Category: what is life?
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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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Days of gentle ripening
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…
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I bear their homes, too
For Jules Acton, author of Oaklore. The old oak tree said to the traveller passing by: “You know me, you see me everyday. I am that oak tree that has stood here longer than any of can you remember.” “I am on the 1840 Ordnance Survey map and I was a sturdy tree, even back…
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Time travellers to Nowhere (3)
We are in Nowhere Wood, about 300 million years ago, staring at a forest of tree ferns, watching them make oxygen. Over the years, these tree ferns have made so much oxygen that its concentration in the air has risen to about 35%, (compare that with the 21% found in the 21st century). There is…
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The story of bluebells
If primroses and cowslips are our favourite flowers of early Spring, then it is the bluebells that steal our hearts in early Summer. On a sunny day, they dust the floor of the wood in a blue mist. Many poets have written in wonder of them. Alfred, Lord Tennyson may have walked the bluebell woods…
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Yellow flowers
Early spring in Nowhere Wood is the season of yellow flowers. Cowslips have an inelegant name: originally called ‘cow slops’, they were thought to grow where cows have trodden their poo into the ground. The old Somerset name of “bunch of keys” is much nicer – the arrangement of flowers on the head were thought…
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What is a frog?
It is late February, the cold weather has moved away and the frogs have moved back in. It’s been a couple of years since they were last here, but here are their newly-laid eggs and the female is hiding beneath the leaf in the top left corner of the photograph. What is a frog and…
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All change!
When you next look into a mirror ask yourself if you are the same person as you were yesterday. Well, of course you are. Even people who last met you ten years ago can still recognise you and call you by your name. Although they might add, “My, how you have grown!” And yet, if we…
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Climbing the walls
A hundred years ago, Nowhere Wood was a sandstone quarry, and there is still a cliff face at the end of the wood.How can this hart’s tongue fern grow on a vertical cliff face about two metres from the ground. That is quite an adventure in time and space. This story explains how this fern…
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Organise and stay alive
Living organisms have very organised structures. Everything depends upon the way that the different parts of their bodies work together. The parts of this watch work together, so that the hands of the watch move round in a rhythm that we use to tell the time. The hands do this because of the precise organisation…
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Being and becoming in Nowhere Wood
All living organisms are doing two things at the same time. They are: Being (they are keeping themselves alive) and Becoming (they are moving towards the next stage of their lives). The butterfly is being and becoming at each stage of its life. All of the animals and plants in Nowhere Wood are also…
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Counting the ways to stay alive
No one knows how many different kinds of animals and plants are alive today, and, sadly, we never will. A survey in 2011 suggested that there are nearly 8 million species of animals and nearly 300, 000 species of plants. Astonishingly, nearly 90% of these species have yet to be discovered, described or named. Many…
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A life well lived
Sir Paul Nurse is one of the most important biologists in the world. He is Director of the Francis Crick Institute in London and has served as President of the Royal Society. In 2001, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the proteins that control the division of cells. Sir Paul’s…