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?
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
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 to look like a set of jangling keys.
Cowslips on the edge of Nowhere Wood. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]Primroses are a most loved flower of Springtime. Called the “early rose” in Somerset, they are the flowers of Easter displays, with bunnies and eggs.
Primroses on the edge of Nowhere Wood. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]
But look at this:
A hybrid between primrose x cowslip on the edge of nowhere Wood [Photograph: Neil Ingram]Growing between the cowslip and the primrose is a plant that is similar to both, but different, too. It looks as if it is half way between the two types of plant.
Cowslips and primroses are quite closely related plants. This new plant has both cowslip and primrose as parents. It is called the “false oxlip” and is a hybrid.
close up of the hybrid [Photograph: Neil Ingram]
The hybrid has formed naturally as a result of “cross-pollination” between cowslip and primrose parents. Hybrids can sometimes occur in animals, too. Find about how mules and ligers form.
The leaves of plants are everywhere in Nowhere Wood, helping to keep the wood alive. Leaves are organs: collections of living tissues and cells, having adventures in time and space. This is the story of a year in the life of an oak leaf.
Leaves are factories for making sugar from sunlight, water and carbon dioxide from the air. No human factory can do this, which is why we, and all other organisms, are so dependent on plants. Leaves are the producers of food.
Buds of the English oak. [Photograph: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:English_Oak_(Quercus_robur)_buds_(8535459373).jpg]In is late November and the cells that will divide to make the new leaf are protected safely inside the scales of the bud. Early in March, when the days warm and get longer, stem cells within the bud start to divide many times, producing all of the cells of the new leaf. To start with, the cells are very small and all look the same.
Emerging leaves. [Photograph: shutterstock_244078297, licensed by NI]Soon, the cells take up water and get much larger. They escape the protection of the bud and the new leaf emerges. The new cells no longer look the same: they are on different journeys of development, becoming all of the different cells and tissues that make up the leaf.
New leaves. [Photograph: Stutterstock 671376856, licensed by NI]The leaf is a factory for making sugar. Like any factory, it has a source of energy and transport systems to get the raw materials into the factory. It also moves the manufactured sugar out to the places in the plant where it is needed. The heart of the factory is the production line where sugar is made. These are called chloroplasts and the leaf has millions of them, all making sugar whenever the sun shines. The Spring and Summer are sugar making seasons.
Oak leaves in autumn. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]Gradually, in the autumn, when the days get cooler and shorter, the sugar factories are shut down and abandoned. The chloroplasts lie in ruins as everything useful is recycled back into the branches of the tree. All that remain are the frameworks of cell walls, turning brown as they dry in the autumn air.
Dead leaves. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]Finally, the oak tree makes a special layer of cells that separates the old leaf from the stem, and the leaf is ready to fall when the wind blows strongly. The fallen leaves are not wasted, becoming energy stores for the organisms that feed on them. Next year’s buds are forming and wait for spring and the production of new leaves.
If leaves are factories form making sugar, then trees are factories for making leaves.
Everything has its own season in Nowhere Wood.
Think about how the leaf is a factory for making sugar. Where does its energy store come from? How do the raw materials get to the production line?
The production of leaves is sustainable in Nowhere Wood. What do you think this sentence means?
[Image: https://www.clipartof.com/portfolio/sajem/illustration/happy-moodie-character-looking-at-his-reflection-in-a-mirror-227335.html]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 could see under your skin, we would find that you are not the same. One of the biggest mysteries in biology is how we can change all of the time, whilst still staying the same.
Your skin cells live for about two weeks, so every month they are completely replaced. Red blood cells live for about 100 days and about two million are made in your body in every second.
Some of the chemicals in your cells exist for only minutes or seconds.
There is an energy store called ATP, which is needed for muscle contraction. ATP is made and broken down within 15 seconds. Cells need glucose to make ATP and this explains why muscle cells need a continuous supply of glucose to stay alive. This comes from our food.
[Image: https://www.clipartmax.com/middle/m2i8d3m2Z5d3G6d3_hm00260-%5B1%5D-digestive-system-close-up/]Even large organs, like the liver, are replaced regularly. You grow a new liver every year. The cells in the alveoli of your lungs are renewed every eight days. Even the bone cells in our skeleton are replaced every three months. Your entire skeleton is remade every ten years.
