Did a good rake and sweep of soggy decaying leaves for my father over Christmas. The inevitable robin appeared straight away to take advantage of the tasty morsels this exposed (hanging out by the broom in the photo above).
 I wheeled several heaped barrow loads down to the allotment to mulch one of the beds which I'd covered with cardboard several months ago to keep the invasive couch grass at bay. Cardboard is surprisingly long lasting as a cover but porous and completely biodegradable. Sheet mulching (sometimes called lasagna mulching) works on the basis that layers of card and mulch will merge with each other and into the soil whilst preventing weeds from developing.
 I've noticed that the soil on the allotments is quite depleted so I want to build up the fertility and structure over winter by adding organic matter.

 Postscript  Two robins came to join me just now while I was sweeping the decking of pine needles.  Robins are fiercely territorial so two together will be a breeding pair...

 I'm using the pine needles to mulch round the fruit bushes:

 

Happy Yuletide.

 The Winter Solstice is upon us, the shortest day and the longest night. I'm with the plants and the druids on this one. Really it all starts here or rather begins again. Day by day the sun arcs higher in the sky and nature begins to stir. Admittedly it doesn't necessarily feel like that for a while so I can see why our pagan ancestors stretched it out with some wassailing and general revelry.  
 I took a stroll over One Tree Hill in Honor Oak Park and gazed towards the centre of London under brooding skies. Actually there's a good many trees; the park is a small survival of the Great North Wood which encompassed around 830 acres of Oak and Hornbeam in particular.
 The original Oak of Honor is gone as far as I know but this one is said to be over 400 years old:

 'Tis the season so here are a couple of photos of an obligate hemiparasite growing on the bough of the apple tree next door: a nice example of Viscum album commonly known as Mistletoe. Apple trees with their softish bark are known for being receptive hosts. Birds eat the berries but cannot digest the sticky seeds which they wipe off on the wood.
 Mistletoe has an arcane and ancient symbolism in the realms of plant lore, myth, magick and yes, Christmas.    

 In search of some winter sunshine to warm my bones I walked through undulating Hertfordshire countryside to the Pegsdon Hills which straddle the border with Bedfordshire and offer sweeping views into the flatlands of East Anglia. This diary takes only a passing interest in geography but these hills are notable for several reasons.
 They form the start (or the finish) of the Chilterns, the chalk escarpment that bulges across southern and eastern England. The Icknield Way passes through here- part of the ancient ridgeway route that runs between the Dorset and Norfolk coasts.
 I was on a particular mission to reach the Trig Point shown above, being the highest point roundabouts. Trig Points were built across the country at such locations by the Ordinance Survey from 1935 onward as part of the retriangulation of Great Britain. On this walk for example I was guided by OS Explorer Map 193 1:25 000 scale.
 One other geographical reason for choosing today's walk: this range of hills is a section of the watershed between the London Basin and the Wash. In our kingdom of rains the precipitation drains along this margin either towards London or towards the north-west corner of Norfolk on the east coast of England. This Trig Point must be one such spot where the water goes one way or the other.
 I'll return in summer because the Pegsdon Hills are also noted for their wildflowers, including some rare ones particular to chalk grasslands which are now a scarce habitat.

