Category: Nature Notes

 

A pretty little flower or menacing alien invader? This flower was in bloom during April and May and a number of people have commented on it. Commonly mistaken for a white Bluebell this is actually the Three Cornered Leek or Three Cornered Garlic. It grows all round the parish, often in private gardens but also alongside the A48 at the top of the Tumble and even on the Wenvoe Village Green. It may look innocuous but it is in fact a notifiable plant under the Countryside and Wildlife Act which means it is illegal to plant it or grow it in the wild. Soil containing seeds or bulbs (in other words any soil in which it has been growing) must be disposed of in a licensed landfill site. The reason is that it does spread rapidly and will soon smother our native wildflowers. It is already a major problem in Cornwall and Devon and one can expect the same to happen here.

It is very easy to identify and distinguish from a Bluebell as it has triangular stems – the latter is round. It also has an onion smell whereas the English Bluebell flower is scented (although the Spanish Bluebell has no scent). It is from the Mediterranean region and was introduced in the mid 18th Century

It is popular with foragers as the leaves and flowers can be added to salads and the bulbs used as a substitute for garlic but don't confuse it with a daffodil bulb which is poisonous. It is in the Allium family which are reportedly good for the heart and high blood pressure. The juice is even claimed to be good as a moth repellent.

 

Three Corner Garlic

 

 

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The Welsh Orchard near Maes y Felin includes a selection of plants grown by the Physicians of Myddfai; 12th century (and onwards) herbalists who were known all over Europe. We know a lot of what they believed and prescribed because, unusually for the time, their teachings were well-documented. The plants they used, with a few exceptions, will be familiar to us – many regarded as 'weeds'.

There is a very common little weed growing all round Wenvoe at the moment with blue flowers known as Ground Ivy and this was first recorded for medical use by the Myddfai practitioners. A fresh herb tea of the plant with honey is naturally rich in Vitamin C and it was found useful in dealing with coughs. The leaves could be turned into snuff which helped with asthma and also headaches and hangovers. The Celts treated moderate burns with an ointment using the stems and it was thought to relieve snake bites. The Celts also used it for many other conditions including indigestion, eye problems and ringing in the ears.

It was an important herb in magic and folklore but a very practical use was for dyeing fabrics, the fruit producing a dye that is grey and sage green, the leaves a creamy yellow colour and boiling a dark navy stain. And if this has still not whetted your appetite a common name for the plant was Ale hoof because it was used for flavouring beer before hops became the standard. It is still used occasionally by micro-breweries and is described as giving the beer a taste of 'slightly nettle with a minty edge'.

Whilst it is never advisable to attempt medical treatments using herbs without consulting an expert, it is interesting to note the current curiosity about some of the old remedies. An old German proverb states 'The garden is the poor man's apothecary'.

 

If you visit the orchards in May you should still see plenty of blossom around, the majority of the trees being apples. But what is an apple and where does it come from? The first distinction is between the crab-apple and the sweet apple that we eat. The crab is our native apple and you can often find it growing in hedgerows around the parish. It usually has spines on the branches and the fruit is small, hard and very sour. But it has been used for thousands of years by our ancestors cooked and fermented. Crab-apple jelly is still popular to make at home or buy.

The sweet apple originally came from the Tien Shan Mountains in Kazakhstan thousands of miles away and it took many centuries to work its way along the silk routes to the Middle East and Europe. If you plant the pips from, say, a Cox’s Orange Pippin you will get a variety of different apple types, many of them of little use so to get another true Cox’s you have to graft them, a skill that was well known to the Romans. You may hear people referring to hybrids between a crab and a sweet apple but this does not happen and DNA analysis of the origins of the sweet apple has found that crabs were not involved in its evolution.

Because of this great variability you never quite know what might pop up and many new varieties were chance discoveries. Claygate Pearmain (which grows in our Community Orchard) was found in a hedgerow in Surrey but once discovered grafting ensured that that tasty variety is still available to us these days. In the heyday of apple development in Britain there were thousands of varieties. Farmers would spread the mush from cider production around the edges of their fields to see what new varieties might appear and if you look out of the window of the car or train you will see apple trees growing from the cores lobbed out of the windows by passengers – there are several on the link road past Pencoedtre. These are known as ‘wilding’ apples.

Commercial orchards have little value for wildlife as the trees are kept short, grubbed up after around 7 to 8 years and sprayed regularly through the season. In a traditional orchard the trees are allowed to grow to their full size and may live for 100 years or more. These are a haven for wildlife attracting many of the species that would have been common before our orchards were destroyed, including rare beetles such as the Golden Chafer and birds like the Wryneck. In 1900 there were about 15 orchards in Wenvoe but little evidence of these remain other than in the names of some houses and streets.

So enjoy your apples whether you plant a tree or two in your garden or visit one of our traditional orchards in the parish. There is increasing evidence that the older varieties may be better for you and being locally sourced you avoid the air miles involved in shipping your fruit from other continents to your supermarket. And wildlife will benefit.

 

The End Game?

No thrush sings in the garden now,

No blackbird looks to bully the thrush

And no swifts shrill above the town,

No kestrels hover over the motorways;

No cheeky sparrows fly up when a car goes by

And no skylarks sing above the barren meadows.

