Rabbiting Year

On the third of February this year we enter the new Chinese Year of the Rabbit (according to Wikipedia).  This is supposed to be a more diplomatic and less turbulent year than the previous one, the Chinese Year of the Tiger.  Speaking personally, that seems a jolly good idea!  While I keep an open mind on all manner of notions, the mantra of things looking up is one I intend to embrace.

Rabbits are also a great deal more relevant to landscape architecture than tigers, so there is a lot more to be said.  For a start there are a great deal more of them, something they continue to achieve with enthusiasm (although the European Rabbit is now a threatened species in its own natural habitat in Spain and Portugal – see Wikipedia and IUCN red list).  Secondly they occur in many different places and often in close proximity to rural people in their working lives or in gardens.

Rabbits are voracious eaters.  When we first moved into our current home we witnessed the decimation of a much-loved pot plant on its first night in its new location with horror.  The following weekend we went shopping for some plants for the garden and bought three rose bushes and a magnolia, thinking the roses would be too thorny and the magnolia too sour a taste for them.  Ha ha!  It turns out that young thorny shoots are a favourite and they loved the magnolia equally.  Thankfully although they all suffered, we were able to put fencing around them in time and now they flourish.  We went back to the garden centre, who gave us a list of plants rabbits won’t eat.  Ominously roses were on it.  We showed it to the neighbours who chuckled and said that they knew of examples of most of the plants on the list that had been decimated over the years.  Someone forgot to give the list to the rabbits!

Rabbit proofing

As the years have passed our rabbit population has declined alongside the growth of some very large domestic cats in the neighbourhood.  Some of these cats are now so large the bird population is safe, because those dainty treats aren’t a patch on the taste of real rabbit.  It feels a bit wrong to watch this change with a lack of pity, rabbits are one of the traditional cuddly furry animals alongside bears and guinea pigs.  A landscape training distances you from the rabbit for exactly the same reasons as we suffered in our garden.  A well-designed bit of open planting has to be installed with rabbit-proof fencing as part of the specification until the thorny species have hardened up and usually for five years at the minimum.  Rabbits like to strip the bark off trees and so rabbit guards are also a feature.  The youngsters are quite experimental which can be highly destructive.  In open landscapes the presence of rabbit or deer populations is shown by a ‘skirt’ line to tree canopies that are near to the ground.  Holly bushes can also have this skirting effect, which is surprising until you look at and feel the young leaves before they harden and realise that they could be eaten and digested fairly easily.

Several years ago I worked on a historic park in Sussex which had a string of terraced lawns progressing from the balcony outside the house into the ‘pleasure grounds’ and the outer parkland.  These lawns were not balustraded as with many Sussex properties, they relied on steep banks between the lawns for a softer effect.  As a result of the softer effect, at the time we were working there many rabbits had turned the whole string into an unmanaged warren!  The extra complication was that the owners LIKED the rabbits!  It was very hard to persuade them that they were losing their lawns and that there were other areas the rabbits could live that were less destructive and less threatening to their chances of getting grants for landscape restoration proposals….. there are plenty of places where their eating habits mean benefits to keeping unwanted vegetation down - so long as where they live is more robust.

So here’s hoping for a more amiable year with the right things happening in the right places!

Ivy – Helix in more than name

Hoar frost ivy in Sussex

When I decided to put something together on a Christmas plant I chose ivy largely because I was intrigued by what I might discover, only to discover that it has had little more than cursory mentions amid hinted at deeper stories.  Ivy as a Christmas decoration is often twinned with holly, but much folklore prefers it used for outdoor rather than indoor decorations because it has some awkward pagan overtones.  Ivy is also a symbol of Bacchus and its use in garlands and head decorations was popular because it was believed to ward off the ill effects of too much alcohol.  This is very appropriate for modern Christmas Days when many people across the country start the day with a Buck’s Fizz and continue drinking until the end of the Christmas meal.  In the early Christian church it was not so highly thought-of and it would be interesting to know what store the temperance movement might set by its continued use as a Christmas emblem.

Telegraph pole, Ireland

Ivy was named Hedera helix by Carl Linnaeus in his Species Plantarum of 1752.  Helix as a word dates back at least to the 1560s and almost certainly well before, referring to ‘spiral’ in both the Latin and the Greek.  In modern parlance, of course, we think of the helix of life, of the description of DNA and its double helix form.  A close look at the form of ivy as it climbs a tree shows a spiralling growth and multiple stems intertwining as they progress up the tree.  In a similar species, the strangler-fig in the rainforest, this action is far less benign than the picturesque image we have of the ivy.  In the rainforest trees are used as support for the young and semi-mature vine, until it reaches a weight and height that can be self-sustaining after which point the host tree is allowed to rot and die away.  The weight of the ivy can bring down a less robust tree, but strangulation is not in its primary vocabulary.

