Category: flow and recycle
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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. Then the first bluebell opened up to the sky,…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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…. 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…
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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. Beneath the old apple tree, the king of the orchard, fallen apples lie…
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Trick or treat?
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…
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Celebrating mushroom season!
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?…
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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. Tonight the orchards are surrounded by farm workers and villagers from Nowhere, all singing and banging pots and pans.…
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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…
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The fairy ring
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…
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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. 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…
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If a tree falls….
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. …
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The sustainable park (2)
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…
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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. It only took a morning, and…
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What’s in a name?
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…
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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! To some, it’s a minor nuisance. They land in your lemonade, tangle in your hair, and make picnics…
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The sustainable park (1)
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…
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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. On the woodland floor, hidden beneath the shade of hazel and hawthorn, something strange is happening. By April, it is fully revealed. It’s not flashy, no pretty flower show. Just a…