flow and recycle – Stories from Nowhere Wood

May 1, 2026May 1, 2026

The Queen of May

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.

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.

Maypole_dancing,_Ickwell_Green,_Bedfordshire_-_geograph.org.uk_-_3445844 — Maypole dancing in Bedfordshire, [Photograph: geograph.org.uk – 3445844.jpg, Creative Commons license]

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?

Notes on the story

Being and becoming in Nowhere Wood

March 17, 2026March 17, 2026

The titmice of Nowhere Wood

[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?

Notes on the story

The mistletoe bough and New Year’s Eve

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.

White mistletoe berries. [Photograph: Schnobby, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mistletoe_with_berries.jpg]

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

Notes on the story

The Apple Tree Man of Nowhere

Apples and the New Year

December 21, 2025December 21, 2025

The shortest day in Nowhere Wood

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.

Slowly, slowly, Spring is coming.

Season’s greetings from Nowhere Wood!

Notes on the story

Spring is coming!

December 4, 2025December 4, 2025

The spring…

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?

Notes on the story

Being and becoming in Nowhere Wood

December 4, 2025December 5, 2025

…. and the pond

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 Park Committee 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.

Image attributions:

Yellow loosestrife, Photograph by: NaJina McEnany, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic licence, via Wikimedia Commons,.

Hop Sedge, Photograph by: Quinn Dombrowski, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic licence, via Wikimedia Commons.

‘Creating ponds are ways of increasing the biodiversity of a habitat’. What does this mean, and why is it generally thought to be a good idea?

Notes on the story

The sustainable park (1)

November 12, 2025November 13, 2025

The tunnelling armies beneath carpets of gold

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?

Notes on the story

Trampling acorns underfoot

Trick or treat?

Traveller's joy or OId man's beard. Growing on the edges of the meadow, Tendlewood Park — 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 has distinctive 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?

Notes on the story

Being and becoming in Nowhere Wood

October 22, 2025November 4, 2025

Celebrating mushroom season!

A close up of a honey fungus, showing its gills and stem, — 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.

Bracket fungus on the old beech tree in Nowhere Wood. [Photograph: Pat Gilbert] — 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.

Honey fungus growing in Nowhere Wood. — 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.

Yeasts and other fungi on fallen apples in Tendlewood Park. [Photograph: Neil Ingram] — 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.

Also see:

January 11, 2025November 4, 2025

Apples and the new year

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.

Small orchards in Somerset — The orchards contain a number of apple trees. [Photograph: David Smith, https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/5606792

Apples 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 hosted Coates 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.

Notes on the story

The Apple Tree Man of Nowhere

September 3, 2025November 13, 2025

The end of the summer

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?

Notes on the story

Climate Change and the Weather

Update:

A few days alter, after real rain, the fern has recovered and perked up.

After a few days rain, the fern recovers. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]

October 11, 2024November 4, 2025

The fairy ring

Fairy ring fungus [Photograph: Andrew Town]

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?

Notes on the story

Hard hats, safety specs and camouflage jackets

April 9, 2025November 13, 2025

What can eat a tree like this?

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.

The oak pinhole borer beetle — 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.

Notes on the story

Yellow flowers

September 12, 2024November 4, 2025

If a tree falls….

A fallen ash tree in nowhere Wood — A fallen ash tree in Nowhere Wood. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]

It was a stormy August night in Nowhere Wood. The wind was tearing through the leaves and branches and was strong enough to pull the whole tree down.

And so, a tree that had been growing in the Wood for fifty years or more was felled to the floor of the wood.

In the tangled wreckage of leaves, twigs and branches, we can see the tell-tale signs of Ash-dieback disease. This probably weakened the tree, so the wind could blow it over more easily.

Most of the ash trees in this region have the disease, which is caused by a fungus that produces sores that blow away in the air, spreading easily through the wood. One day they will be cut down.

Fungi feeding in a fallen tree in Nowhere Wood — The tree is a store of nutrients. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]

Although this tree has died, its adventure through time continues. It is becoming useful because it is a large store of nutrients that other organisms in the wood will use to survive and grow.

Over time, insects and fungi will break down the tree wood releasing nutrients that to the organisms in the wood.

Left undisturbed, nothing will go to waste.

New trees will grow up to replace those that have fallen, using the nutrients that are in the soil. Fallen trees are an opportunity for the wood to re-grow itself.

a fungus on a tree — Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of some fungi. [Photograph; Neil Ingram]

There are lots of fallen trees in Nowhere Wood. The autumn is a good time to see fungi feeding on the wood, because this is the season when they produce their fruiting bodies that make spores. Mushrooms are examples of these fruiting bodies.

It is sad when we lose trees that we have known for years. Yet there is hope for the future. How does the wood recover from the loss of trees?

Notes on the story

What’s in a name?

