May Day is gathered together in Nowhere Wood. The guests are all assembled, having arrived in timely order, ready for the magical day.
First to arrive was the wild garlic, clean and green with the freshness of a memory of good times around the family table.
Wild garlic in Nowhere Wood [Photograph: Neil Ingram]
Then the first bluebell opened up to the sky, followed by the others, forming a coloured haze beneath the trees, daring the sky to lose its heavy April clouds to show its true May colours.
A haze of bluebells in Nowhere Wood [Photograph: Neil Ingram]
Then the big oaks open their leaves, delicate and shimmering in the sunshine, before they darken and spread a curtain over the wood.
Fresh unfolding oak leaves, translucent in the sunshine. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]
Oceans of cow parsley flow over the floor of the cleared wood, where tall, sickly, ash trees once stood. This is the First of May, celebrating new starts and the freedom to enjoy the light.
And, finally, the Queen of May, the Hawthorn, blooming proudly here and across the Park.
The hawthorn in May [Photograph: Neil Ingram]
Hers is the glory, the scent and the crisp whiteness. Entwined together, the branches strengthen their appeal and magic.
Once in this place, the villagers would plait her blossoms into a crown and choose the fairest maid to be their Queen of the May. This is not a crown of thorns: today it is a crown of promise.
A hawthorn crown [Image by AI]
Then, the village children would dance and twist their maypole ribbons to form a perfect spiral of red and white. This was one day when they could leave the chalky gloom of their school rooms and breathe.
In the engine room of wood, it is just another working day, the animals are busy with family business, since being and becoming is a lifetime’s quest: nests need to be built up, offspring fed and protected from danger. The real magic is that it all works: the dance of the DNA spiral that continues year after year, in a stately and predictable procession.
But perhaps, the wood also senses that today is a special day.
Happy May Day!
Why do you think it is an advantage for small plants living on the floor of the wood (like bluebells) to flower early, before the tall trees get their new leaves?
Why do you think celebrating May Day was important part of village life in Nowhere?
Spring has arrived—but the world is not yet settled.
In an uncertain climate, people choose uncertainty and so does the weather. Sun, rain, frost and wind – the persistent wind blowing through the meadows. Spring marches onwards, regardless.
The cuckoo flower in Trendlewood Meadows. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]
The cuckoo flower with its dainty lilac flowers hides in the unmown grass, shielded from the biting winds. Some look white at a distance, as pretty as a lady’s smock, which is another of its names. And ladies always want to look their best in spring.
Springtime when, historically, milkmaids and farm boys thought of romance, and their parents looked away. It captured Shakespeare’s imagination, too:
“When daisies pied and violets blue, And lady-smocks all silver-white, And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue, Do paint the meadows with delight, The cuckoo then, on every tree, Mocks married men; for thus sings he: “Cuckoo! Cuckoo, cuckoo!” O, word of fear, Unpleasing to a married ear!”
The ladies smock in in Trendlewood Meadows. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]
In the days when country gentlemen wrote letters on paper to the Times, each year there was a race to announce that the first returning cuckoo had been heard in England.
The flowering of this meadow beauty coincided with the returning cuckoos, and so the name also became a signifier of spring.
Cuckoos are cheating birds, deceiving male birds of other species into raising their young for them. This is how a wife’s infidelity became the ‘cuckolding’ of her innocent husband.
The cuckoo flower became tainted by these unsavoury associations. They were not thought to be appropriate to pick and bring into the house, in case they brought bad luck.
The cuckoo flower needed saving from this undeserved fate, and in some parts of the country they became associated with the purity of the Virgin Mary.
The cuckoo flower in Trendlewood Meadows. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]
Country folk live with these flowers and their stories, which have become part of our culture. We love them in the park because they are food plants for the caterpillar of the orange tip butterfly, which is also friend of the park. Each female lays one egg beneath a cuckoo flower, and the emerging caterpillar feeds on the seeds of the plant.
Orange tip butterfly in Trendlewood Park. [Photograph Andrew Town]A single egg of an orange tip butterfly on a cuckoo plant in the Meadows, Nowhere Wood, 22/04/26. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]
Find out how the orange tip butterfly depends upon the cuckoo flower.
[titmice is an old English name for birds of the Paridae family, including blue and great tits. It is also a term familiar to the American readers of these stories.]
This is a bright and early sunlit story, chipper with the sounds of Spring:
“Ti-ti-pu, ti-tipu….tsee-tsee-tsee”.
The quick, little, sharp notes, ticking up from the hazel beside the path, like a tiny clock wound too tight. I stop and look up. Far up high in the tree, a blue tit darts between the twigs, hopeful as a scrap of summer sky—blue crown, white cheeks, yellow breast flashing through the bare twigs.
Blue tit in Trendlewood Park. [Photograph: Andrew Town]
It paused only long enough to scold me before flitting deeper into the wood.
I walked on.
Nowhere Wood is just beginning to wake into spring. The oaks are still bare but their buds have swollen, and soon the leaves will open. When that happens, the caterpillars will come—thousands of them, hanging in the branches like green commas.
The small birds of the wood are waiting.
Blue tits in Trendlewood Park. [Photograph: Andrew Town]
Further along the path I hear another call, slower, deeper and more deliberate: teacher-teacher. A great tit landed on the trunk of an old oak and turned its head to look at me. Compared with the restless blue tit it seemed calm, almost thoughtful, its black breast stripe neat against the yellow. A bird with presence and authority.
