Active? Inactive? Which was it? Actually I had a very active weekend but still found time for a walk at the Botanic Garden of Wales and got to see some great moss and fungi which I shared with the Moss Appreciation Society on Facebook. Gonna have to update my iPhone if I’m going to take photos with it!
Soft Moss
Moss & Fungi Friends
Fungi City in the country of Moss
Saturday morning had a bit of a spectator sport going on – the spectators and the competitors were starlings. Check this out –
and this
And then on Sunday morning we had some peace . . .
Well, maybe not daily, but I hope to put up interesting sound clips from everyday life along with an image or two. Here are a couple that I have recently put up on SoundCloud and Twitter (@stillwalks ) – why not follow me on these as well.
It’s been a while since I blogged but I am gradually getting there! More to come in the next week or two. In the meantime here is a little snippet of sound I enjoyed recently.
Every year about this time we get a huge flock of rooks stopping off at our local Tesco’s car park. The sight and sound is amazing – here is the sound at least!
The blurred movement in the images reflects something of the feeling I had whilst out on an evening walk and finding myself in need of something to eat due to a low blood sugar level. As a diabetic of many years, I am familiar with the symptoms and using my phone in this way this seemed like a good idea to show something of the effect a low blood sugar can have – a bit like being drunk and having the munchies at the same time. Symptoms can vary quite a lot for individual diabetics and I am lucky always to have been able to recognize the onset of a “hypo” (hypoglaecemic reation).
I was down the old churchyard on the marshes again the other night (see the Old Churchyard Walk) and took these pics on my phone. Watch out on this blog for the impromptu StillWalk from the same evening also using photos taken on my (old) iPhone.
Thinking about my previous comment on wet Summers reminds me about the incredible amount of moss I encounter when out on StillWalks production days. Admittedly a fair few of these have been in and around woodland so maybe that is to be expected but, despite the fact that our lawn is made up of more moss than grass, I love the stuff.
It’s when it sends up those little heads, the peristomes, that it is particularly fascinating.
If you want some fascinating facts about moss, check out info presented by Year 2 children (6 – 7 year olds) in this screen shot video from a woodland project I did with them a few years ago.
When we first moved into our current house, the garden was almost a complete blank. A flat rectangle of grass with a straight path down one side, an unused greenhouse towards the bottom end with about 30 – 40 feet of brambles and rubble all banked up behind it and chain-link fencing down the sides.
We spent our first Winter planning how we wanted it to look – not too ambitious to begin with, we simply wanted to get some plants in there and take away some of the straight lines. We dug borders and changed the shape of the path and my mother gave us a Flowering Cherry tree.
We were pleased to find out that, until about 12 years earlier, what was now grass had been filled with roses. This must have been quite something – the garden is approximately 50 metres long from the yard and about 5 metres wide and 50 – 75% of this was roses. Anyway, they must have done the earth a lot of good, and the earth kept that goodness all locked up until we came along and started planting. The result was that it seemed like anything planted grew like crazy. Actually, there are some things that don’t do well and, of course, some of the things that do grow well, we would prefer them not to.
Over the years we have managed to reclaim all of the area behind the greenhouse as well as using the greenhouse itself for a number of years for tomatoes, cucumber, basil, aubergine, etc. However, the greenhouse is no more – taken away when we built a studio at the end of the garden. We still try growing fruit and veg but these days the british Summer is more suited to moss cultivation than anything needing a bit of sunshine. Speaking of which, why not visit the Moss Appreciation Society on Facebook.
There are always improvements and changes we want to make to the garden but whether or not we get round to doing anything about them doesn’t matter to me, I still love our garden the way it is – never too much under our control!
. . . and the birds . . . I used to play birdsong recordings in the background on the computer sometimes in our previous studio – now I don’t have to. Even without StillWalks, they are always there in the garden, right beside me.
The Cherry Tree in full bloom through the patio doors