March 22, 2025November 20, 2025

The sustainable park (2)

An ash tree showing symptoms of ash dieback disease. [Photograph: M. J. Richardson, https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/5465604]

We did not want those trees in Nowhere Wood to be felled, but we accepted that the trees were infected with Ash die-back disease and had to go.

Growing and managing trees is something that people of done for tens of thousands of years. One secret is to use every part of the tree mindfully, to benefit the community.

And so it was that fifteen volunteers from the Friends of Trendlewood group came together to drag the fallen branches (“brash”) to the edge of the pond.

Dragging Ash branches to the pond. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]

We worked alongside the council parks team, who piled wooden stakes in the ground across the edge of the pond. We then weaved layers of branches between the stakes to create a “dead hedge”, separating the pond from the children’s playground.

Laying a dead hedge, using ash branches. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]

The pond is fed by streams and disappeared for many decades, only to return as a permanent feature in the last few years. Watercress plants grow in the water, as they would have done in the 1800’s, when people used to collect them to eat.

It took a morning to build the dead hedge, which will help to protect children and dogs from getting wet in the pond. It is a good use of waste wood that would otherwise be burned. Burning wood releases stored carbon into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.

The completed dead hedge. [Photograph: Simon Stannard]

It is another example of how the park is managed in sustainable ways.

Sustainability is an important idea. The United Nations has a sustainable development goal for life on land, (number 15). Find out what it says and why it is important.

Notes on the story

What can eat a tree like this?

March 15, 2025November 4, 2025

A tribute to fallen trees

The trees in Nowhere Wood are always there, going quietly through the motions of the seasons: noticed only when we stop to look and reflect. But we feel their presence strongly, just out of sight and mind.

Until today, when their absence feels like the loss of dear friends.

Fallen ash tree trunks at the quarry face of Nowhere Wood. [Picture: Neil Ingram] — Fallen ash tree trunks at the quarry face of Nowhere Wood. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]

It only took a morning, and nearly 100 years of growth has ended. Yes, they had Ash dieback disease and were marked with a red spot. Yes, they were unstable on the quarry floor. Even so, we feel their loss keenly.

Trees with Ash dieback disease are marked with a red spot. [Picture: Neil Ingram] — Trees with Ash dieback disease are marked with a red spot. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]

The wood will regenerate, but only if we can remove the trunks from the woodland floor. Else we shall see little re-development in our lifetimes. This problem is one that we have to own.

The robin is an optimistic opportunist. Making the best of new opportunities amongst the fallen branches of ash. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]

In the mean time, life goes on amidst the debris of fallen trees.

Notes on the story

The sustainable park (2)

October 11, 2024November 4, 2025

What’s in a name?

Dryads Saddle — Dryad’s saddle [photograph: Andrew Town]

This fungus grows in Nowhere Wood. It has the glorious scientific name of Polyporus squamous. That’s hard to say, harder to spell and even harder to remember!!

Scientific names are important though: they give the accurate name of the organism, and they also tell scientists quite a lot about how the organism lives. These scientific names are a kind of code that give the name and address of the organism in the living world.

However, the names that ordinary people give organisms are just as important. They are easy to remember and often tell an interesting story. This fungus above is called the Dryad’s saddle. If you look carefully, you can see that it shaped a bit like a saddle that someone would use when riding a horse.

Is this what a dryads looks like? — Is this what a dryad looks like? [An AI generated image]

Dryads are nymphs that live in the world of myths and legends. They live inside trees, often oaks.

Oak trees can live for a 1 000 years, and the dryads are the spirits of the woods, protecting and nurturing the trees. They are the guardians of the woodlands. They are invisible, unless they choose to reveal themselves to us.

Perhaps you will see a dryad in Nowhere Wood? You will have to be quiet and be thinking the right kinds of thoughts.

Dryads observe the changes in the seasons, the rhythms of nature and their deep connection to the Earth. Perhaps we need to think the same way if we are to be allowed to see them for ourselves.

There are lots of fungi with interesting fairy names. This is the scarlet elf cup and grows in Nowhere Wood, feeding on fallen sycamore and hazel wood.

Find out what the scientific name is for our human species. What do the words mean in English? Do you think they are a good description of us?
Very few people believe that there are dryads protecting our woods. Can you think of any benefits to thinking like this? Are there any disadvantages?

Notes on the story

The fairy ring

June 27, 2025November 4, 2025

It’s Flying Ant Day!

Today is Flying Ant Day: the day that ants take to the air and fly at the same time. The ants are from different colonies that can be several hundred metres apart.

Let’s celebrate Flying Ant Day!

Swarm of flying yellow ants in Nowhere Wood. [Photograph: Andrew Town]

To some, it’s a minor nuisance. They land in your lemonade, tangle in your hair, and make picnics suddenly less romantic. A swarm of tiny aviators with no regard for personal space.