For a moment the bird stayed there, gripping the bark.
Then it flew slowly, deliberately, away to an important meeting.
I follow the path round a bend where the hazels thickened. Suddenly the wood becomes alive with movement. Two blue tits chase each other through the branches, and the great tit returned, hopping along a twig above them.
They were not quarrelling. Instead, they searched the branches together, peering beneath buds and along the bark.
One of the blue tits hung upside down to inspect the underside of a twig. Then it seized something invisible and swallowed it.
Food.
Blue tits in Nowhere Wood. [Photograph: Andrew Town]
Soon there would be much more of it. When the oak leaves open the caterpillars will appear in a sudden green flood, and somewhere nearby these birds will be prepared for it.
In a hole in an old tree—or perhaps in a nest box hidden in the wood—a female tit might be sitting on a clutch of pale speckled eggs. One egg laid each morning until the nest held eight, or nine, or even ten.
When the chicks hatch, the parents will work without rest, carrying caterpillars back to the nest again and again and again.
The birds above me moved on, drifting through the branches lightly in the breeze
A moment later they were gone.
I walked a little further and noticed a feather lying on the path. Olive green, with a hint of yellow at the edge. A great tit’s feather, most likely.
I picked it up, then set it back down.
Somewhere behind me the ticking call of the blue tit began again.
The wood, it seems, is full of them.
Titmice are popular visitors to gardens with bird feeders, especially in the winter. What are the advantages and disadvantages of feeding birds with bird feeders?
Male badger near Nowhere Wood, February 2026. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]
There are badgers in Nowhere Wood. For the first time, we think. This is their February story.
Imagine living in a dark world shaped by scent, vibration and touch — where wind carries stories and the air itself guides you back to the mouth of your sett. A world of kinship and inherited ground. Of rival clans pressing at territorial edges. Of sudden violence in the margins between families.
Imagine spending each day feeding on the earth itself. Earthworms drawn from damp soil; fallen fruit when it ripens; carrion when it is found — but mostly worms. Reliable food, abundant in spring when the ground softens and the night stays wet.
The animals emerging at night to feed and play-fight — no claws unsheathed, no teeth bared — are likely subadult males. They circle, shoulder, and grapple in the leaf litter, testing strength without drawing blood. In time they will disperse, edging beyond the safety of their natal territory and pressing at the boundaries of neighbouring clans.
The breeding females remain underground. Late winter is the season of birth: cubs lie blind and furred in the nesting chambers, sustained by milk and warmth. We must wait several weeks before they appear above ground, tentative in the dusk outside the sett.
Male badger near Nowhere Wood, February 2026. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]
We will follow the badgers through their year, as they explore their new world of scents and smells.
After dark, we can hear the tawny owls that live in the old oak by the pond, calling to each other, “tu-wit, tu-woo”.
In the woods and hedges around the hamlet of Nowhere, where the ancient oaks keep their own counsel and the paths disappear at dusk into darkness, there is an old tree with a hollow space, worn smooth by centuries of weather. My great-grandmother used to say a wise old owl lived there, and some mothers still do, repeating the rhyme as if it were a charm:
The more he saw, the less he spoke; the less he spoke, the more he heard.
Two tawny owls
Whether or not the owl is wise in any human sense, we do seem to take care around that tree. We believe that tawny owls protect our woods, and that harm done to any of them would haunt us as bad luck. So fallen branches are stepped around, not over, and axes ring elsewhere. The ancient oaks endure.
At night, the owl still emerges with a quiet knowing, the kind that can sense mice and voles in complete darkness. There she sits still for long minutes, head angled, as though the darkness were speaking and he were weighing its words. This is the stillness that unsettled my great-grandparents. Wisdom, yes—but wisdom tinged with shadow.
Not with the blaze of insight promised by the goddess Athena’s little owl, nor the reason of the law courts and the Bristol merchants, but the intelligence of strategy rather than force: patience over pursuit, timing over speed.
The Greek goddess of wisdom, Athena with her little owl trophy.
When the cry comes, it comes suddenly, tearing the night. Once, a traveller heard it from the track and remembered a line he had learned in school—the owl that shrieked, the fatal bellman, which gives the sternest good night—and he quickened his pace homewards. The sound seemed final, like a door being closed somewhere far off.
The traveller did not know that what he heard was not one voice at all, but two.
From the oak came a sharp twit, from the female, and from deeper in the wood a rounded tu-woo, from the male. Female and male, call and answer. Not a lament, but a confirmation. This wood is their place, and they are in it together.
For generations, the mistake had been made—one lonely owl calling to the dark—when in truth the sound marked pair-bond and boundary, a steadying signal stitched into the night.
Florence’ the tawny owl; seen during a very wet flying display, at the British Wildlife Centre, Newchapel, Surrey. [Photograph: Peter Trimming, https://www.flickr.com/photos/peter-trimming/5487239086/]
They hunt while others sleep. Not because their eyes are more sensitive than ours—they are not—but because their ears tell them what their eyes can not see. Asymmetrical, finely tuned, they catch the smallest rustle from under the leaf litter.
From a branch they drop without warning, wings betraying no sound, and seize a vole or mouse, swallowing it whole. In leaner times, birds, too. The wood is not sentimental. Even owl chicks are sometimes taken by the buzzards if they can find them.