Ivy clad wall, Ireland

Ivy as a plant grows well almost anywhere in temperate climates.  It is pretty robust in dark, dank and northern aspects as well as being remarkably tolerant of low rainfall and pollution.  This has made it consistently popular as a plant in gardens and public spaces for centuries.  In  Europe in medieval times it was part of the palette of plants, including vines, used to drape over trellises and arbours, providing a manageable structure to the green areas of the time.  It is  used frequently to cover walls and fences.  At periods through history it has been used as a wall covering for houses, where it was considered to be beneficial in the retention of warmth because of the outer area of the plant having the leaves, inner areas having air pockets made by the path and the intertwining of the stems.  In the past 80-100 years this view has been challenged by the very realistic concern about how the plant travels as it grows and how intrusive to soft mortar this can be.  The old stems are robust and tree-like.  The young shoots are climbers and they are explorative, using sucking fronds to ‘stick’ to the surfaces they climb.  On an old brick wall with mortar in need of repointing, or with an old sandy mortar, this can lead to young shoots growing into small cavities, fattening as they grow and ultimately breaking up the wall.

Ivy growing on house walls

 

Earlier this autumn, I was in Inverness at the time of the Housing Expo.  It was fascinating to see one of the houses employing a mixed innovative and traditional approach.  Scotland, in particular eastern Scotland, can be profoundly affected by strong winds in the winter months.  This house uses a recycled rubber covering to protect the walls from the cooling impact of these winds and ivy is being grown up the side of the building to help with this protection.  It will be very interesting to hear how this and all of the truly innovative houses on this estate fare.  With the rubber coating it will be a while before there will be too many small cavities to be explored.

Aralia hispida in Newfoundland

Finally I am adding a photograph that we used as a Christmas card a few years ago.  It is called Bristly Sarsaparilla and grows on the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland.  As a plant it is a distant relative of the American Poison Ivy as well as being a family member of our ivy.  Its form is evocative of the berries and flowers of our own native ivy and several friends were kind enough to remark upon it.  Its latin name is Aralia hispida and Hedera helix is in the Araliaceae family.

Ball Bearings at Stonehenge

Stonehenge from the A303

Many years ago as a young Geography student at Exeter University I pleaded with my tutors to be allowed to do a dissertation on visitor behaviour at Stonehenge.  Unfortunately it was not to be, there was no-one who had the necessary knowledge to be able to act as my tutor so I went down a map route studying the archaeological mapping by the Ordnance Survey in Wiltshire instead.  My only real regrets are financial, my years in the map world have been wonderful and to have a 'great' as a tutor instead was inspiring.  Brian Harley is much missed.

Since then I have had the enormous privilege to have worked on Stonehenge as a landscape architect and graphic designer and enjoyed it immensely.  It is a wonderful site still in need of enormous TLC and sensible planning.

Granite balls in the modern landscape

It was with fascination that I read the Science Daily article on a young Exeter student's ideas about the movement of the stones from Wales and evidence that he has spotted as to how this could have been achieved.  Now a PhD student he has been working on decorated granite balls at Scottish Neolithic sites, especially in Aberdeenshire, since he was a second-year undergraduate.  He noticed that there were similar balls found near to Stonehenge.  With his colleagues at Exeter experiments have been undertaken using spheres and gouged logs that do cast interesting light on a possible technique for the long-distance transport of the Preseli stones used for some of the construction of Stonehenge.  Anyone who has spilt a bag of frozen peas on the kitchen floor will have a very good idea as to how such small objects can be capable of carrying MUCH heavier objects!  What is intriguing is the idea of how, in the absence of frozen peas, Neolithic man could have come up with such an innovative solution.  There is evidence that the Ancient Egyptians used logs for much of their transportation of large blocks of stone, but in a culture not as obviously sophisticated the idea of ball-bearings is fascinating.  The first UK patent for ball-bearings was not given until 1794!

Granite ball engraved as a memorial to Raoul Wallenberg in Stockholm
contrasts with the bicycle wheel

The ingenious nature of this design is that directional control would have been easier for the large blocks as the balls would have been guided on the grooved, seasoned wood and this would have been easier than the less flexible log-rolling used by the Egyptians and also than anything simple wheels could have achieved under such weights.  The journey from Preseli to Wiltshire is far from flat or straight and any techniques used would need to be able to accommodate uneven paths and many sloping landforms.  I hope very much that the next few years of work on this do prove that it is correct.  The engineering is simple and sublime!