Flying ants on the flowers of common ragwort. [Photograph: Andrew Town]

Is there really anything much to celebrate? Would we not be better off without ants?

But pause a moment—really look. This is the wedding flight, the briefest of honeymoons, when new queens and males take to the skies to mate and search for new grounds and new beginnings. It’s a natural marvel unfolding on our doorsteps, so what is going on below the surface?

It starts underground, beneath a cracked paving stone, under a patch of sun-warmed earth: this is the colony, the kingdom of the ants. The colony pulses with organised purpose.

Yellow meadow worker ants. — Yellow meadow worker ants in Nowhere Wood. [Photograph: Andrew Town]

Tunnels and chambers run through the soil, branching and looping. Here, everything has a rhythm. The queen lays eggs, which are tended and nurtured. The queen is guarded with reverence because she is the provider of life to the colony.

Their larvae are fed and thousands of identical worker ants are formed. These do not have wings.

The power of ants lie in their numbers.

Some ants are the pirates of the wood: ferocious and aggressive, they will attack those who cannot defend themselves or have not learned to work with the ants. Like pirates, ants will protect anything that gives them what they want – usually food.

Some species roam in teams, tracking down caterpillars, beetle larvae, or even spiders. They subdue them not with brute force, but with strategy: surround, immobilise, overwhelm. A single ant may be no match for a wasp larva, but a dozen? A hundred? That’s a different story. Their venom can paralyse, their mandibles shear, and their numbers do the rest.

These ants are farming blackflies. [Photograph: Andrew Town]

Other ants are the gentle manipulators of blackfly insects, tending huge herds of them.

Blackflies suck the juices of a plant, excreting sweet sticky “honey dew”, which feeds the ants in the colony. In exchange, the ants give the blackflies protection and time to reproduce. Some ants actively”farm” the blackflies, by stroking them gently with their antennae to encourage them to produce honeydew. Like milking a cow.

Biologists call ants ‘keystone’ species. In architecture, the keystone is the stone at the top of an arch that holds the whole structure together. Remove it, and everything collapses.

Ants play this role in the architecture of the wood. Their tunnelling aerates the soil, letting water and oxygen reach the roots of plants. They break down waste, dead insects, and fallen leaves—recycling the detritus of life into the ingredients for growth.

Some species plant seeds by accident, dropping them underground where they germinate safely. Others protect plants from pests or farm aphids like cattle. A colony is not just a nest: it’s an engine of fertility, a subterranean society that quietly underpins the world above.

Take them away, and you begin to see the gaps. Soils become compacted. Nutrients stop cycling. Other animals—birds, lizards, even mammals—that feed on ants start to vanish too. The threads of connection begin to unravel.

The world is a better place with ants – and the flying ants are crucial, for this is where new queens mate with males and go to form new colonies, so the cycle of life continues for one more year. As long as the old colonies have healthy queens, they will continue, so that Flying Ant Day is a way of mixing together different colonies, to make and spread new ones.

The ants benefit, and so does Nowhere Wood, so, let’s celebrate Flying Ant Day!

Why is it an advantage for a new queen ant to fly away from the colony before laying her eggs?

Notes on the story

Being and becoming in Nowhere Wood

November 28, 2024November 20, 2025

The sustainable park (1)

The old willow tree in Trendlewood park. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]

This willow tree in the park is very old. Maybe a hundred years or so. Look how its bark is gnarled and twisted. It is a great friend of the park and is home to many different insects and birds. One year, a female mallard duck even made a nest on the flat top of the tree!

The willow keeps on growing because every few years, it’s friends cut off all of its branches!

This really does encourage the tree to grow strongly.

We call the removal of the branches ‘pollarding’.

This ancient willow tree has recently been pruned — Pollarding trees is a way of keeping them alive. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]

This week, it was the old willow’s turn to be pollarded. You can see the cut stumps where the branches used to be.

Woods have always been important to people. In the 17th century, new forests were planted to provide enough timber for the boats for the Royal Navy.

People have pollarded woodland trees for thousands of years. It was their main source of wood for building, making furniture, for charcoal and for fuel to heat their homes.

Wood is a very useful sustainable resource, when managed in this way. It is sustainable because the tree carries on growing and making new wood.

Pollarded willow wood is special. It is used to make cricket bats and weave baskets. For generations, this provided income for poor families in Somerset.

It is also a good way of making new fences. This is because cut branches of willow will grow new roots when they are placed in water.

The cut stems will grow into new trees and can become a hedge when they are planted closely together.

Two volunteers from the Friends of Trendlewood Park soaking the branches of willow. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]

The photograph shows two volunteers from the Friends of Trendlewood Park preparing willow branches to build into a new hedge in the area near the playing fields.

They place the cut ends of the branches into water.

A newly planted willow hedge in Tendlewood Park. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]

In a few months’ time, when the weather is warmer, this hedge should be growing strongly and could grow for many years.