In Nowhere Wood, the owls continue as they always have, weaving their lives through dark and shadow, with crafts that are millions of years old . Keeping and holding a territory, a pair answering each other in the dark. In balance, with the oak, hollowed by time, listening—saying nothing, but hearing everything.
Some of the trees in Trendlewood Park play host to mistletoe, an ancient plant with mythological powers. Mistletoe is easiest to see in winter. when the trees have given up their leaves.
When older trees stand bare against the low sky, mistletoe hangs in their branches like dark thoughts. From the ground it looks an accident: round, self-contained worlds lodged high in the branches like lost balloons. Neither leafless nor quite at home.
Mistletoe growing on a tree in Trendlewood Park. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]
In fact, evolution has shaped mistletoe into a highly effective machine for stealing space and water from mature trees. Firstly, there are separate male and female plants, each bearing flowers that produce pollen and fruits, respectively.
Female flowers of mistletoe. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]
These are the female flowers, with their orange stigmas that catch pollen carried by late winter insects in February–March. These early insects are attracted by scent rather than colour. As a reward, the insects receive precious food, at a time when few other nectar foods are available. The seed is held inside a white translucent globe, that is the fruit.
The seed inside is wrapped in viscin, a gluey substance that stretches into threads when pulled apart. Mistle thrushes, blackcaps, and other winter birds gorge on the pearly berries when little else is available.
Birds wipe the sticky remains from their bills onto a branch, or pass the seed whole, leaving it stuck to the bark like a stain. There it waits, fixed fast against rain and frost, until spring warmth draws it into life. Germination begins not with invasion but with patience.
Mistletoe does not grow on a tree so much as into it. Its seeds, carried there by birds, germinate where they land and push a root-like structure—called a haustorium—through the bark and into the living wood.
Mistletoe growing into a rowan branch. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]
From there it draws water and mineral salts from its host, tapping the tree’s transport system while still making its own sugars by photosynthesis. It is a hemiparasite: dependent, but not helpless; taking, but also growing greenly on its own account. The host tree bears the cost quietly, ring by ring, while the mistletoe thickens above, each year adding another fork to its slow, spherical architecture.
Gradually, over decades, the tree weakens and will eventually fail, as it plays host to more and more uninvited guests.
A protected Norway Maple tree, heavy with mistletoe. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]
Despite this quiet parasitism, mistletoe gives generously to the wood. Its evergreen leaves offer shelter in winter; its flowers feed early insects; its berries are a crucial cold-season resource for birds. In Trendlewood Park, the thrush that guards a mistletoe clump does so fiercely, chasing off rivals with sharp calls and sudden wingbeats. The plant becomes a defended territory, a winter larder, a node of life when the rest of the canopy is stripped to essentials.
Long before botanists described haustoria and hemiparasites, mistletoe had already rooted itself in British imagination. To the Druids, it was a plant apart, especially when found on oak, rare and therefore potent. Pliny the Elder described how it was cut with a golden sickle and caught in a white cloth so that it never touched the ground, as if earth itself might dilute its power. It was associated with fertility, protection, and the suspension of ordinary rules—a plant that belonged neither fully to sky nor soil, growing between worlds.
Druids cutting mistletoe with a golden scythe in the style of a medieval woodcut.
That sense of being between has never quite left it. Mistletoe grows easily upon apple trees, and in orchards it has a magical significance. Cut on New Year’s Eve and hung in houses, it provides protections against witches and goblins. The old branch, taken down on New Year’s Eve must be burnt.
Hung in gloomy houses at bleak midwinter, mistletoe became a licence for closeness, an excuse for kissing when the year is at its darkest. The custom is gentler than the old rituals but carries the same implication: that life persists, that green things endure, that intimacy and renewal are possible even now.
In Nowhere Wood, when the light is low and the paths are slick with fallen leaves, the mistletoe bough watches from above, evergreen and unapologetic. It lives by taking, but also by giving—food, shelter, stories. It reminds the trees, and those who walk beneath them, that survival is always a matter of connection, and that even the strangest relationships can bind a landscape together.
Happy New Year from Nowhere Wood.
Summarise how the mistletoe plant makes seeds and how these seeds are spread to new trees
On the shortest day, 21st December 2025, under heavy skies, the light arrived reluctantly, like a visitor creeping late into a church service, hoping to be unnoticed. It arrived in Nowhere Wood as a diffused light, fading the dark into a gloomy, dignified grey.
The leaf litter lay sodden and heavy, mud tugging at every step with a damp, muffled pull, as though the wood itself were slowing its thoughts.
Nothing much happened, which was precisely the point.
Robins rehearsed their winter song from the holly trees, thinner than summer, but more earnest. Magpies bustled about, dodging the raven.
Robin, in Nowhere Wood. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]
Somewhere deeper in, a squirrel sat high in a tree, eating an acorn.
A grey squirrel in Nowhere Wood. [Photograph: Andrew Town]
A greenfinch launches an aerial parade, searching up and down for seeds and insects, pecking at the branches of the holly.
A greenfinch in Nowhere Wood on the shortest day. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]
The wood pond lay full to its edges, deep and cloudy, reflecting the grey sky hiding the sun. It is giving little warmth today. There is no wind to disturb the dark surface water, either.
