10 Years in Wiltshire

Today marks the 10th anniversary of me moving to Wiltshire. It all began when I was studying online for an AS in Business Studies and asked on the forum for a study buddy. A certain lass from Wiltshire, who goes by the name of Lucy, replied and we started emailing each other.

Lucy and myself in Bruges, 2012.

At first it was just a study relationship, but this became friendship and we'd video chat on MSN Messenger (remember that!?). March 2007 was my first visit to Wiltshire and after a few visits of me to Lucy and Lucy to me in North Lincolnshire, we decided it was time to move things along. On the 1st September 2007, I made the 200 mile trip from North Lincolnshire to Wiltshire to move in with Lucy at her parent's house.

We found our first place in Chippenham and moved there in October that year. Such a short time of chatting via email to living with each other made for a steep learning curve and the first year of living together was pretty tough. But so are we! After 2 years we moved to Melksham, which we bought with a mortgage and then last year we moved to Calne.

For me, the move to Wiltshire was difficult and it's only in the last year that I've felt that Wiltshire is now my home.

In some ways the last 10 years has gone by so quickly. But in others, I can feel the passage of time.

My son investigating a bee orchid, 2017.

Now that Wiltshire lass is my wife and we have a son who's now over 2 years old and, even with my chronic illness, life is great. I'm really happy I made such a life changing decision and get to spend every day with my best friend, the love of my life. Who knew that first email, that first phone call, that first visit, would lead to a totally different life than I had lived previously.

Here are some of the photos I took on my first visit to Wiltshire:

Silbury Hill, 2007

Cherhill, White Horse and Monument, 2007

West Kennet Long Barrow, 2007

Stonehenge, 2007

My hygge: Making the most of being stuck indoors

With ME keeping me indoors for much of the time, I started paying attention to hygge last year.

Pronounced 'hue-ga' or hoo-ga', the Oxford English Dictionary defines hygge as "Esp. with reference to Danish culture: a quality of cosiness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being; contentment from simple pleasures, such as warmth, food, friends, etc." (oed.com, 2017).

In an attempt to create this coziness for myself, started using candles and moved on to making my own with beeswax. Something that I've found I enjoy - receiving a surprise anniversary gift of some candle moulds to make different shape candles. This adds an extra dimension to the hygge of candle making - and enjoying - because I didn't have to harvest every jam jar to fill with wax, but could be a bit more creative with it.

I've also made a little cacti garden in a pot, which I find helps with contentment - as does my current 90 streak of meditation.

Being stuck indoors for a lot of the time does suck, but at least this current trend of different lifestyle concept has given me a way of focusing some energy on improving well being while the wife and child are out doing their thing!

New Arrival

5th Blogiversary

Crocuses in our garden

This blog started on 25 March 2010 as a blog to document my camping journeys with my friends. After that first post, things just got busy and I didn't start blogging regularly until the following year. After that I came down with a mystery illness, now diagnosed as ME, so while I've had to leave camping behind, I didn't want to leave nature behind.

Not being able to spend much time in nature, gave me plenty of time to learn about it. So, in this blog I've written lots about the science behind plants and I've used the blog as a way to post photos and identifications of many species of plant, animal, and fungi. I also blog every now and then about Geocaching, outdoor swimming and the night sky.

I've never had a long term plan for this blog and I don't know where it will end up. But, I want to thank everyone that reads what I post, especially the long term readers.


All the best,
Tim

Partial Solar Eclipse (complete with cloud cover!), Wiltshire, 2015

Gardening with ME: A bit about ME

I've been wanting to write about my experience of ME for a while now and thanks to Gwenfar's Garden I have been inspired to get started! I'm joining her #GardeningWithME meme and future posts will be specifically about the trials and tribulations of gardening while managing ME. I have lots of ideas for future posts and will probably post around 1 every month or so during 2015. This first post is an introduction to how it all started with me.

It's a boy!

I'm excited to write that we're expecting a boy!

We recently had the 20 week, or anomaly, scan. It was exciting to see the major bones being checked and some measured, as well as the brain, lips, heart, and stomach being shown and checked.

Our little meeple was so fidgety last time that it made the 12 week scan difficult and the measurement for the likelihood of down's syndrome couldn't be done (and was later checked by blood test). This time, however, he just wouldn't move! This means that one kidney and some of the spine couldn't be checked and we'll need to have another scan in a couple of weeks.

