Spring Cowslips

The cowslips at Sun Rising are just beautiful at the moment.  Here’s a shot of the wildflower meadow, with young memorial trees beyond.  Each year, the cowslips spread, bringing not just the soft yellow colour, but important food for the bees and other insects, and a lift to the human soul as well.

Cowslips in the Wildflower Meadow

Cowslips in the Wildflower Meadow

You may be able to see, too, that we have taken the heavy tree protection off some of the older saplings this year.  Having nurtured these little trees from the beginning, I felt their vulnerability acutely, but after just a few weeks they are starting to settle, feeling stronger, especially in the spring sunshine.

The clay is cracking though, having had so little rain.  Even though it will be hard to lose the sunshine, if the rain does come this weekend we must celebrate its coming – the earth, trees and spring flowers do need it.

Spring Birdsong

It is so uplifting to wake in the morning to the sound of the dawn chorus again.  The adult males are sprucing themselves up in brighter courting feathers, and singing their hearts out each morning.  At Sun Rising, the loudest birds have been the song thrush and robins, but there are so many great tits and blue tits around.  The yellowhammer is easier to hear than to see, and the dunnocks and wrens are quieter, sneaking around in the still-bare branches of the hedges and trees.  I love this little fellow, somewhat undignified in a brief gust of wind.

Great Tit in the Wind

Great Tit in the Wind

The lichen is richly yellow behind him, and the little buds on the blackthorn can just be seen too.  There are now snowdrops and primroses in flower at Sun Rising, and the first few daffodils came into bloom yesterday.  With a few days of warm weather ahead, the spring growth will burst through.

Snowdrops

The first signs of spring are so important in terms of lifting the heart and soul, especially when the cold and damp of an English winter are wearing us out.  Some families have been planting snowdrops ‘in the green’ on graves, and these are always quicker to come into flower than the bulbs.  For me, it is always the first showing of these little creatures in flower that makes the difference, bulbs that have been hiding under the growth of summer, then the cold earth of winter, whose first leaves are almost impossible to notice.  They flower as if at first terribly shy, faces to the ground, but slowly they find the confidence and strength to stand and shine.

Snowdrop

Snowdrop

Snowy Yellowhammer

Heading up to Sun Rising at 8 this morning through the snow, the sun was just beginning to break through the clouds, that pale blue of an English winter sky starting to come through.  The burial ground looked just beautiful.

Yellowhammer searching for food in the snow

Yellowhammer searching for food in the snow

I took a shot of this little fellow with robins, sparrows, dunnocks, blackbirds and tits, on and under the birdfeeders.  A rabbit was there too, looking a good deal warmer in fur than the rest of us.

If you go to Sun Rising, do be careful of icy patches.  Although the snow has mainly melted in the sunshine, out of the sun it is very cold and due to remain so.

Tidying the Hedge

Winter is a challenge for many.  It is not unusual for people to hold on through the summer months, to let go in the cold of winter, so it is a busy for funeral directors and natural burial grounds like ourselves.  Being outdoors in all weathers can be hard work, and where life is hard the need to find beauty and inspiration is greatest. At Sun Rising, the first shoots of daffodils leaves are coming through the grass.  Primroses are flowering on the occasional grave, hardy and determined, despite the heavy frosts.  Catkins are hanging from the bare branches of a few of our hazel trees, tight and pale at first, growing in in length until, honey-yellow, they open.  The tender new buds of growth on the dog roses are another sign that is heartening. A task of these cold winter months is to cut back the hedges.  Around the car park we’ve just done this, giving a tidy feel for the new growth to come.  Allowing a little curve on the top to avoid the unnatural straight lines created by the side-arm flails along the country lanes, we hope the hedge will bush up well this summer.  Maybe this time next year we’ll be able to lay the hedge.

The Trimmed Car Park Hedge at Sun Rising

The Trimmed Car Park Hedge at Sun Rising

Do let us know what signs of you spring you find at the burial ground and around the nature reserve?