[Image: http://halloween.phillipmartin.info/halloween_skeleton.htm]So, when your friend sees you after ten years and calls out your name, there is not a single part of your body that was the same as when you last met. You have been completely remade and remodelled. And the same is true of your friend.
So, how can this be? New cells are made when one cell divides to make two cells. The information in the genome is copied before cells divide, so the new cells always receive the same information as the old cells.
The new cells use this information to grow bigger and to develop. So, you stay the same because of how your new cells use the information in their genomes.
Living organisms are alive because they actively remake themselves. No man-made machine can do this. Which is, perhaps, just as well.
In what ways have you changed in the last ten years?
This story continues the adventures of the ferns in Nowhere Wood. The first part of the story is Climbing the walls.
The genome of the fern contains essential information that the fern needs to grow and make new cells. At different times the fern produces spores, sperm and eggs and the two forms of the plant. The genome contains information on the growth of each of these stages.
The information in the genome is the same in every cell of the fern because an identical copy of the genome is found inside the nuclei of all the cells of this fern at every stage of its life.
The genome is found in the nucleus of each cell.
Fern chromosomes
The genome is divided between a number of chromosomes. The diagram shows the genome of the Adder’s tongue fern. It has about 1440 chromosomes. This is the largest number of chromosomes of any organism in the world!
Fern genomes are larger than the genomes of other organisms, because they contain the information the fern needs to grow spores, sperms and eggs as well as the two forms of plant.
The genome contains the secrets of how to be a fern and how to move forward in the adventure. This information has been copied and passed on to each generation of ferns, ever since the first ferns evolved about 390 million years ago.
Life is like a relay race: genetic information is passed on from one generation to the next in the genomes of sperms, eggs and other gametes.
These ferns are having risky and uncertain adventures in time as well as space. If the secret information is not passed on correctly, then the species may become extinct. History shows us that most species that have ever lived on Earth are now extinct.
1. Why do you think it is essential that the genetic information from parents to offspring is copied accurately?2. Why do you think the fern genome is so large, compared with other types of plant?
Hart’s tongue fern growing on the sandstone walls of Nowhere Wood. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]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 can climb walls.
Ferns are an ancient group of plants, first appearing on Earth about 390 million years ago. That’s about 260 million years before the emergence of flowering plants.
Spores on the under surface of a fern leaf. Nowhere Wood. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]Like fungi, another ancient group, ferns produce spores. They are the brown dots on the underside of this fern leaf. Spores are light and float in the air like particles of dust.
One spore floats up to a small crack in the rock face. Rainwater and the decaying remains of a leaf have formed a sticky, jam-like, humus inside the crack. The spore sticks to the humus and germinates, developing into a tiny little plant, about 10 mm long.
Drawing of a gametophyte of a fern. [Image: https://picryl.com/media/prothallus-gametophyte-0bab1a ]This is a fern, but it is not the mature adult form. It has tiny roots that grow into the humus, drawing nutrients from it. This small plant is called a gametophyte because it makes gametes for sexual reproduction. Gametes are sperm and egg cells.
These gametes will come together to make the adult fern on the surface of the tiny gametophyte.
Sperm from ferns. [Image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d7/Fern_sperm.jpg]The gametophyte makes many small sperm that swim in the water on the surface of the plant. They swim towards eggs, which are much larger. This photograph shows a fern sperm fertilising a fern egg.
The sperm and the egg join together. A single cell is produced that will grow into the adult fern. Eventually this fern will make spores of its own.
This may sound like a long-winded and complicated adventure, but it seems to work well, because there are so many ferns in Nowhere Wood.
The fern exists in several different forms during its adventure: spores, eggs, sperm, gametophyte and adult plants. What do they have in common?
Each of these forms is made of one or many cells. Each cell contains a nucleus, and inside each nucleus is a genome. Genomes contain information. The information in the genome is the same in all of the different forms of the fern.
The genome contains the secrets of how to be a fern and how to move forward in the next step of the adventure.