The sonographer stressed to us that it's very unlikely that there's anything wrong and everything that she checked was absolutely normal.

Thank You

Our fireplace with a lovely cross stitch from my sister-in-law and a rose picked today from our garden.

Last week I found out that I'd won a blog award from Notcutts Garden Centres. I don't know who nominated me for the Wildlife blog award, but I wanted to say thank you!

This is the first award I've been nominated for or won, so it's a really nice feeling. Especially the £50 voucher I received for winning the Wildlife category - which led to a flutter of bookmarking!

As some of you will know, it's been a busy time for me lately, with my wife's severe pregnancy sickness and other things, so I've felt quite guilty that I haven't had the energy to keep up with the blog as much as I wanted to (stupid M.E). But, I have lots of ideas and hopefully normal service will resume presently!

So, I also wanted to thank everyone who's followed my blog for the past few years, especially those of you that provide the comments that motivate me to continue sharing my thoughts and studies. You're all wonderful and make the blogosphere a great place to be a part of.

For more information on the Notcutts awards, click here.

Expecting

Nearly 2 months ago my wife and I found out that she was pregnant!

We code named the baby "Meeple" after our love of boardgames, so that we could talk about the baby without anyone knowing! However, that didn't last too long as my wife came down with severe pregnancy sickness. This has meant that she's been bed bound for around 6 weeks and has lost nearly 2 stone in weight.

The pregnancy sickness seems to be calming down now and we had the 12 week scan last night and were happy to find that everything is progressing as it should! Our little meeple was very active and this meant that we got to see him/her for at least 10 minutes while the nurse tried to get the required measurements. In between these periods of activity, meeple would turn over and go to sleep - which turned out to be very unhelpful!

The benefit of the pregnancy sickness was that we got to see our little meeple at around 7 weeks as the GP needed to check that everything was ok and to find out if it was a multiple pregnancy that was causing the severity of the sickness. By last night the 7 week scan seemed like such a long time ago! It was wonderful to see meeple's heart beating away and to see such active movement.

Now is the wait until the 20 week scan and then finally the birth! We've been given a due date of 26 April.

Here's a copy of last night's scan showing meeple curling his legs up!

A short walk around Brownsea Island

Brownsea Island is one of our favourite places. We enjoy the feeling of isolation, the chance to see red squirrels, and the amount of habitats available in such a small piece of land.

Brownsea is the largest of the islands within Poole Harbour, Dorset and one of the few remaining homes of the red squirrel (Sciurus vulgaris) in the UK. It is owned by the National Trust, however around half of the island is managed as a nature reserve by the Dorset Wildlife Trust.

We've found that the best way to increase encounters with red squirrels on the island is to separate yourself from the other visitors - which is important as you'll be arriving with dozens of other passengers on one of the ferries that travel to the island. After that, just walk slowly and quietly and you're likely to see the squirrels either in the trees or gathering food on the ground. This time we had a few geocaches to find near the church, so this ensured that we were mostly on our own.

I had placed the camera down to help Lucy find the geocache, which was about 5 metres away, when a red squirrel joined us. It was taking quite an interest in our bag (and camera, which I now couldn't get to without scaring away the squirrel!), before hopping up to us and sitting face height on a stump. It was a wonderful experience. After a few moments it gently hopped away again. We managed to see a few squirrels during our walk, including this one:

Talking about the different habitats, heathland it just one that visitors will encounter on the island and we saw the heath speedwell (Veronica officinalis) that created a lovely carpet of delicate colour - one that this green woodpecker (Picus viridis) was also enjoying; but for other reasons! Along with this Mouse-ear-hawkweed (Pilosella officinarum)

As we headed towards the beach we saw some other interesting species such as this English stonecrop (Sedum anglicum), spiral wrack seaweed (Fucus spiralis), and of course the very pretty oyster catcher (Haematopus ostralegus); which posed for some photos before having an afternoon nap.

I think we found three geocaches this time around which took us around the National Trust side of the island. It's amazing that within a few steps of having a panoramic view of the harbour, you suddenly have a completely different view - such as this path with coniferous trees.

One of a few geocaches available to find on the island.

Having a sit down and some lunch on the beach we saw what looks like an old kiln from the pottery activity of 100 years ago (lack of demand and poor quality clay resulted in this being a short endeavour). There's lots of evidence of these activities in the fragments of pottery being found along the beach. We also made ourselves a friend in this black-headed gull (Chroicocephalus ridibundus), who was quite happy to walk up to us and seemed quite tame.

