Journal
What to look for in April
April is the month that our summer birds start to return - flying immense distances, often from sub Saharan Africa to nest here.
Preparing for their arrival can make a great difference to whether or not they breed successfully.
Make sure that there is some open water so that they can drink when they get in - and for swallows, house martins and swifts make sure that there is plenty of mud about so that they can build their nests. If it has been dry weather you can simply water a patch of clay soil or even compacted grass and they will be able to scoop up beak fulls to make their nest.
Do not put pet fur out for birds to make nests with if your pet has been wormed or treated for fleas in the past three months - the chemicals can persist in the hair and have been shown to harm fledglings.
Wood sorrel (Oxalis acetosella) is appearing in the woods - it looks a little like a bright green clover and grows at the base of trees and under fallen logs. The taste is pure sherbet - an acidic kick, caused by oxalic acid, the same chemical in rhubarb. Take an apple and a paring knife with you on a walk and make apple slice/wood sorrel sandwiches.
I have written a whole post on foraging for wood sorrel here.
Dandelions start to flower in April here. They are often regarded as weeds but they are a really important plant for bees.
Eight dandelion flowers - the average in a small lawn - provide enough nectar for 15,000 bee visits per day. This is because what we think of as the ‘flowers’ are actually composites made from 100 separate ‘florets’, each providing food for visiting bees.
If you want to eat the leaves, cut them to the ground and cover them with a light proof bowl for a week or so. The growing leaves will blanch in the dark and look like endive - delicious with bacon or halloumi in a salad.
Brown hares spend the beginning of the month ‘boxing’ - standing up on their hind legs and pummelling their front legs. This is usually a male and a female and seems to happen when a male is being too persistent, chasing the female at speeds of up to 40 miles an hour in the hope of mating.
The boxing happens when she gets fed up and turns to tell him to get lost.
Leverets, baby hares, are born with their eyes open and fully covered in fur - hares don’t have burrows, so the babies are left in slight indentations amongst long grass called forms.
Hares tend to live on open ground and their best defence is to stay completely still and flattened to the ground until danger is completely unavoidable and they start up and run.
This is one of the many reasons that dogs should not be allowed to run off lead in grass in Spring, even when there are no visible creatures for them to disturb.
Forcing spring branches
Earlier this year the hedges along our road were cut - and as I walked home with Dixie I found mangled elder branches on the ground. They looked completely dormant, but I took them home, popped them into a jam jar of water and waited.
Three weeks later they began to grow leaves, six weeks later there were tiny elder flowers ready to bloom.
It felt like watching magic happen before my eyes and woke me up to quite how simple it is to force spring branches and bring some hope indoors.
It also gives a lovely alternative to flowers when British outdoor grown flowers are in short supply and our gardens are a little sparse.
My windowsills are now covered with jars and vases, each with a different kind of twig and the sun room has a magnificent display of hazel catkins lengthening day by day.
My first nature table
My first memories of a nature table are from Primary two, St Margaret’s School for Girls in Newington in Edinburgh. It was the day before an end of year parents’ evening, a sunny June day.
Miss Black, young hapless Miss Black in her first teaching job, wanted to make an impression. She led us across the playing field, a little line of dark green pinafores, to collect twigs and cones and flowers for our classroom nature table.
She led us right across the playing field to where trees fringed a small stream. We each had a jam jar which we dilligently stuffed with greenery.
Then Miss Black spotted an amazing plant, a plant that would surely ensure our nature table stood out from the rest, a towering umbellifer. She went to pick it, she battled back up the slope to us clutching it aloft. Giant hogweed.
By the time we got back to school Miss Black was beginning to blister, we were greeted by shrieks from other staff. The hogweed was ostentatiously bundled into a binbag, Miss Black was bundled away, we got to join Mrs Munro and the infants for story time.
The 2B nature table never got finished - the jars remained unlabelled, the leaves unpressed. Miss Black appeared at school next day her hands bandaged up, her face splotched and burning.
That evening parents mulled over whether she was a suitable influence. They gathered and gasped at the danger we had narrowly escaped.
I remember believing that the plant had eaten her fingers.
Nature tables acquired a dangerous glamour.
We didn't buy a house . . .
11 years ago we came to view Sunnyside.
We were fleeing from a house bedeviled with boundary disputes which had come to feel unsafe.
We were looking for somewhere to settle with land and possibilities. We were dreaming of an idyll.
We spent about 20 minutes in the house - a 1980s bungalow with tiny rooms and aluminium windows - which was just about as far from our dream house as it was possible to be.
Then we spent almost 2 hours in the bluebell wood beneath the house, walking down towards the Altquhir burn which runs through the bottom of the garden.
We didn't buy a house that day, we bought a wood of shimmering blue.
Then it all slipped away.
A couple of years ago several months of heavy rain turned the fields behind the house into a slurry like mix and one stormy night they slipped. The fields, with about 40 trees clinging on, tumbled down into the raging river and were swept away. The bluebells were covered with a couple of feet of wet clay.
Last year they struggled, we couldn't get down to the river as the ground was like quicksand underfoot, but we could see that there were not many bluebells. I cried.
But this year they have returned - the wood may have be half the size but the bluebells are back carpeting everything in a shimmering haze.
Alder seedlings are sprouting - within my lifetime it will all be back, a multi layed natural wood.
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