By mid-afternoon the day was already tired. Shadows thickened around the trunks, joining up like old friends. This was the hour when the wood seemed to draw inward, not asleep, not awake, but attentive. If you stood still long enough, you might feel it: a collective pause, the held breath of roots and stones and sleeping insects. The turning point is always quiet. Nothing announces it. There is no drum roll when the year changes its mind.
At 3.03 pm, though no one checked a watch, Nowhere Wood reached its farthest point from the sun. This is the winter solstice.
The sun reached its weakest moment and fell below the surface. It has stopped retreating. The orbit of the Earth round the sun will slowly draw Nowhere Wood closer to the sun. That is enough, for today. Somewhere beneath the cloudy skies, the trees receive the signal of change and keep it to themselves. Spring is coming!
Day length is not the only cue they use, and the warm wet winter has already drawn hazel catkins and alder into flower.
Hazel catkins in Nowhere Wood on the shortest day. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]
Darkness came early and properly, as it should on such a day. Yet it was not an ending. Lights were lit in the houses beyond the wood. Foxes and badgers began their evening patrols. The slivery moon lifted, pale and weak, took over the night.
In Nowhere Wood, the shortest day passed almost unnoticed, which is how the most important things usually happen. The light had given its least—and that, quietly, is the beginning. From now onwards the days will get longer by about two minutes each day until midsummer’s day in July.
This is the first part of a two-part story in the sustainable park series of stories.
First comes the summer rain, after weeks of drought. Then the wet drizzly, misty days, then the powerful storm from the bay of Biscay, and gradually the water table rises from its summer low.
The ancient spring fills and moves to the surface. Two generations ago, this spring fed into a pond where cattle drank. Locals picked water cress from the edges of its clear waters. This spring feeds our ancient oak (See: I bear their homes, too) and the old crack willow.
The old crack willow and the ancient oak in Trendlewood Park. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]
We celebrate the return of the spring like an old friend, as people have done for fifty thousand years or more. Water is our life. We have always known that.
Our spring feeds into a pond that we have built to contain it. Within twenty four hours the pond is full, and life settles down next to it.
All streams and rivers, even the mightiest, start from springs in muddy fields flowing in tiny streamlets, that join together as they travel towards the sea. In the past, people chose to build their homes close to rivers because of their need for water to live and to transport goods from place to place.
Photograph: The river Avon, that flows through Bristol to the Channel, starts life as springs in a field in Acton Turville in Gloucestershire. [Photograph: Derek Harper, https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/5225584]
People use a lot of water in their homes and businesses, and the water table falls, even in winter. The springs and streamlets can dry up, affecting the flow of rivers. Dryer winters, caused by climate change, can make this even worse.
Rivers and streams are the drainage system of the landscape. When they flow freely, they carry rainwater away from our fields, towns, and roads. Global warming is bringing heavier and more frequent downpours, especially the autumn storms. This means much more water reaches the rivers in a shorter time. If the river channels are blocked by fallen branches, silt, or rubbish, the water cannot move quickly enough. It then spills out over the banks and floods the land around it.
Winter flooding in low lying floods around Nailsea, North Somerset. Small rivers and drainage ditches run next to these fields. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]
Healthy rivers also have space to spread out safely. When wetlands and flood meadows are protected, they act like a sponge. They slow the water, hold some of it back, and release it slowly. If these areas are lost or built over, the river has nowhere to go during a storm. So the extra rainfall caused by global warming becomes a bigger danger.
Keeping rivers clear and giving them room helps both people and wildlife. It reduces the risk of homes and roads being damaged. It also keeps the water cleaner for the plants and animals that depend on it. Maintaining rivers is one of the simplest ways we can prepare for a future with heavier rain.
Some indigenous peoples live by rivers and depend upon them for their survival. They often believe that their rivers are alive in ways that are more than just the lives of all of the organisms living there. These peoples believe that their rivers have rights and should be protected by laws.
What protections do you think rivers should have? Who can protect them?
This is the second part of a two-part story in the sustainable park series.
Every year, the flow of the spring is rather erratic. In some winters it barely registers above ground, in other years it can flood the walkways and paths around the park. To reduce the risk of flooding, the Friends of Trendlewood Park decided to build a permanent pond to hold back the water, reducing the risk of flooding and (hopefully) providing new habitats for wetland creatures.
The pond was to be built next to the old oak and ancient willow, which are listed for protection by North Somerset Council. This means that the construction of the pond needed to be sustainable – with no artificial tools (like earthmovers) or materials (like plastic liners). The pond was to be built the hard way: with lots of manual labour and (mostly) natural ingredients.
Measuring the dimensions of the pond. The ancient crack willow tree is in the background. [Photograph: Simon Stannard]
First, the dimensions of the pond were determined and marked with poles and string.
Digging the foundation of the pond involves a lot of spade work! [Photograph Simon Stannard]
Then teams of volunteers started the heavy spade work. It took time, but the efforts started to bear fruit.
The pond takes shape. [Photograph: Simon Stannard]
The pond is designed to be tiered into layers. This creates ledges of different depths, that different plants and animals can utilise. It diversifies the habitat and creates new opportunities for animals and plants to live in the pond.