The martins abandoned their nest under the eaves years ago

Early predictions have come true:

'Silent Spring' is here;

There is 'No Room for Wildlife'

What do we have instead?

The roar and unhealthy smell of the motorways,

Green fields, quiet lanes and woods turned into 

Fly-tips, housing estates, business parks and recreation grounds.

Trees and plants stressed or dying in summer heat and drought.

Collectors begging us to 'Save the Children'

For what? A world destroyed by their elders?

Soon, we too will be gone, 'Gone with the Wind' –

Unless …?

 

This poem by Derek Gould was printed in the BBC Wildlife Magazine

 

 

 

 

 

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They are all around you as soon as you step out of the house – on your roof, on the pavement, on the trees, the walls and the fences. Yet most of us do not notice them. They grow where little else can, slowly but steadily. They come in all sorts of shapes and sizes – flat and round, scaly and shrubby. They are, of course, lichens. Lichens are fungi that behave like plants because they have little green algal cells inside them. Together they form the lichen body. The algal cells make sugar and give it to the fungus. In return the fungus shelters them from excess sunlight and water loss.

 

The easiest to find are those on the pavements. All those white or yellow blobs or stains are lichens. Some look so like chewing gum that they are called the Chewing Gum lichen. Or take a close look at the trees behind the library which sport a great variety of them. And what use are they? You might have heard that reindeer eat lichens but did you know that they are also eaten by humans, used in medicine, cosmetics and dyeing and making litmus paper? They can help prospectors looking for precious metals and will be contained in your sprinkling of Garam Masala. So next time you slap on your Brut or Eternity, or anoint yourself with Estee Lauder or Yves St Laurent, thank the humble lichen.

The Wildlife Group are preparing a Lichen Trail round the village which will be downloadable from the website so if you see members lying on the pavement or examining the gravestones with hand lenses that will be the reason – you do need to get up very close to them to appreciate their colours, the tiny fruits that many of them will be growing; even the spores that help to identify the different species. If you are interested in getting to know more about them, do contact the Wildlife Group.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Snails and slugs

Snails and slugs may not quite get the pulse racing like Cheetas and Gazelles but they are a lot more practically useful in and around the Parish. Without them and the other small denizens that munch their way through fallen leaves and other vegetation we would soon be disappearing under a mountain of debris. Those who have visited Molluscopolis on the Upper Orchid Field may have learned a bit about the variety of different snails you can find here but a relatively new one is the Girdled Snail. SEWBREC, who record all wildlife sightings for South East Wales, this month asked people to look out for the Girdled Snail as they had very few records for the whole of Wales. This is a Mediterranean species, first noted in Britain (Devon) in 1950 but spreading steadily up the country. It is usually found in gardens and waste ground and is very easy to identify as it has a distinctive pale -coloured girdle or keel around its middle. Within a couple of hours we found the one shown in the photo which was perched on a plastic composter, just waiting to be recorded. The chances are there will be several hundred in Wenvoe so, gardeners in particular, look out for them and, if you find them let the Wildlife Group know.

The Service Tree

The Upper Orchid Field has been host to a very rare tree, Sorbus domestica, commonly known as The Service Tree. It grows in a few locations in South Wales and ours fell off the cliffs near Fontygary and was spotted on the shoreline. It was replanted in our field but has never been very happy as the site is both damper and shadier that it would ideally want so it is heading back to a safe location near Fontygary where hopefully it can prosper and reproduce. We still hope that in the future we will be able to provide a home for a a couple of these in a suitable location so that we can help consolidate and expand the population. We have already planted in the Upper Orchid Field, the Wild Orchard and the Community Orchard a close relative Sorbus torminalis, The Chequers Tree, the fruit of which was once used in brewing and which many pubs are names after.

 

 

 

 

 

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Possibly the oldest in Wales? Recently we wrote about Citizen Science – how anyone can contribute to what we know about our world by recording what they see. One example is the Ancient Tree Register managed by the Woodland Trust. The Wildlife Group is registered as a recording group so if we come across a tree that is likely to be particularly old we take measurements and send the details off. So far we have recorded 18 trees, many of them in our parish. These would be regarded as 'veterans' – to be 'ancient' a tree has to be at least 400 years old – the likeliest candidate being the yew in St Mary's churchyard facing Old Port Road.

However, whilst walking near Tretower recently members of the group came across a massive oak. It measured over 10 metres around the trunk and details were sent off along with photo, grid reference and lists of the mosses and lichens growing on it. The response we received from the Ancient Tree Register was encouraging. "This is a most remarkable ancient oak you have recorded in the Brecon Beacons… What a great find and thanks for adding it to the Woodland Trust's Ancient Tree inventory. Although the girth could be exaggerated by the tree's condition, falling open, it still suggests that this is one of the biggest and possibly oldest oaks in Wales"

It was as recent as 2014 that was is considered to be Britain's oldest tree was discovered in a churchyard in Wales, a yew in St Cynogs churchyard at Defynnog near Sennybridge which is thought to be 5,000 years old. The Pontfadog Oak was believed to be Wales's oldest oak at 1,200 years but it fell over in 2013. It will be interesting to see how our oak comes out when investigations and surveys have been completed