Spheres are a symbol of universal potent power

Covering Rock

 
Not all recycling is messy or boring, as I realised with glee on a recent visit to Scotland and the two Highland Stoneware shops in Ullapool and Lochinver.  The wall coverings on the building exteriors are a joy to behold and use the broken pottery pieces in a creative and memorable way.  Highland Stoneware is beautiful and evokes the character of the highlands in many of its pieces.

The Lochinver boulders with their covering of pot fragments echo the lichen covered boulders higher up in the mountains.

The mural designs were by the remarkable Kaffe Fassett (with his assistant Brendon Mably) and are dated on the murals to 2000 for Ullapool and 2002 for Lochinver. In many places the ability of the broken pottery to use its third dimension is used for clever effect.  Several teapot spouts scatter the front of the building, for example.

Much of the pottery they used is recognisable in the complete works for sale inside the studio shops.  There are tremendous echoes with the ceramic mosaics designed by Antoni Gaudi in the Parc Guell in Barcelona.  The difference with the Highland Stoneware work is that it is in a location where the inspiration is immediately apparent.

Truly pragmatic bollards....

Here are some bollards being pragmatic!

It looks like quite a sad tale for them. They have been summarily stacked against the lamppost while they are replaced by more robust cast-concrete bollards. Despite having environmentally-friendly credentials through being made of extruded plastic bags, they were not selected or placed for a busy roadway. Cars park regularly on this street and I have seen sufficient damage to a friend's car through attempts to park next to bollards to know that they need to take quite savage hits at times. The dust-line on these bollards shows that they would not have been very good at giving back what they got. With luck they will be moved to a different location, maybe doing people management rather than vehicle.

The photograph was taken in Willemstad, Curacao in January 2010. There is a very good tradition of recycling and reuse of physical objects in the Caribbean, so it is almost certain that the bollards would be put to a new use and not wasted.

Daffydowndilly, Lent Lily, the harbinger of spring

I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing.
Dorothy Wordsworth, Grasmere Journal April 1802

The next plant group that I mention has to be the Daffodil. We have suffered such a long and dark, cold and bitter winter and now spring is being kept held at bay.  So much so that the Daffodil Festival in Thriplow, over the weekend 20/21 March, was widely publicised by the press having fun at its expense, because very few of the daffodils were in flower as it started. They are blatantly still 'feeling the cold' and keeping themselves for a few more days.


This genus has vast hordes of people writing about it, so I am concentrating wholely on the plants we all consider to be common daffodil, despite that being a somewhat complicated idea.  The literature is comprehensive.  I will acknowledge 2 major sources for this blog post.  Alice M Coats performed a remarkable feat in her works on the history of garden plants.  Narcissus appears in Flowers and Their Histories, published in 1956.  Penelope Hobhouse is also a major figure in the research on plants in garden history and published Plants in Garden History in 1992.  In 2002 a book was published by Taylor & Francis edited by G Hanks; Narcissus and Daffodil: The Genus Narcissus as part of a series on medicinal and aromatic plants.  It is on order so I cannot make direct reference to it for this blog post, but there are a couple of comments that I make that have been triggered by its publicity material.

Daffodil or Narcissus?  Both names have origins that may be myths.  Of course it is more scientific to use Narcissus, but Daffodil has long-standing charm and poetic celebration.  They both describe plants that are more diverse in colour and form than those with which the names are immediately associated in popular culture.  Both names in fact originate from the white rather than the yellow form of the plant.  Narcissus is known to be a Greek word and for many years it was thought this was inevitably linked to the myth of the youth tricked into looking into a still pool and seeing his own beautiful reflection for the first time, falling in love and turning into a (white) flower.  The truth is more intriguing, since it comes from Narce according to Pliny in 320BC, which 'betokeneth nummedness or dulnesse of sense', from the intensity of the aroma from the flower.  What makes this intriguing is that eastern daffodils have been found to contain quantities of Galanthamine – a narcotic chemical used in the amelioration of dementia and Alzheimer's.  Daffodil, or daffydilly as Shakespeare had it, is a corruption of Affodyl, in itself based on Asphodel, another often white plant!  The reasons for this connection have yet to be explained.

