Tag: diversity

Posted on

The story of bluebells

Bluebells at Portishead headland.
Bluebells at Goblin Combe [Photograph: Pat Gilbert, Friends of Trendlewood Park]
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 above nearby Clevedon Court with his friend Arthur Hallam. Tennyson compared a carpet of bluebells to “the blue sky, breaking up through the earth”.

Bluebells are important plants in woods. About 50% of the world’s population of English bluebells (Hyacinthoides non-scripta) is found in the United Kingdom. This is largely due to the UK’s relatively mild climate and our widespread ancient woodlands, where bluebells thrive.

But all is not as it seems, because the English bluebell is threatened by a rival Spanish bluebell, (Hyacinthoides hispanica), which was introduced in the 17th and 18th Centuries into formal gardens in large country houses.

English bluebell in Nowhere Wood.
English bluebell in Nowhere Wood. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]
 The flowers of English bluebells are deep violet-blue,  bell-shaped tubes with petals that roll upwards.  They are found mostly on one side of a curving stem, so that the flowers droop downwards. Often they have a strong sweet scent.

Spanish bluebell in Nowhere Wood.
Spanish bluebell in Nowhere Wood. [Photograph: Neill Ingram]
The rival Spanish bluebell has paler flowers that are found all round the stem, not just on one side. The petals are not as curved back as the English bluebell. The stems are thicker and more upright and the leaves are much broader than the English bluebell.

Spanish bluebells
Spanish bluebells. [photograph: Neil Ingram, Nowhere Wood]
These two species are closely related and can breed together to produce plants that can breed with each other and with both parents. These are the hybrids. So, what we find is that in  most English woods we get a range of bluebells, some of which resemble the English and Spanish types as well as many plants that have characteristics of both types.

Recent research suggests that most of the bluebells in UK woods are hybrids and the pure English forms are restricted to very old woodlands that have little human interference. Certainly the ones bought from garden centres are probably hybrids.

However, the good news is that the English bluebell is thriving in these remote woodlands and is likely to survive, as long  as we leave them alone!

  1. Does it matter if the traditional population of English bluebells is gradually replaced by a hybrid form of English-Spanish bluebell. What do you think?

 

Notes on the story

A tale of two butterflies

 

Posted on

Early risers!

The first snowdrops of spring
The first snowdrops of spring. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]
Every year, the snowdrop is the first plant to flower in Nowhere Wood. It is a symbol of the birth of Spring, bringing good cheer and hope at the end of a long winter. This is one reason why people plant snowdrops in their gardens.

Snowdrops in snow
Snowdrops in snow. [Photograph: ERS images, https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/12736811423122699/]
Snowdrops are tougher than they look: they can grow through ice and snow. Their leaves have hardened edges that act as snowploughs and their cells contain a snowdrop antifreeze that stops ice crystals forming. The real secret of the snowdrop’s success is found below the ground, in the frozen soil. There, in the darkness, is a bulb, full of food made in last Spring’s photosynthesis. Like a battery, it is an energy store, so that the plant can start to grow in the weak winter sunshine.

This means that the plant can make leaves to grow in the warming Sun. The leaves make food to store in its bulbs ready for next year. Snowdrops do all of this before the leaves of the big trees open to steal the light, so that the floor of the wood becomes shaded. By then, the work of the snowdrop is over and it can wait for the next winter.

1. How have people helped the snowdrop to survive for so many years?

2. What advantages do snowdrops have by storing their food in underground bulbs. Can you think of any possible disadvantages?

Snowdrops have many more secrets that help them in their adventures in time and in space. We may tell more stories about snowdrops in the coming days! Come back to read them.

Notes on the story

Time travellers to Nowhere (1)

Posted on

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 to look like a set of jangling keys.

Cowslips on the edge of Nowhere Wood.
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
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
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
close up of the hybrid [Photograph: Neil Ingram]
  1. 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.

 

Notes on the story

The story of bluebells

Posted on

The singing trees

ice freezes the pondWinter has come to Nowhere Wood and ice has formed around the fallen trees in the pond. Everything shivers and wood is silent again. Squirrels search for food in the frozen mud, but everything else is waiting, biding its time.

Silent, except for an ancient overgrown hedge formed from a row of old trees, bound together into a thicket by generations of bramble stems. These trees are singing, for this is the home of the tree sparrows. The trees are just outside the wood, next to a path much used by dogs taking their owners for a daily walk.

The tree sparrows are warm, protected from the icy wind by the layers of dead branches that surround them. Impenetrable, they are hidden amongst the branches, out of harm’s way. In this forgotten place, they thrive and they sing.

