Bimonthly weather report January-February 2012

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It has been  a disastrous season - at least if we only remember February.  January was reasonably mild but February was Arctic!  The average night temperature was nearly minus three, but there were ten consecutive nights below minus eight.  We suffered as did numerous friends and neighbours from burst pipes.  One gushed like a fountain and our guest flat had three centimetres of water throughout the bedroom, bathroom and kitchen.  The consequence of that inundation is not entirely resolved in March.
The amount of rainfall has been appallingly low. We had only 7 millimetres in February.   Last year we had 44 and the year before 38. 
The snowdrops were delayed.  The first one was seen on the 23rd January  but it and its buddies soon hit the frost and the real flowering appeared on the 28/29 February.
Nearly all winter vegetables in the garden were killed.  Brussels sprouts  pulled through.  The roses which  were planted last autumn have been seriously damaged and possibly some have died.  This is a terrible shame  because they were a special planting to commemorate my wife's birthday.
No celandines appeared before March and of course the early flowering plum tree is still shut up tight even as I write this on the 10th March.
No migrating cranes (birds) have been seen during these two months.

The Sorcerer's Heart -Clathrus ruber

My wife said "There is something odd in the hedge".  We were in the car returning from shopping and just turning the corner of the lane to enter our driveway.   It wasn't an old discarded ball but this astonishing fungus.  It is astonishing at any time.  But to see it on January 2nd (2012) is truly extraordinary.   It is only the third time I have seen it.   The last time was some years ago when I came upon a specimen growing just under the walls of the ruined chateau of Montsegur,  That place is remarkable enough; perched high on a small mountain, bleak and forbidding.  It was the last refuge of the the religious sect - the Cathars - massacred on this spot by the bigots of the Catholic Church.

Clathrus ruber is usually said to be a southern species desiring warmth.  On January 2nd it was 4 degrees in the morning. So that seems odd.  It is rare in England, having mostly been found very close to the south coast, though are a few records close to the east coast of Scotland.  Perhaps it needs warmth during the previous year? It certainly needs warmth to let its stink pervade the air.  For, so it is said, the spores are distributed by flies attracted to the stink.  This specimen attracted no flies and I had to get my nose to within 15 centimetres of it to detect its characteristic smell of rotting flesh.

The specimen was  no mean size, having a diameter of over fifteen centimetres.  The cage like structure had slightly collapsed towards the left.  It expands out of an 'egg' the soft papery casing of which can be seen at the base.  The mass of spores immersed in a brown slime is contained in the very centre and this is surrounded by a the girders of spongy red tissue.  This net of girders expands quite quickly creating a cage with the greeny-brown gooey stinking mass of spores (the gleba) sticking to the inside of the cage like structure.

It seems incredible that anyone would attempt to eat the thing, but I read from an American journal (1854) that a young man ate a portion and he suffered convulsions and lost his power of speech and became unconscious for 48 hours.   Another scientific account details that the fruit body is more than usually rich in the element manganese. That does seem odd.  Manganese is important in various enzymatic processes.  Perhaps it is important in whatever processes make the net like ball  expand rapidly?

Though it is rarely seen,  It is usually found in places with much leaf mould.

Flies which distribute the spores probably not only do this on their feet but also through their digestive tract.  I hypothesise, but it would seem not unlikely. You might suppose that the red colour (which is due to carotenes, and similar to the chemicals that make carrots red) might, in being similar to the colour of red meat, also be attractive to flies.  But do flies see colour?  If they do not, what then is the reason for this colour?  Other related species have this same colouration.

By the 6th January the gleba had almost totally been washed away by the rain and the girders, now pale pink, were left with a consistency of polystyrene foam, not at all slimy  and with little smell.