Digging the drainage channel for the pond. [Photograph: Simon Stannard]
An earthen dam has also been built to reduce the risk of the water flooding out of the area onto the path around the park. A drainage channel has been dug into a nearby gulley to take the flood water away. In a rare concession to modern technology, the pipes are plastic sewer pipes. but covered in bentonite clay. We shall see if it can withstand the heavy winter rains.
The pond in November, as it fills after the autumn rains. [Photograph: Simon Stannard]
It has taken over a year to build the pond and we know from last summer’s trial that dragonflies were seen on the dry edges of the pond.
There were plant arrivals, too. Gypsywort, hop sedge and yellow loosestrife.
New arrivals at Trendlewood Park pond. [Photographs: attributions at the end of the story]
It is unlikely that the pond will remain throughout the next year, that will depend on how dry and hot it will be, but it will be interesting finding out.
The Friends of Trendlewood ParkCommittee would like to thank: North Somerset Council for its permission for us to build the pond and for their ongoing support of the project and whole of Trendlewood Community Park. Nailsea Town Council for its enthusiasm and financial support for the materials needed to build the pond. Linsday Moore for her botanical expertise. Thank you to the many people who gave their time, energy and expertise to work on the project, including the Somerset Wood Recycling (the Green Team), and volunteers from the Wildlife Action Group volunteers, the Belmont Estate corporate workday volunteers and the Friends of Trendlewood Park.
It is early November in the park, and carpets of fallen leaves are piling up across the earth in sodden heaps, driven by the autumn winds and rains. The browns of the oak, the sycamore ambers and the golds of the beeches.
A carpet of fallen leaves in Nowhere Wood. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]
Beneath the old apple tree, the king of the orchard, fallen apples lie on top of the leaf-litter, wind-shaken and bruised. Their skins cracked, their flesh softening, their scent faintly sweet but sharp in the still air. To almost every walker, they are simply decaying fruit to be sidestepped or stepped on. But down below, for the mini beasts of the soil, these apples are the food for their futures.
Fallen apples in Trendlewood Park. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]
These apples, built by the tree from sunlight and salts, now become a banquet for a micro-world. First slugs and woodlice nibble the breaking skins.
As leaves and apple flesh break down, bacteria and fungi colonise. Fungi thread through leaves, breaking tough lignin and cellulose into sugars. Bacteria feed on these sugars and their growth increases.
Then the springtails and mites gather. But the major transformation begins when the earthworms arrive.
In this video from @PlayEarth we can see how apples are consumed by earthworms: in our park, the same players are at work, but working at much slower rhythms.
As the earthworms burrow, they drag down leaves and fragments of apple into the soil, creating tunnels rich in oxygen and moisture. The earthworms grind the material in their guts, making it more digestible for microbial armies.
As they pass through, the earthworms consume the microbe-rich soil, expelling the soil as finely ground particles. Their work accelerates the breakdown of the leaves and apples.
The result? The fallen apples, once crisp and bright, become part of the soil. Nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium return to the ground. The soil structure improves. Tiny pores hold water. Seeds waiting in the seed-bank sense the difference. Saplings in spring find richer soil, more ready to grow.
In our small park, what seems like waste—leaves and fallen apples— are the lifeblood of food webs, cycles and renewal. Life depends on life. The work of the worms and other soil organisms is quiet, unseen, but foundational. Without it, the leaf carpet would build up, decomposition would slow, nutrients would be locked away. Instead, the earth beneath is alive and renewing, waiting for the spring.
Many people tidy up the fallen leaves from their garden lawns and flower beds. Why might it be better to leave them where they fell?
Traveller’s joy or OId man’s beard. Growing on the edges of the meadow, Tendlewood Park. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]
A traveller on the pathways, weary after many miles of walking, looks up into the hedgerow and sees the silky feathery threads surrounding the dark fruits. The sight brings the traveller an uplifting joy, at least according to John Gerard in his 1597 herbal. He called it ‘travellers joy’.
It has other names. It is ‘old man’s beard’ in Hampshire and Wiltshire and called the delightful ‘Withywine’ in Somerset. Its formal name is Clematis vitalba and it hasdistinctive flowers and fruits.
Drawings of the flowers and seed heads of Clematis vitalba.
Vitalba means ‘vital’, full of energy. It certainly grows rapidly, especially in new habitats, where it can form dense thickets. This is the secret of its success as a coloniser of hedges and woodlands.
But, its rope-like branches can choke and strangle the trees over which it invades. Little wonder that frustrated woodsmen have given it a range of darker names, such as ‘devil’s twister and ‘devil’s guts’.
Trick or treat? It is halloween, and it is for you to decide.
Given the large number of local names for plant species, why was it important to create a recognised system of formal names?
A close up of a honey fungus in Nowhere Wood, showing its gills and stem. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]
Everyone agrees, it is an outstanding mushroom season. The dry summer and the warm wet autumn have created the perfect conditions for these mysterious forms which spend most of their lives living underground. Quietly, but with ruthless effectiveness, they influence and shape the growth of the trees in the wood.
But, what is a mushroom? The people living in Nowhere a century and a half ago would distinguish between mushrooms (which they could eat) and toadstools (which they could not). Learning how to tell them apart was (and is) very important for mushroom foragers. Their children would have been taught that if they were not certain, they should leave well alone. Still good advice, today.
To a mycologist (a biologist of fungi) the term toadstool is not used, and the term ‘mushroom’ is used to describe the fruiting bodies of all these fungi.