 Wildfires and wildflowers. The wildfire season has burned long and hard in California and Oregon this year. It's been quite widely reported in the UK and these accounts prompt me to consider some of my own observations concerning this phenomenon.
 Fortunately the closest I've come to an actual fire was my first day hiking in Castle Crags this year. A big blaze was developing about 50 miles to the north and a fair amount of smoke was blowing downwind, like a hazy day only the haze was smoke. I took advice at a Ranger Station; the fire was moving north and the trail to Mount Eddy runs south-west so there wasn't a safety issue.         
 In July 2017 I made a day trip from San Fransisco to Santa Rosa a couple of hours drive away. The town was hit by devastating wildfires several months later. I passed through the town again this summer and it was shocking to see that whole neighbourhoods had disappeared with only the foundations of houses and some scorched debris remaining.
 Rightly there's talk of man made factors like climate change influencing these events but it's important to bear in mind that many of these territories have what is sometimes referred to as a "fire ecology".
 I saw signs of this when I hiked near Crater Lake (also July 2017). The Klamath-Siskiou region traverses northern California and southern Oregon comprising a vast area of interconnected wildernesses of which the Crater Lake National Park is one. Following the Pacific Crest Trail to the west of the lake I came upon a large area of burned out forest, an expanse of charred of pine trees sticking up like blackened telegraph poles. This whole sector was becoming carpeted in wildflowers (Lupines in particular), as the forest floor regenerated from the ground up.
 Perhaps it would be more accurate to speak of a fire and ice ecology. When I arrived I couldn't access the PCT at first because the landscape was still under thick snow. Within a few days the snow had largely melted and already there were meadows blooming- another reason that these alpine areas can be so flowery is the very short season in which they have time to flourish.
 Back home a month later I noted a report that this section of trail had been closed due to a new wildfire burning further west caused by lightning. In autumn the snow began to fall once more; this is a very volatile landscape.
 The mountainous forests of this region have burned and regenerated many times over millennia. None the less human activity is increasingly a factor- case in point several of the huge fires in 2018 were caused by electrical faults. It has some bearing on the toll on life and property that more and more people are housed in what were the homelands of the indigenous semi-migratory tribes. Before European exploration and colonization what we now call California is estimated to have had somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000 inhabitants. 40 million people now live there.  

 A living fossil and botanical curiosity has appeared in sight of my front gate- a newly planted Ginkgo biloba sometimes called the Maidenhair Tree. Last week a number of planting holes were created in pavements around the neighbourhood and this week various trees have been added. This initiative was funded by donations gathered during the Telegraph Hill Open Gardens weekend which took place in May; numerous gardens opened to the public including the one I muse upon in this diary.
 G. biloba is reckoned to be at least 270 million years old and is much the same now as it was then which makes it one of the most ancient of trees still living. All other plants in the world are members of groupings of related plants but Ginkgo has a unique taxonomy being the only member of its division, class, genus, order and family of which it is the one and only species. In prehistory there were other Ginkgos but they are gone. The Maidenhair Tree was here with the dinosaurs (and probably eaten by them).
 It is thought that small populations still exist in its native China that are wild and semi-wild but the Ginkgo has a venerable history of cultivation in both the East and West going back a thousand years or more.         

 One of the notable characteristics that endears Ginkgo to horticulturists is the luminosity of its leaves when they turn golden yellow in autumn. Walking in Greenwich Park a few weeks there were numerous trees blazing out the last days of autumn (see my entry dated 19th. November). This Ginkgo glowed with a greater intensity than any of them. 

 I returned today to have another look. The distinctive fan shaped leaves have largely fallen and fruits are dangling from the branches (just about visible in the photograph above). Doing some research for this entry I came across a newspaper article from 2013 saying the Greenwich Ginkgo had produced ripened fruits for the first time in its existence after a long, hot summer that year. Given that we have had the longest, hottest summer for decades I imagine this might be true of 2018 as well.
 It is said that the seed in the fruit can be considered edible; conversely the pulp of the fallen fruit is noted for smelling foul (that's certainly true). There's an intriguing theory that this smell might have served to attract dinosaurs to eat the fruit and thereby disperse the seeds. Dinosaurs are extinct but Ginkgo biloba is still here and said to be a very resilient choice as an urban street tree- after 270 million years it clearly has some staying power.  

 Dug the hole to re-instate a small pond on the allotment. Seems like there was a pond here previously which became defunct.
  Where there's water there's life: it's generally reckoned that creating a pond is the single most effective thing you can do to encourage wildlife.
 

