressed through the four books, starting with Spring. Clearly, although I managed this for Spring and largely for the Summer book, the timetable went out of the window when I was busy in the Autumn. So, here we are, in June and I’m writing about Autumn. Never mind, I hope you are still enjoying these posts regardless of what it looks like outside your window. I will be satisfied if I finish the series in the 50 year time window since the books were published, which was 2009-2011. That means I have the rest of the year to finish the second half of the autumn book and the Winter volume. On, on...


Here’s a wild picture. Until last month’s unprecedented extreme weather conditions in Scotland, I would have said it seems a bit odd to be writing about wild Autumn weather in June but hey ho... Here, a herd of young cows are sheltering behind a high hedge from a gale and lashing rain. Some starlings and magpies are sheltering as best they can behind the cattle. Growing under a fallen, broken tree, there are some puffballs. The only part of this scene that you couldn’t have found here last week was the puffballs – it’s a bit early for those in June! But hey, this is supposed to be a picture from Autumn. In fact, as far as the theme of these posts goes, comparing our natural history today with that displayed in paintings from 50 years ago, I don’t have much to say for this one. I’ve already covered starlings here and magpies here and, as I’ve said elsewhere in these Autumn posts, we actually don’t have good information on the changes in the distribution of many of our native fungi over time, even the relatively large ones like puffballs.

Having lived in the Stirling area for 22 years, I’ve seen many little puffballs around here, but never a giant puffball, the edible (in fact, gourmet) giant puffball beloved of gourmands, and delicious when sliced and fried; until last Autumn that is, when O and I were walking near Dunblane and found the shattered and largely decomposed remains of a giant puffball, but which was still capable of producing clouds of spores. So we took some pieces and scattered them along the edge of the field we found it in and, from late summer, we will start checking for signs of growth, just in case!

Stormy Scotland: addendum

Yet more damage in Stirling from Monday's storm, including uprooted and snapped trees on King's Park golf course, and a significant incident involving a mature lime tree uprooted and falling on a house in the King's Park area. A lovely original Victorian cast iron railing bent like it was plastic, its wall demolished, a bay window smashed and guttering torn off, but it could have been worse...

Stormy Scotland

Today saw relatively unprecedented weather conditions for Scotland in May. Usually a month of increasing temperatures, sunny weather and generally altogether pleasant conditions, May 2011 has seen unsettled, wet weather, despite a glorious and hot few weeks in April. Today, as forecast by the Met Office, Scotland has been subject to an intense area of low pressure, bringing howling, raging south-westerly winds and torrential driving rain. The Met Office ‘s amber-rated Weather warning predicted winds gusting up to 80 miles per hour. In fact, In Glen Ogle, 25 miles or so north-west of Stirling, on the road to Crianlarich and Oban, a gust speed of 100 mph was recorded. Such high winds in late Spring or Summer are bad news as regards damage to trees and gardens. Deciduous trees are carrying their full complement of new leaves by this time of year, increasing the resistance to high winds and greatly increasing, therefore, the strain placed on branches. And so, not surprisingly, there were many examples of broken branches and even uprooted trees here in Stirling today. I was on holiday and took a walk around this afternoon recording the scene.

Everywhere was littered with small branches, leaves, even some major tree branches. Many trees were also pushed over by extreme gusts.

This poplar tree fell over behind me with a soft crash while I was sheltering from an extreme gust, waiting until I judged it safe to walk under a big lime tree that had already lost some big branches.

Our lime trees are, in one way, a bit like Australia’s “drop gums”, a species of eucalyptus, the River redgum (Eucalyptus camaldulensis) – this drops branches or even falls over when under stress (and kills and injures the unwary!). Lime trees are not as unstable as this but are prone to dropping fairly large limbs in high winds. I was very wary walking into town today down an avenue of mature lime trees, for obvious reasons, given the size of the logs that were raining down! Thrashing violently, the lime trees looked more like whomping willows in the extreme winds today...

Up on King’s Park Golf Course, trees were yanked out of the ground all over the place:

I like the way the root plate, the outline of the branches and Stirling Castle in the background mirror each other’s shape in this case.

Our garden didn’t escape the damage either – here are the sad remains of half of our 150 year-old pear tree which snapped clean off in the wind.

And our neighbour’s old (50 years old?), highly prolific bramley apple tree was simply pushed right over. So, no more free bramleys for us.

As the evening wears on, the wind is dropping (thankfully!) - I'm up late completing this and it is now almost silent outside (0130 hours). I’d like to round of this wee report with one of my favourite poems, the highly appropriate “Wind” by Ted Hughes. My High School English teacher, Brian Christopher, left me with an abiding love of Ted Hughes’ poetry, particularly his nature poems (surprise surprise), for which I’ll always be grateful. The images conjured by this poem would be familiar to many today in Scotland (and Northern Ireland, I gather):

Wind

This house has been far out at sea all night,

The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,

Winds stampeding the fields under the window

Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky

The hills had new places, and wind wielded

Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,

Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as

The coal-house door. Once I looked up -

Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes

The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,

At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;

The wind flung a magpie away and a black-

Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note

That any second would shatter it. Now deep

In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip

Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,

And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,

Seeing the window tremble to come in,

Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.

Ted Hughes