In the UK, wild daffodil (Narcissus pseudonarcissus) is primarily a woodland plant, behaving in a similar fashion to bluebell but normally flowering earlier in the season.  It often flowers on the First of March, which made it an obvious alternative to the leek for St David's Day adornment.  The period of its peak flowering during Lent in most years led to another old name being Lent Lily.  The wild plant is fairly small with the trumpet cloaked by the outer petals, rather than 'set off' by them as we know in the cultivated form that is so much more abundant.  The photograph was taken by Simon Davey.

There have been two phases of intense interest in growing daffodils in this country.  The first was between the mid 16th and mid 17th centuries as bulbs were collected from the hills of Europe and cultivation began to throw up new hybrids and varieties.  The Iberian peninsula is especially important for the introduction of Narcissus hispanicus, the Great Spanish Daffodil.  This magnificent plant is tall and erect with a proud bright yellow head and is one of the key ancestors for the 'common daffodil' we all think we know so well.  In 1597 Gerard listed a dozen plus different daffodils in his Herball.  Thirty years later Parkinson listed 78.

After this period of activity it all went very quiet and many of Parkinson's list went out of fashion and ceased to be available.  This may have been from a combination of factors that included both changes in the design and layout of parks and gardens that took place in this period, as well as the fall in temperatures that accompanied the Little Ice Age.  The next period of daffodil-raising began about 1837, leading to the widespread travels of Peter Barr (called the Daffodil King) who was able to refind many of the species lost since Parkinson's time.  Since his time the daffodil has gained a substantial place in the hearts of all, with numerous hybrids between yellow and white, multiple stemmed varieties and double-flowered heads that I personally have enormous affection for, but which require copious amounts of water and luck to maintain a stem strong enough to hold the heavy heads.  The Royal Horticultural Society have a Daffodil Register and Classified list from 2008 that contains 27,000 different plants identified as of garden origin up to June 2007.

What struck me very forcibly as I was putting this together was the timing of the two periods of intense cultivation compared to the penning of the lines which have made the daffodil so much a part of our cultural heritage.  Wordsworth went for his walk with his sister Dorothy exactly in the period in which the daffodil was out of favour.  It was to be a further 35 years before the  resurgence of interest began.  I then re-read the lines written by Dorothy in her Journal and thought their description more suited to the wild daffodil than those whose photograph is often put alongside reproductions or quotes of the poem.  Apparently it is widely known among botanists that he was describing wild daffodils, but it came as a surprise to me.  In fact there is a bit of concern about the health and future of the very plants he described, in 2002 the National Trust announced that they are worried that some garden variety plants that have appeared nearby may be hybridising with the Ullswater plants and that they are carrying out research to establish the origin of the new plants and come up with what to do next.  It is with a wry smile that I think of the Poet's Daffodil (otherwise called the Pheasant's Eye Daffodil) also being the white form, an incredibly beautiful plant that has been grown in cultivation for centuries, easily pre-dating Wordsworth, for whom it was never named, of course.

Daffodils herald the spring for us in such a glorious and flamboyant sunniness, encouraging joy and hope even under dark wet conditions.  Snowdrops are an appropriate beginning but we need that yellow for our hearts to lift to meet the rays of the sun.

Appreciating Lichens...

...Till there rose, abrupt and lonely,
a ruined abbey, chancel only,
lichen-crusted, time-befriended,
soared the arches, splayed and splendid,
romanesque against the sky....            
John Betjeman, Ireland with Emily.

A landscape friend of mine has asked me several times to do something about lichens, which I feel a bit shy about doing.  I am a landscape architect married to a lichenologist.  It isn't often that venturing into subjects that you know many people who know the material better than you do is particularly sensible, so I have resisted her suggestion each time she has made it.  However, lichens are a part of all of our worlds and the international lichen community is in the process of selecting their top 100 lichens.  This has started me thinking about how I would address that as a landscape architect, and not as a lichenologist.  Lichens come in all manner of shapes, sizes and textures.  They grow on all manner of surfaces, which now include my car following a couple of years of dusty summer PM10 deposits building up in crevices of windows out of the reach of the car wash.  Many of the current great lichenologists have a profound love and in-depth knowledge of tiny little dot lichens that most people wouldn't even notice. Landscape architects are more likely to prefer the more showy lichens....  (In fact the emerging list contains many very beautiful lichen species and I will add a link to the full list when it is available in the next few weeks).