The fern exist in several different forms during its adventure: spores, eggs, sperm, gametophyte and adult plants. Think why is important that the genome in every form is the same?
These are perfect conditions for growing the fungi that spread everywhere throughout the soil of Nowhere Wood. Fungi are Nature’s recyclers, feeding on the fallen leaves, fruits and wood.
Mycelia of fungi. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]Fungi feed on the wood of the dead oak trees, turning it into nutrients that provide energy and chemicals needed to grow new fungal cells. (These cells form long threads called hyphae). Some fungi can spread out over really large areas, several kilometres wide.
At this time of the year, the fungi are busy ‘ being’.
Fungi in Nowhere Wood. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]Then one night, silently and without warning, the fungi do something else.
They produce structures that we call “mushrooms” **.
Mushrooms are fruiting bodies. They produce thousands of tiny spores.
Spores are small and light. They are carried on air currents to new places in Nowhere Wood, where they will germinate and grow into new hyphae.
Fungus in Nowhere Wood. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]Spores have often been found in the filters of jet aircraft flying at the edge of the atmosphere, so some spores can travel right round the world. When fungi produce spores they are ‘becoming’ something new: small, light and mobile versions of themselves.
Decaying fungus in Nowhere Wood. [Photograph: Neil ingram]Then, almost as soon as they arrive, it is all over. The fruiting bodies die and become food for other fungi and bacteria in Nowhere Wood.
This is how it is. The precious molecules are used, recycled and become part of the growth of new organisms. Nothing is ever wasted.
Nearly all of the atoms present on Earth when life began to evolve about 3.7 billion years ago are still found on Earth today. Many of them are found locked inside living organisms. Sooner or later, all of these organisms will die. Imagine what life would be like without Nature’s recyclers.
You are a collection of recycled atoms. Think about how carbon atoms enter and leave your body. [Hint, carbon atoms are found in carbohydrates and in carbon dioxide.]
You can read more about ‘being and becoming’ here.
**Some mushrooms are good to eat, others are really poisonous and can kill us. It is hard to tell them apart unless you are an expert, so it is sensible not to touch or eat any mushrooms you find in a wood.
One hundred and fifty years ago, the oak woods near Nowhere would have been home to red squirrels. Now they have all disappeared.
A red squirrel. [Photograph: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/Red_Squirrel_-_Lazienki.JPG]The red squirrels have been replaced by grey squirrels that were introduced into the UK from the United States in the 1870s.
Grey squirrels spread to nearly all parts of the UK, replacing the red squirrels wherever they went. Now red squirrels are only found in a few places, where they are protected.
Grey squirrels are 60% better at digesting oak acorns than red squirrels, which seem to prefer hazel nuts. Oak acorns are much more common in Nowhere Wood than hazel nuts, and this favours the grey squirrel.
Grey Squirrel. [Photograph: Gary Helm, https://www.flickr.com/photos/ghelm/8645487905]The success of grey squirrels at surviving and breeding in Nowhere Wood is due to the production of acorns, which varies from year to year.
Survival is a risky journey for any squirrel: the arrival of new competitors or interruptions to the food supply can pose real challenges.
Their lives are adventures.
The word ‘adventure’ has two parts:
Ad means moving towards something.
Venture means attempting something dangerous or difficult, that is risky, with no guarantee of success.
Put the two together and you get the idea that the lives of all living organisms are risky journeys into the future, with no guarantee of success or survival.
If you like, you can think of life as:
organisms having adventures in time and space
Think about the squirrels and the oak trees. In what ways are their lives adventures? [Hint: think about what the word adventure means.]
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 of all of the parts of the watch.
The ability to tell the time emerges from the watch, only when all of the parts move together smoothly. If anything goes wrong, the watch “stops” and the ability to tell the time disappears.
Living organisms are alive because they are organised. Everything depends upon the way that the different parts of their bodies work together.
For an organism, life emerges and exists for only as long as its parts work together smoothly.
If anything goes wrong, the organism becomes ill. If it is very serious, then the organism dies and its life disappears. This is difficult to think about, but it is a fact of life.
One of the important features of human society is that we have learned how to care for the sick and the elderly. Hows does this help the survival of humanity?
![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)
Mushrooms are 