This article was first published in  http://blogs.angloinfo.com/an-english-naturalist-in-france/

Bimonthly Weather Report November December 2011

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December was by far the wettest month of the year, with 91 mms.
The comparative figures  for the other months from January onwards are.
23,38,45,04,19,37,22,38,33,58,29 and then 91. == 437 mms (17.2 inches)
In 2010 the rainfall was 648 mms (157 mms in June!) == 25.5 inches
In 2009 the rainfall was 671 mms = 26.4 inches

December was also quite mild 
The average temperatures for December (degrees C) over the past three years being.
2009   3.65 min/ 7.42 max
2010   1.61 min/ 6.52 max
2011   6.65 min/ 9.97max

Night frosts were 2009 - 8  2010 -14  2011 -2

Flowers open over Christmas included Mexican orange blossom in plenty, winter jasmine.  Rose bushes are growing their buds. 
The damned moles are having a whale of a time, as I write this on January 3rd 2012

You can eat any mushroom once!

Monsieur Gouny, our neighbour, looked at my small basket of mushrooms and he said ‘Ce sont les rosés?’ – they are the field mushrooms? – rosés des prés’ ?   ‘Oh no they are not’, I replied in French.  I illustrate some here as they were growing. They look like mushrooms but anyone who ate them would soon be writhing with a highly disturbed stomach. 

I have many textbooks on mushrooms and toadstools and that on the mushrooms lists over seventy species.  Of toadstools as a general group, there are thousands in Europe.

The mushrooms, collectively placed in the genus Agaricus all have spores which begin pink but which turn to a deep dark purple to black as they ripen.  The so-called gills which carry the spores change colour as the spores change colour.  Agaricus mushrooms all have a fleshy ring on the stem but the stem in otherwise bare and has no enveloping sac at its base (unlike the various deadly poisonous Amanitas).

The numerous true mushrooms all look very similar.  So, how do you tell them apart?

Well the ones I collected make the answer very difficult. 

These were Agaricus xanthodermus, the so-called ‘yellow-stainer’.  I fear that almost all  living things come in a variety of forms and the species of mushrooms are no exception.   If you read the books they will tell you that the ‘yellow-stainer’ has two marked characteristics.  Firstly, that the flesh in the base of the stem when cut, turns chrome-yellow, and that the broken flesh has a smell of ink.  It so happens that mine have no smell at all, and the colour change is extremely slight.

I illustrate a specimen which is shows a little yellow in the base – good specimens would be brilliantly yellow.

So it is necessary to look for other signs which are less obvious.  The shape of the cap helps.  This is not a smooth even dome.  When young it has a more rectangular section.  The sides tend to be almost vertical and the top is more flat. [The one marked Y shows this shape.] Then if you cut the specimen in half, the young gills are exceedingly pale pink.  Lastly look to where the mushrooms are growing.  Agaricus xanthodermus does not normally, if ever, grow far away from trees, whilst the ‘rosé des prés’  is found in the open pastures.   The yellow stainer is probably growing around the roots of the trees and in fact helping the tree to obtain minerals from the soil.  It is also itself in return obtaining carbohydrates from the trees.  So beware of mushrooms which look like mushrooms growing under trees! The field mushroom is obtaining nutrients from decomposing organic matter, possibly old horse dung.

Above all remember that the best mushrooms have a red tinge to their flesh and will colour any water in which they are placed a pale pinky-red.  The yellow stainer will never do that.  All mushrooms can be placed either into the group of red stainers or the group of yellow stainers – which bruise yellowish,

Bimonthly Weather Report 2011 September October

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These two months were appreciably drier and warmer than in 2010.  That only 9 mm rain fell in September was remarkable.  The ground became too hard and dry to work.  Farmers are not able to find enough hay for their animals. By mid October there was no water left in the garden cistern.  But on the 24th the situation was saved by heavy rain.

The Cranes flew south on the 16th and 17th of October, a little late for them.

Ground frosts occurred on the 20-21 October which seemed to suggest that winter was imminent, but it was a false alarm, and at the end of the month summer temperatures had returned. 

The walnut crop was poor with very small nuts falling.  The Hazel tree yielded nothing at all.