This bracket fungus is growing on the old beech tree. It is probably a Giant Polyphore. [Photograph; Pat Gilbert]
So, this wonderful bracket fungus is still called a mushroom by biologists.
These mushrooms may be of the honey fungus in Nowhere Wood. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]
Which fungi do not produce mushrooms? Well, yeasts are single-celled fungi that do not produce mushrooms. They often grow on the surface of fruit and help to turn apples into cider. Moulds and rusts are also fungi that do not produce mushrooms. They form fuzzy or powdery growths that spread quickly.
Mould fungi on fallen apples in Trendlewood Park. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]
Moulds play an important role in helping to break down fruits in the orchard, releasing nutrients back into the soil.
What are mushrooms for? The photograph at the top of the page shows the gills of the mushroom, under its surface. The gills make and store spores, which blow away in the wind. Spores can settle and grow into new fungi.
Imagine what would the world be like without fungi.
A green woodpecker in Nowhere Wood [photograph: Andrew Town]
If you look carefully at this image, you can see another woodpecker, but one that is quite different to the great spotted woodpecker that starred in our last story. This is a green woodpecker. Can you see why?
These two kinds of woodpecker are able to live together all year round in the wood, without getting in each other’s way. This is because they have different lifestyles.
An AI generated render of a green woodpecker
This AI generated image of the green woodpecker shows its special characteristics: the green feathers on the back and wings and the paler feathers on the belly. The red head and the black ‘moustache’ around the beak. Males have a red centre to the moustache, so this image is of a young female.
She has a sharp beak , like the great spotted woodpecker. Male green woodpeckers also use their beaks to dig holes for nesting sites.
A green woodpecker digging a nest in Nowhere Wood. [photograph: Andrew Town]
However, male green woodpeckers sing a special call to attract females to their nests. The call sounds like the woodpecker is laughing, and the bird is sometimes called a ‘yaffle’ or ‘laughing Betsy’. You can the various calls of the green woodpecker, here.
Unlike, the great spotted, the green woodpecker does not feed on insects found on the tree. Rather, it hunts for the ants that live in the open spaces near the wood. You might see them in the meadow that runs alongside the wood.
It is these differences in appearance and lifestyle that mean that the two woodpeckers can life happily alongside each other in the wood all year round.
Green and great spotted woodpeckers have different ways of feeding. How does this help them to live alongside each other in Nowhere Wood?
What might happen if they shared the same food supply?
Let’s travel back in time three hundred years or more, to the East End Farm, near the hamlet of Nowhere.
East End farm has a few sheep and goats, some vegetables and several apple orchards.
Children in Bridport, Dorset, wassailing in a community orchard. [Photograph, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/25/Bridport_Community_Orchard_Wassail_2022_%2851830797371%29.jpg/1024px-Bridport_Community_Orchard_Wassail_2022_%2851830797371%29.jpg]Tonight the orchards are surrounded by farm workers and villagers from Nowhere, all singing and banging pots and pans. Children hang pieces of toast soaked in cider from the tree branches.
For tonight, January 5th, is the wassail, the twelfth night of Christmas.
The orchards contain a number of apple trees. [Photograph: David Smith, https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/5606792Apples grow all across the county of Somerset, and are especially important to Nowhere and its bigger neighbour, Nailsea. Every farm brews cider, which they give to the farm hands as part of their wages.
(Centuries later, cider would be brewed and sold in large factories. Nailsea hostedCoates factory for over 150 years. These days, the Thatcher family brews cider at Sandford, ten miles to the southwest.)
Wassailing at night. [Photograph: Steven Brace, https://www.flickr.com/photos/30399879@N03/3286351432]Back in Nowhere, apple trees are a sign of a healthy farm. Wise famers celebrate the good health of their orchards with a wassail.
Their people visit the apple trees by the light of burning torches. Singing songs to them and making a lot of noise to ward off evil spirits. Hopefully, this should be enough to ensure a good harvest in the next year.
The oldest tree in the orchard is given the greatest respect, and he is called the ‘Apple Tree Man’. [Image: Neil Ingram]
The Apple Tree Man decides how many apples will grow in the next year. Farmers keep the Apple tree Man happy by pouring cider over his roots.
There are several old folk tales told in Somerset about the Apple Tree Man. The next story is a modern retelling of one of these old tales.
Nowhere Wood has a weary silence, as the heat stifles its life. It is ready with its autumn plans, which cannot start until it rains.
Rain, the life-giver. Yet in flood, rain is the also the destroyer. It is a question of balance. Is the balance changing in the wood? Is the balance changing in the world? This has been the hottest summer the wood has ever known. People across the world are saying the same things.
Fern leaves wilting in the summer heat in Nowhere Wood. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]
Even the fern leaves are wilting for want of water. Holly trees have deeper roots, but they are suffering, too. The soil in the wood is very thin, because it used to be a stone quarry, and the roots cannot grow deep enough to find water.
Holly leaves wilting in the summer heat in Nowhere Wood. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]
Then, the remains of a hurricane in the Caribbean barrels westwards, bringing with it strong westerly winds, which blow the summer away in a moment.
The first autumn rain falls in Trendlewood Park. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]
The rain falls, gently at first, then much stronger. The smell of the wood changes as the plants take up the water and everything seems to relax.