The key surfaces upon which lichens grow are: rocks (saxicolous), trees (corticolous), wood (lignicolous), soil (terricolous), moss (muscicolous), other lichens (lichenicolous) as well as leaves (foliicolous) and even metal (metaliferous).  Almost all of these surfaces are ones that we work with in landscape design or management.  Graveyards are the most obvious places where people can see lichens growing and which generate a great deal of reaction to their presence.  Lyrical poetry has been written on the relationship of lichen covering to the concept of age, and occasionally it is linked to the idea of decay, which is not at all fair.  Some churchyards go to extraordinary lengths to 'clean' the churches and memorials of their lichen covering.  It is known for new stones to be polished to resist lichen cover, which is a shame and has given many modern graveyards a stark and aggressive character, with each letter etched deeply and embossed in gold leaf.

In cities such as London, until about 30 years ago, most lower plant cover of monuments, walls and trees came in the form of a dark green alga mixed with soot.  It was ugly and it felt as though everything needed a good wash.  This was due to the very high levels of industrial and coal- based pollution.  It is amazing to consider that in some cities now the air pollution levels have sunk below those of the countryside which is awash with nitrates from fertiliser.  Work being done on air quality by OPAL is showing very clearly the increase in pollution-sensitive lichens colonising urban centres, with decreases also showing in rural areas as nitrate levels increase (more information here).  OPAL is an initiative run jointly by the British Lichen Society, the Natural History Museum and Imperial College, London.

Lichens can give valuable details about the health of an area, urban or rural.  There is a lovely simple grey lichen that can tell if a piece of woodland has been under continuous canopy for over 400 years just by its very presence.  It is highly sensitive to change in management.

There is a brilliant and flamboyant yellow splat of lichen that announces very graphically where birds or dogs have 'been'.  It thrives on nitrates and is also very keen on airborne particles of nitrogen compounds that can build up in the nooks and crannies after a period of dry weather.  This can mean that it will grow on small twigs in preference to the main bark of a tree.  Almost all lichen names are in Latin only.  This lichen is called Xanthoria perietina.

I have had a long affection for and interest in the use of concrete because it is so ubiquitous and flexible in how it can be used.  Different surface textures can be designed into it, but it does have a poor reputation based heavily on the green alga that will grow on it as it ages, dulling a once bright surface, making it appear in need of tooth-whitening techniques.  I believe that it may be possible for us to design in ways to make this work.  In the 1980s there was a short fashion for architects to design their wooden cladding in office atria and the 'reconstructed stone' effect of the buildings' exterior to tie together.  Since this poncy name is basically concrete when used in a fine grain form it is very interesting that the inevitable streaking of the surface came to reflect the grain of the wooden panels indoors.  Some buildings and walls have had pig slurry or other compounds sprayed onto the walls to encourage rapid colonisation by lichens to mellow their look and imply age and robustness.

I have chosen a few lichens to comment further on:

Cladonia stellaris is an arctic species that doesn't occur anymore in the British Isles.  It is eaten by reindeer and moose, and is a major constituent of reindeer moss.  The relevance for landscape, apart from the utter beauty of its form, of course, is the history of its use for architectural modelling.  It is one of only a few species that were used traditionally in the depiction of trees around buildings.  I used to be able to buy bags of it for my college models.  It was often dyed varying shades of green, which softened the normal crunchiness of the growing organism.

A lichen that gets both lichenologists and members of the public equally excited is Lobaria pulmonaria.  This lichen has been given an English name, Lungwort, in the herbal tradition of health-giving properties showing in the visual form of an organism.  It was considered to be a powerful aid in the treatment of lung disease as a result of its very lung-like characteristics.  It is incredibly sensitive to air pollution and occurs in the best quantities in western Scotland and Ireland.  It does occur in pockets in England and is heavily protected by legislation.  In paintings by Constable of trees at Flatford Mill, he shows it as abundant on their trunks.  It has not been seen in East Anglia since the industrial revolution.

A sibling to Xanthoria parietina is Xanthoria aureola.  This is a coastal species also fond of bird droppings etc, but has a different character and form to its more widespread relative.  It is also more likely to be orange rather than yellow.

Many other lichens have siblings with different localities.  Ramalina farinacea is a widespread lichen often seen growing on twigs or fences. It prefers a good air quality.

Ramalina siliquosa, on the other hand, although with a similar form, is far more fussy.  Not only does it require good air quality, but it really needs that air to be salty and is another lichen with a range that is primarily coastal.  Strangely, it does grow on Wiltshire Sarsen stones, a fact that has not been easy for lichenologists to explain.



And finally....

When picnic tables come towards the end of their useful life it is not everyone who shuns them, by any manner of means.  As they age, their lichen community increases and so does the community of lichenologists who enjoy them.....


as well as having their own way of showing appreciation of paving...the next photograph was taken by Simon Davey on a field visit to the Netherlands.

For further information – the obvious site from which to begin - The British Lichen Society