Just found this amazing image of the UK blanketed in frost and snow.
We don’t get this kind of weather that often in the UK (I’ve heard 1963 and 1982 mentioned) so it is a bit of a novelty. It’s obviously a novelty my local council who seem to have on gritting lorry zooming around ineffectually [...]
I’ve been visiting Columbia Road market again after a hiatus of several years.
If you need decent quality plants, indoor and outdoor, then this is one of the major places to drop in on a Sunday morning. These days it seems to be open for much longer than when I was visiting ten years or more [...]
This caught my eye a while back.
The algorithm used by Google to work out rankings for pages has been applied (theoretically) to food webs. the implication here is that if scientists can calculate the state of an ecosystem they will be able to work out whether the system is vulnerable to collapse.
Of course things change [...]
Herbal pesticides have been in use for thousands of years. Plants and herbs also have many medicinal uses and form an essential part of our every day lives.
We spent the morning trimming the mixed hedge in the front garden. It is a mix of Eleagnus, Holly and Buddleia. Not that unusual but what really surprised me was the number of Crickets we found.
I’ve identified them as the Speckled Bush Cricket [Leptophytes punctatissima] and the only ones we found were the females. [...]
The National Trust in the process of building a database of trees in the UK. This is quote a big project and there are lots of related links on the web as I’ve been finding.
The BBC have picked it up
BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Plan for national tree database.
There are also links to [...]
Found this article on the BBC website. Yun-Yun Mao and Shuang-Quan Huang of Wuhan University in China have been researching how flowers have evolved to reduce the effects of rain on their pollen stores.
BBC – Earth News – Raindrops drive flower evolution.
As pollen is essential to flower reproduction it’s essential to protect it and it [...]
Sitting in Clissold Park in London, it just looks like a great big garden.
There are flower beds, water features (OK. Two large ponds), play areas, wonderful trees and lots of grass.
There are great parks and gardens everywhere. Cambridge has a marvellous botanical garden, Ipswich has a great park and Derby has some lovely communal spaces [...]
Just a few garden favourites.