Droplets of rain on a leaf of a snowberry plant in Nowhere Wood. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]
Nowhere Wood is lucky. Somalia in East Africa it has not had any significant rain for two years and a quarter of the population faces “crisis-level food insecurity” (near-starvation). Yet, in 2023, October floods killed hundreds of people and washed away thousands of homes. The harvest was ruined, leading towards more famine.
It is the unpredictability of the weather that causes most concern. Farmers sow their seeds not knowing whether it will produce enough food. And that is now the same everywhere across the world, including Great Britain. Time will tell what will happen in the future.
Meanwhile Nowhere Wood celebrates the arrival of the rain in autumn as the fruit ripens and the wood moves forward into the next stage of its adventure.
Apples ripening in the rain in the orchard in Trendlewood Park. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]
1. Imagine that the autumn rains did not come. What would happen to Nowhere Wood?
It is a January morning, misty and still. The air hangs silently in Nowhere Wood. Suddenly close, but just out of sight, a loud and fast drumming shakes the stillness. Then a silent pause, followed by a quieter drumming coming from the other end of the wood.
Let’s find the first drummer. He’s hard to see, high up in the tree, but there he is, pressed against the tree trunk: a male great spotted woodpecker. The other drummer in the distance is a young female. The woodpeckers are having an adventure in Nowhere Wood.
A female great spotted woodpecker approaching her young in Nowhere Wood. [Photograph: Andrew Town]
Our male is digging a hole in his tree, hoping to impress the female. If it works, she will lay their eggs in the hollow space in the tree. This photograph, taken a few weeks later in Nowhere Wood, shows the new mother feeding her fledgling chick.
How can these woodpeckers drill such large holes in trees without injuring themselves? Well, it looks as if all parts of their bodies have special characteristics that enable the birds to do this. Scientists call these special characteristics, adaptations.
Look at this video of a great spotted woodpecker pecking at a tree. Look at his feet. He has three toes on each foot, with two toes facing forwards to grip and hold onto the tree trunk. This prevents him falling off when he pecks the tree! The beak is made of a tough material that keeps growing and keeps the beak sharp.
The adaptations to the skull and tongue of the woodpecker. [Illustration by Denise Takahashi, https://www.birdwatchingdaily.com/news/science/woodpeckers-hammer-without-headaches/]
His skull is especially strengthened, like a builder’s hard hat. The brain presses right up against it and cannot move around.
The tongue extends backwards into the head as a long thin tube of bone and cartilage that runs right round the inside of the skull of the woodpecker. This acts like a seat belt, holding the brain in place.
The tongue is especially long and sticky, so it can go right into the tree holes, searching for insects.
a close up of a woodpecker. [Photograph: https://www.core77.com/posts/81063/Why-Woodpeckers-Dont-Need-Safety-Goggles-and-Why-Their-Beaks-Never-Get-Stuck-in-the-Wood]
The eyes fit tightly inside the skull, and do not vibrate whilst the bird is pecking. Their eyes have a special transparent membrane that closes across the front of the eye to prevent splinters of wood scratching the eyes. The feathers around the eyes and beak also stop wood reaching the eyes. Together, they act as safety spectacles!
Finally, a woodpecker is quite vulnerable to attack by larger birds when it is drumming against the tree. The patterns of lines and stripes act like a camouflage jacket, making the bird hard to see against the tree surface.
Woodpeckers have a lot of adaptations to help them to survive in Nowhere Wood. This story contains a photograph that suggests that the woodpeckers are living successfully here. What does the photograph tells us about the future of woodpeckers in Nowhere Wood?
Woodpeckers have developed these adaptations through evolution. Charles Darwin is the scientist who first suggested a possible way evolution could happen. This is called natural selection. Find out what natural selection is.
This story is about how a pair of tiny insects about 6mm long and their very hungry caterpillars can eat a large tree.
Bark of a mature European Ash tree (Fraxinus excelsior). Photograph: Ash Bark – geograph.org.uk – 645097.jpg
Ash trees are beautiful: young trees have smooth grey bark, whilst older trees have bark that cracks to form diamond shapes, like the pattern we see on a chain-link fence.
No one likes to see these wonderful trees cut down in their prime. One of the problems with ash dieback disease is that there is often little to see on the outside. Yet the tree is damaged on the inside.
The trunk of an ash tree damaged by ash dieback disease. Photograph: Neil Ingram
Some beetles can bore into wood of infected trees, as the photograph shows. The beetles have made many round holes as well as carving the thin curved galleries in the wood of the tree.
An adult oak pinhole borer beetle, which can attack ash trees. Image: John Curtis (1791–1862).
It is hard to say what type of beetle caused this damage, but one likely culprit is the oak pinhole borer, which (despite its name) can attack weakened ash trees. The infection probably occurred during the summer months, when a male digs a hole a few centimetres deep in the bark of the tree.. The female inspects the hole and then returns to the surface to mate with the male.
The female then re-enters the hole and the male follows her in. She digs deeper into the tunnel, working in a curve. The female eats the wood and excretes the fine wood fragments in her feces. This is called frass. The males help to keep the tunnels clear, by moving the grass out of the way.
The insects’ bodies are covered in spores of a group of fungi, called ambrosia fungi.
Ambrosia fungus, grown in a laboratory, seen under a microscope. Photograph: Kathie Hodge, https://www.flickr.com/photos/cornellfungi/6185749769
These fungi grow in the galleries made by the female. The eggs of the insects hatch to form larvae, which feed on the ambrosia fungi.