Sneaky Seedeater

For the past few days, we’ve been watching a little muntjac at Sun Rising, snaffling up the birdseed under one of the big feeders.  I know they aren’t a native species, and there are debates about their impact on the environment, but this little one is beautiful.  And on a frosty day, with a sharp cold wind, who could stop her from filling her belly …

Muntjac eating Birdseed

Muntjac eating Birdseed

Order Forms

Dogwood

Here’s another beautiful image of autumn at Sun Rising : the dogwood in berry.  The dogwood leaves are such a rich array of colours at this time of year, the stems so bright amidst the grey of leafless hawthorn and blackthorn, but only when those leaves are a backdrop to the berries does the full nature of the plant shine out.

Dogwood Berries

Dogwood Berries

It isn’t just a hint of the colours that this picture shows, but the grace of nature, the elegance of the leaves.  Look at the leaf to the top/right of the berries: like the poised hand of a dancer.  And when the leaves fall, softly drifting down, almost in silence, it inspires us again.

Haking Rakers

A note of thanks to all our lovely volunteer rakers this year.  Following problems with the machinery, our raking days were a little scattered, but we did manage to catch a group of you in this lovely photograph.  Thank you!  There is still more mowing and raking to get done, so I’ll thank those who are yet to join us too!

Raking the Meadow

Volunteers Raking the Wildflower Meadow at Sun Rising August 2014

Although it sounds like the most perfectly natural state, in actual fact keeping a wildflower meadow as a wildflower meadow takes a good deal of management.  Left to its own natural processes, after the flowering, the plants would go to seed, then die back.  Falling so they lie on the earth, the vegetation would matt in the damp, rotting, like a compost heap, all the rich nutrients of their growth going back into the soil.

Wildflowers, though, need a soil with low fertility. If the soil became richer in the areas where we are growing wildflowers, instead of that beautiful display of betony, selfheal, knapweeds, mallow, trefoils, and so on, we’d begin to get the richer grasses once again colonising the land.  Furthermore, without mowing, we’d soon get blackthorn, hawthorn, maple and birch seedlings.  Within a few years it would look like scrub land, and within ten it would be on the way to woodland.

In order to maintain a nature reserve as a patchwork of diferent habitats, offering the richest potential biodiversity to the broadest array of wild flora and fauna, we must manage the land carefully.  We mow the long growth of summer in the wildflower meadows, raking off the arisings to compost them them elsewhere.  That compost can then be used to help plant trees in areas where the soil fertility can afford to be higher.

Thistle Gall

There are so many wonderful moments of discovery when we immerse ourselves in the natural world.  On Sunday, we found a thistle gall on creeping thistle (Cirsium arvense) by the pond.  It’s the first one I’ve seen, or noticed, and I was keen to explore more.

Thistle Gall

Thistle Gall on Creeping Thistle at Sun Rising

The thistle gall fly (Urophora cardui) is a beautiful black and white fly.  For readers who are interested, here are a couple of links.  http://www.naturespot.org.uk/species/thistle-gall-fly . This blog gives some fascinating information too –  https://blogs.reading.ac.uk/whiteknightsbiodiversity/2011/10/15/553/.

The Little Creatures

As we move through this late summer season, harvest-tide, we continue to cut the long dried grasses and wildflowers that have now gone to seed.  Although the strimming leaves a pale stubble for a few days, after a little rain the areas green up with soft new grasses and another flush of wild flower growth.  It is good to feel the burial ground being tidied up again.  But there are hard aspects to the mowing …

Little Mouse in the Stubble

Little Mouse in the Stubble

The areas of long grass and wildflowers, heavy and falling over now, matting on the earth after heavy August rains, are ecosystems that have developed over the long growing season since March.  They are filled with life!  On our clay soil, many of the plants produce oil-rich seeds, especially valuable to the little creatures like the beautiful little soul in the photograph above.

Although we do our best to ensure the wildlife has plenty of time to move away from the machines, and we leave patches of thick growth where they can shelter, finding new homes, adapting gently as we all face the coming autumn and winter.  That we disturb them at all hurts me, but caring for a nature reserve and burial ground means we must manage the ground, we cannot simply leave it to become wilderness, much as sometimes I feel the desire to do so …