 A year in the garden. As winter takes hold it's a good point to look back on the year that's gone. The Hellebores (our native H. foetidus) were already flowering in January followed by the Snowdrops in February which carpet the back of the garden.

 After the Snowdrops came the snow...

 The early flowers caught in the snow were tough enough to merely go to sleep and emerge when the snows began to melt like this these Crocuses.

 Soon enough the heralds of spring were going strong, daffs in particular.

 Apple blossom is a sure sign that spring is underway.

 Readers of this diary will know that I don't think there's much distinction to be made between weeds and wildflowers. Garlic Mustard always pops up here and there but this year for some reason it had colonized everywhere there was a bit of bare earth. That's fine by me- free plants and the fresh leaves are tasty with a bit of bread and cheese.

 As our long hot summer got underway the garden quickly filled out with flowers, flowers and more flowers (which means bees, bees and more bees). Some might say it's untidy but a layered, successional planting of hardy plants that grow, spread and seed freely is manna for me.

 One notable development this year is that the garden has become somewhat lighter and brighter. The neighbours on the north side decided to remove an evergreen Holm Oak and a large but ailing cherry tree fell down in the neighbouring garden on the south side. Foxgloves for example have never done particularly well in the past but this year they flourished.

 By mid-summer the drought had begun to bite (I don't use a hosepipe, in fact don't have one). Trailing Bellflower didn't seem affected and produced a mass of starry blue flowers as always whereas Herb Robert turned an intense shade of red before withering. NB these are two other plants that gardeners routinely treat as weeds yet this chance combination of colours was one of the most striking things I saw in the garden all year.

By late summer the garden was well and truly parched.

 In September we had some rain and it's amazing how quickly the outlook became lush and verdant again.

 When autumn got underway most of the flowering was done but a few plants -Asters for example- go out in a blaze of glory.

 In some ways though autumn is even more colourful than summer. The Sumach tree is a case in point. 

 By November the garden was a mass of fallen leaves- damp, decaying, delicious to the senses.

 Even in December hope springs eternal. The tips of the Snowdrops are pushing up through the soil and thus the cycle continues.

 The River Avon near Bath was a welcome backdrop to my day yesterday (work was involved, it wasn't just a jolly). Heading out of London at dawn I noted there had been a hard frost in the English countryside which still lingered. Mists clung to low lying areas. The ground was damp, the air was damp, every branch of every tree dripped with dew.
 It's strange to think that we have had a drought this year but now not one blade of grass will be dry for months to come. The Avon was in full flow with powerful swirling currents that seemed to portend burst banks and flooded fields in the months ahead

 Fatsia japonica is another winter flowering shrub, this one is planted not far from the Mahonia described in my last entry. Apart from Gorse I can't think of any plants that grow in the wild in the UK that come into flower at this time of year (unless prompted by unusually mild conditions).     

 Over time a number of species like Fatsia and Mahonia have been introduced from other climes to add variety to the winter garden. They are hardy enough to withstand the weather and it remains in their DNA to flower when they do.

 The introduction of such plants has also had the effect of extending the season for pollinators. The Fatsia shown here for example was attracting many wasps (flies too). It has been suggested that the life cycles of some pollinators may be changing in response to warmer winters and the availability of out of season nectar.   

 Mahonia species are evergreen shrubs that grow as far apart as the Himalayas and Asia (e.g. M. japonica which is actually from Taiwan) and North and Central America (e.g. M. aquifolium aka the Oregon Grape). They've been introduced to the UK as garden plants mainly in the form of various Mahonia x media hybrids with names like "Winter Sunshine". The above is probably one such cultivar seen here in my local park.
 These are tough, spiny woodlanders in their natural habitats and winter flowering. The almost fluorescent spikes of yellow flowers are said to be fragrant though I can't say I find that particularly noticeable. Bumblebees however will come out of hibernation when they flower and seek them out so the scent and colour must be a potent lure.