Weather report - July -August 2011

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Bimonthly Weather Report

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These two months were considerably more wet than in 2010.  The rainfall totalled 35 mms last year  and it was 125 mm this year.  This at least restored the balance of the drought in the first half of 2011.

Unfortunately the vegetables suffered well before July commenced and although it has been possible to get some beans planted and crop, some crops have been totally futile. The parsnips totally failed to germinate and there was no attempt to plant a third time in July.  

As I reported for May-June, the hay crop was appallingly poor. 

Nevertheless some fruit crops have done quite well.  There were quite a few plums and the walnut and chestnut trees will probably produce good crops.  In an entry on this blog I have commented on the fruiting of the True Service trees (Sorbus domestica).  Their  fruit crops are immense and  branches are breaking under the load.  Such also happened with apples and plums.  

Partridges  have been scuttling around as the car approaches along the lanes. But not immediately near the house.  The odd hare scampers across the field as I write this piece and we see small family groups of roe deer on some mornings from the bedroom window.

But it seems to me that insects generally have not been as prolific as usual.  There have been very few sightings of the horse fly [I seem to think - none!]with large green eyes (Philipomya graeca).   The Silver Washed Fritillary butterfly  has hardly had a sighting, yet in previous years we normally see several at once trapped indoors and trying to get out of the windows.  There has not been the usual numbers of Marbled White butterflies. Small flies of the house-fly type appear to have been less abundant.

There was a fairly good cropping of  fungi at the end of July some days after a downpour of rain, but it was not repeated after the 26 mms of rain on the 26^th August.

A few Cesar’s mushrooms were seen in July.  No cèpes! 

Towards the end of August a few Autumn Ladies Tresses (Spiranthes spiralis – an orchid) have appeared on the pasture and I have noticed that some other flowers are flowering quite well at this time – Sickle leaved hare’s ear is fairly abundant in its accustomed location and the yellow Odontites is quite luxuriant.

The True Service Tree or Cormier

Wild Plants of France 5.

This beautiful tree, laden with golden fruits is growing at the far side of my daughter’s field.  The locals know it as the Cormier.  In England it is named in books as the true service tree.  But few people will recognise it.

Once it was thought to be extinct in England.  When I was young it was thought that there was just one tree growing in the Wyre Forest near Kidderminster in central England.  There, that single tree was known as the ‘whitty pear’.

Some time in the 1960’s I happened to read the work of Nennius (in translation) of the Wonders of Britain.  Nennius was a monk who lived around the year 800 in North Wales.  He gathered together all kinds of scraps of information.  I was trying to get to grips with the stories surrounding King Arthur whom Nennius mentions.

He wrote in latin ‘Juxta flumen quod vocatur Guoy, poma inveniuntur super fraxinum in proclivo saltus qui est prope ostio fluminis’.    And this is translated as:

‘Next to the river Wye apples spring from an ash tree on a slope by the river estuary.’

I happened to be living fairly near the Wye  at the time.

A friend of mine, a botanist, happened to be wandering around  the district and  he found on the banks of the Severn very close to where the Wye joins that larger river,  amongst some scrubby and neglected patches of trees specimens of this same tree.

It could not be better described as looking like an ash tree bearing small apples.

These must be descended from the same tree or trees that Nennius describes.

The leaves resemble much those of the rowan tree or mountain ash to which it is in fact related.

The fruits are, unless ripe to the point of rotting very bitter.  They almost take the lining off the teeth. Yet the Latin name Sorbus domestica reflects a culinary use.  It is claimed that they were fermented to make a form of cider.   

The wood is fine grained and excellent for carving. But generally the trees end up as firelogs. In this district of south-central France the tree is quite common growing on the edge of the abundant woods of pubescent oak. Most are felled in the recurrent process of cutting timber for firewood. There are few around as old as this specimen, though the tree is said to live to 600 years and more.   This one is perhaps towards a hundred years.