 

Well not quite forgotten. In the garden of a house, less than 10 metres from the singing trees, is a garden with a bird feeder, filled daily by its residents. The sparrows dart from the hedge to the feeder and then back again, hour after hour, making sure they do not go hungry.

Small acts of kindness can make a big difference to the birds in Nowhere Wood. These ancient hedges are important, too, as wildlife corridors, joining ancient woodlands together, giving animals a chance to move safely across the landscape.

  1. Why are the ancient hedges such a good place for the tree sparrows to live?
  2. Why are bird feeders so important in the winter months?

 

 

Notes on the story

Spring is coming!

Posted on

Subterranean superheroes

Leaf fall in Nowhere Wood. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]
The leaves covering the floor of Nowhere Wood are slowly disappearing in the mild December nights. Fog hangs in the air. The wood is preparing for winter and everywhere is quiet and still. Most of the real action is taking place below the ground, but what is making the leaves disappear?

 

Earthworm [Photograph: Shutterstock 1596740926, licensed to NI]
The culprits are earthworms, the little subterranean superheroes that do most of the heavy lifting in Nowhere Wood. There is about 45 million earthworms underground in the wood, with a total biomass equal to about twenty elephants. They are easily the most abundant animal in the wood, but they are so rarely seen.

 

Earthworm. [Photograph: Shutterstock 171009224, licensed to NI]
Earthworms tunnel into the soil making the burrows that are their homes. At night, they come to the surface to drag fallen leaves back down into their burrows. The burrows are also perfect homes for bacteria and fungi.

 

 

Fungi mycelia. [Photograph: 159740926, licensed to NI]
The bacteria and fungi  feed on the leaves, turning them into nutrients that they use as food. This is humus. Earthworms eat the fungi and the humus-rich soil. As they do so, they glue the soil particles together into small clumps. This improves the quality of the soil, making it a perfect environment for plant roots.

 

Plant roots in Nowhere Wood. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]
Plant roots need plenty water, air and nutrients, all of which are given to the soil by the fungi and earthworms. We can think of earthworms as the soil’s farmers, ploughing the soil for the plants. Without their work, no life could exist in Nowhere Wood.

 

Charles Darwin. [Shutterstock 252138244, licensed to NI]
The famous scientist Charles Darwin studied how plants, earthworms and fungi work together to keep woods alive, and he wrote a famous book about it in 1881. He wrote about earthworms: “It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organised creatures.”

  1. In what ways do you think that soil is alive?
  2. Think about how the trees, fungi and earthworms work together to keep the wood alive.

Today, Friday 4th December 2020, is World Soil Day 2020. Here is a video celebrating our dependence on soil:

Notes on the story

Spring is coming!

Posted on

Trampling acorns underfoot

Acorns in Nowhere Wood


I have never seen so many acorns in Nowhere Wood. Everywhere I step, I am treading on acorns. Acorns are the fruits of oak trees and this year it certainly has been a bumper harvest.  Biologists call this a “mast year”.

The air in Nowhere Wood in April and May was very hot and still. This allowed the oak pollen to hang in the air near the feathery stigmas of the oak flowers. Perfect conditions for pollination and making acorns.

July and August were warm and wet, ideal conditions for growing a record crop of acorns.

A jay with an acorn. [Photograph: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2007-11-21_Jaybird,_Eichelh%C3%A4her,_Garrulus_glandarius.JPG]

This is good news for the birds of the wood, like pigeons, jays and woodpeckers, which eat acorns. And for the squirrels and mice, too. Deer eat acorns, and I did once see one near the woods very early in the morning. The oak trees are producers and this is one way that they make food for the woodland herbivores.

The oak trees in the wood are perhaps seventy or eighty years old now and tower above the other trees. They are successful, but for how much longer? The oldest trees are falling down, some by lightning strikes during thunderstorms.

It is difficult for young acorns to grow into oak trees, because the floor of the wood is covered by thick ivy and brambles. There is a battle going on here for light, space and water that makes an episode of Eastenders look tame!

Young oak seedling in Nowhere Wood. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]

Some young shoots make it through to the light, but they are few and far between. The future of acorns in Nowhere Wood will depend on them.

Everything is connected together, and a change to one organism affects everything else. The squirrels and the jays will be needing the oaks to remain successful. This is the way of life in Nowhere.



 

  1. Walk round an open space or a park near where you live. How are the living organisms depending on each other to survive?



Notes on the story

Counting the ways to stay alive