The round holes are part of the tunnels that reach the surface of the wood, allowing the new adult borers to leave the tree.
It is an interesting relationship between the insects and the fungi, because both depend on each other for their survival.
We talk in these stories about how energy flows through ecosy stems and how atoms are recycled by other organisms. The ash tree, the ash dieback fungus, the beetles and the ambrosia fungi are component parts of an ecosystem.
Explain how energy flows through the ecosystem and how atoms are reused.
The “fruit” of the London plane tree is actually a dense, ball-shaped cluster of individual fruits. These hang on long stalks, often in pairs, from the tree’s branches.
Fruit of the London plane tree [photograph https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Alvesgaspar]The individual fruits are called achenes. Each achene contains a single seed. Attached to the base of each achene is a tuft of many thin, stiff, yellow-brown fibres. These fibres help the wind disperse the achenes to new locations.
The individual fruits (achenes) of the London plane tree, showing the dense fibres. [Photograph: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User: Jebulon ]The achene cluster breaks up slowly over the winter, releasing the individual achenes (each containing a single seed) to be dispersed by wind.
When the conditions are right, the seed germinates, breaking through the achene, growing roots into the soil.
Fruits that are dispersed by animals (like the blackberry) are often brightly coloured, juicy and sweet tasting. Those fruits that are dispersed by the wind are often dry, small and lightweight. Why do you think this is?
Just outside of Nowhere Wood, next to the school playing fields, you can, on a summer evening, sometimes see a fairy ring. The photograph shows parts of this fairy ring: sometimes you can find rings that form a perfect circle.
How many fungi can you see here? There are about 15 mushrooms – the fruiting bodies, but only one fungus. In the soil, the fungus exists as a tangle of small thin threads called hyphae. The hyphae, which make up bodies of all fungi, are called mycelia.
Fungal mycelia can grow to enormous sizes. There is a fungus in a forest in Oregon, USA, which is 3.5 miles across and covers over 2000 acres. It could be up to 8.5 thousand years old!
The grass growing around a fairy ring fungus [Photograph: Andrew Town]
The fungus is good at feeding on dead organisms, and returning the nutrients to the soil. This helps the grass growing around the circle to grow taller than the grass growing further away from the fungus.
Fairies dancing in a fairy ring [image: Walter Jenks, The fairy ring. https://britishfairies.wordpress.com/tag/down-tor/]
People love fairy rings and make up stories about them. In English folklore, fairy rings are caused by fairies dancing in a circle. Be careful if you see one though. The stories say that if people join in the dance they would be punished by the fairies, and made to dance in the ring until they fall asleep.
Why do you think that fungi are useful in our woods and fields?
William Shakespeare is thought to have written these lines:
“If you see a fairy ring
In a field of grass,
Very lightly step around,
Tiptoe as you pass;
Last night fairies frolicked there,
And they’re sleeping somewhere near.
If you see a tiny fay
Lying fast asleep,
Shut your eyes”
William Shakespeare wrote “A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream” in about 1596. In the play a group of powerful fairies cast spells on people, making their lives very difficult. Many people believed in such ideas in Elizabethan times.
Why do you think many people no longer think like this?
It is mid-July and it has rained for the first time in several weeks. Gentle warm rain, interspersed with strong sunshine. These are the days of gentle ripening, to complete the work that started in in the blossom season of the early spring.
The orchard in Trendlewood Park has a collection of ripening fruit trees and we hope that the Apple Tree Man of Nowhere will bless the harvest of apples, pears and plums.
Apple fruits ripening in the orchard on Trendlewood Park. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]Pear fruits ripening in the orchard on Trendlewood Park. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]Plum fruits ripening in the orchard on Trendlewood Park. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]
In the autumn, these fruits will be ripe enough for animals to eat. What happens as fruit ripen?
Update: 22/7/25
I could not resist the ripening of the Guelder Rose, Viburnum opals, but do not eat it them, else you may fall ill.
Guelder rose on Trendlewood Park. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]
![Blue tit in Trendlewood Park. [Photograph: Andrew Town]](https://blog.neilingram.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/YL-Area2-blue-tit-1024x768.webp)
![Blue tits in Trendlewood Park. [Photograph: Andrew Town]](https://blog.neilingram.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/YF-Area2-blue-tits-Copy-1024x768.webp)
![Blue tits in Nowhere Wood. [Photograph: Andrew Town]](https://blog.neilingram.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/YG-Area1-hungry-baby-blue-tits.webp)
![Tawny owls. [Photograph: https://www.pickpik.com/tawny-owl-owl-bird-birds-night-active-animal-3227]](https://blog.neilingram.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/tawny-owl-owl-bird-birds-863737eb16d8dd7dca38cfe3d2c200af-768x1024.jpg)
![Bracket fungus on the old beech tree in Nowhere Wood. [Photograph: Pat Gilbert]](https://blog.neilingram.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/c1ab4241-025b-4d19-bc0d-1c0166ed0e24-1024x461.jpg)
![Yeasts and other fungi on fallen apples in Tendlewood Park. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]](https://blog.neilingram.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/IMG_4147-2-1024x768.jpg)
Let’s travel back in time three hundred years or more, to the East End Farm, near the hamlet of Nowhere.