This species of willow is called the brittle willow, because branches break off easily. Suggest why it is an advantage to the willow for these branches to be able to grow into new trees.
This species of willow has two ways of reproducing. It flowers and makes seed and also can propagate through fallen branches. Find out why it is useful for the species to be able to reproduce in these two ways.

After the story:

Just after I finished writing this story, it was announced that young trees grown from seeds of the Sycamore Gap tree are to be given to charities, groups and individuals as “trees of hope“. This ancient sycamore tree, from Northumberland, was cut down in September 2023.

new growth from there Sycamore gap tree — Image from https://www.thesill.org.uk/sycamore-gap-tree-is-sprouting/

This is a lovely, kind idea. The tree lives on, not only through its seeds, but also in the new stems that are growing from its cut stem. This shows the power of nature to recover and re-grow. Life is resilient, it does not give up.

Notes on the story

Apples and the New Year

June 5, 2025April 11, 2026

The Lords and Ladies of Nowhere Wood

Nowhere Wood in late winter is a place of bare branches, weak shadowy light and unspoken secrets, waiting for new leaves start to emerge.

Lords and ladies in January — Lords and Ladies in January [Photograph: Neil Ingram]

On the woodland floor, hidden beneath the shade of hazel and hawthorn, something strange is happening. By April, it is fully revealed.

Lords and ladies, in Nowhere Wood April — Lords and Ladies, in Nowhere Wood, April [Photograph: Neil Ingram]

It’s not flashy, no pretty flower show. Just a apple-green leaf, twisted like a bishop’s cowl. A greenish-purple hood half-hiding something inside. You’d walk past it if you didn’t know better.

The plant is Arum maculatum, but no one calls it that around here. It has lots of ancient names, some of which are so rude that they would make Geoffrey Chaucer blush! In Somerset, it was called ‘Adam and Eve’, but most places call it Lords and Ladies, and there’s a good reason for that. With a little imagination, we can see the tall upright lord dancing with his lady in the flowing green gown.

This is a flower and it is a seed making factory. It does this by subterfuge, luring insects and holding them hostage until it gets what it wants.

Lords and ladies flower exposed — Lords and Ladies flower exposed, [Photograph: Neil Ingram]

One glance inside the sheath and you’ll see the machinery of the deception: “the Lord” is called a spadix, sitting on top of a ring of yellow hairs that point downwards. Below them are the orange ovaries, that will become fruits containing the new seeds. These are the “Ladies”.

Beneath the ladies are the yellow pollen-making anthers, that ripen after the ovaries have received pollen from insects.

Down in the gloom of the woodland floor, the spadix heats up, becoming warmer than the air around it, which attracts small insects. It also gives off a smell of rotting meat and dung — irresistible, if you’re a midge or a small fly looking for a good meal.

They blunder in, hunting decay. Down they fall, past a ring of slippery hairs that trap them in the chamber below. There’s no nectar. No reward. But while they wander round, they give up their pollen to the ovaries. The pollen grows tubes that towards the egg cells, fertilising them, and making new seeds.

The stamens burst open with fresh pollen, which give the insects a quick meal, whilst covering their bodies in pollen.

The yellow hairs of the jail bars have withered overnight, allowing the insects to escape with their pollen load. No harm done, the insects immediately carry the pollen away to the next ripe lords and ladies flower in the wood.

lords and ladies fruits, nowhere Wood, June. [Photograph: Neil Ingram] — Lords and Ladies fruits, Nowhere Wood, June. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]

By June. the sheath is long gone. But what remains is a spike of fruits, ready to ripen in the late summer sun. As bright as traffic lights, the fruits rise like a warning from the shade. Poisonous, yes. But beautiful.

ripe fruits of lords snd ladies in Nowhere wood, July. — ripe fruits of Lords and Ladies in Nowhere Wood, July. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]

The autumn is a time for making food, using its large leaves that are designed to capture the dim light of the woodland floor. The food is stored underground in a rhizome.

young leaves of lords and ladies, in Nowhere Wood, January. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]

Later, the leaves disappear and the plant lives underground for the winter.

Rhizome of Lords and Ladies plant. [Photograph: Neuchâtel Herbarium, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Neuch%C3%A2tel_Herbarium_-_Arum_maculatum_-_NEU000100869.jpg]

It lives on as a secretive rhizome, sleeping through the summer heat and the turning year, until — just as the bluebells fade — it returns to play its part again.

Be careful: all parts of these plants are poisonous to people – especially the berries.

Each ripe red fruit contains a seed of the Lords and Ladies plant. Birds, like thrushes and backbirds love to eat these fruits. Explain how this helps to disperse the seeds away from the parent plant.
What are the advantages to small insects of going inside a Lord and Ladies flower?

Notes on the story

Echoes from Nowhere