We slowly walked back to the ferry and spent a few minutes in the new gift shop - which has a nice second hand book collection; which included the David Attenborough book The First Eden, which I picked up for a couple of pounds. The ferry back takes passengers on a tour around the harbour and it seemed much longer than previous times we've been on it - lasting for nearly an hour. But it's such a lovely place to be, interesting scenery and history, that we didn't mind.

Of course, I can't end this post without showing you one of the other famous species on Brownsea Island; the Peacock

Married!

On Friday 30th May, Lucy and myself got married! We had a wonderful and lovely day surrounded by our closest family. We had a short honeymoon in Dorset, which has given me lots of ideas to blog about!



As things become a bit more settled, I hope to return to some sort of blogging routine - and importantly getting back into reading the blogs that I follow. Until then, I hope that you're all well and enjoying the year!

Best wishes,
Tim

4th Blogiversary

It's hard to believe that the very first blog post was published on the 25 March 2010! It was published by my friend, Mark, and detailed one of our camping adventures.

So much has changed in the past 4 years. This was initially a blog about camping and was called 'Camping and Outdoors' and I published many posts about camping, bushcraft, and equipment. Then I got ill in January 2012 and found that for the time being camping was out of the question.

As suddenly as illness came on, I found a real interest in plants. So, over time, the blog became more about what we can observe when we're out and about in nature and the name of the blog changed to 'Notes of Nature'. Here's one of the early layouts:

April 2012

Since then I've learned much about plants and really like trying to pass on what I've been learning. I also became interested in minimalism and as well as blog posts of my reflections about clutter and minimalism, my blog design was very minimalistic at one point:

March 2013

I feel that I have reached a happy medium with the blog design at the moment, so it'll probably stay the same for a while. My main frustration at the moment is how tired I am, so I've really had to pull right back using pacing in an attempt to ensure that I don't slip too far back. I really hope to be back blogging soon and really appreciate the messages that I've received from other bloggers. I hope that you're all well and enjoying the onset of Spring. Thanks for reading.

Taking a break

Feeling a bit tired at the moment, so I'm going to take a little break from the blog. Will be back as soon as I can. Until then, here's a lovely Alstroemeria...

Book Review: Grow your own cut flowers by Sarah Raven

Last year I made some small bouquets from the flowers growing in our garden. It made me realise how much I missed choosing and buying flowers for Lucy each month - something I haven't been able to do while I've been off work.

Book Review: The Earth Moved by Amy Stewart

Earthworm or bookworm!?

Sometimes I'm reading a book - or attempting to - and it's just a real effort to pull myself away from whatever I'm doing, even the most tedious task to sit down and plough through the pages.

This book, however, is absolutely magical. The Washington Post say that this book is 'an enjoyable, enlightening educational experience'. I not only applaud the excellent example of alliteration, but wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment.

Berry Go Round Plant Carnival

At the end of January I'll be the host for the Berry Go Round plant carnival for the first time.

Berry Go Round (BGR) has been around since January 2008 when the first BGR was hosted by Seeds Aside. Since then there have been 65 BGR carnivals, with the most recent being held over at In the Company of Plants and Rocks.

The purpose of Berry Go Round is to highlight posts of botanical interest that have been written in the month prior to the carnival. Posts are either submitted to the BGR spreadsheet or have been found by the host during that month. These posts are then collated into a blog posts with links going back to the original post.

It allows all of us that blog about plants to find out about each other and read the interesting things that we've all been discovering during our botanical adventures.

So if you write about plants, submit your post here - you can submit up to 4 entries from your blog. Any posts about plants are fine, so long as plants are the main focus - that includes recipes of botanical interest, but not normally purely horticultural posts.

I have to say that I'm very excited about hosting the carnival this month. I'm looking forward to seeing all of your lovely plant posts and only hope that I can put together a post good enough for them.

Submit your posts here

If you'd like to be a host for Berry Go Round, then please email Susannah by clicking here. I know that February is still available and it would be really great to have someone host the carnival and continue on with this fine tradition of collating and sharing botanical posts. If you want a few more details, please click through to the hosting guidelines.

My 2013 Review

I like to take a few extra days to review the previous year. Not only does it allow me to read lots of other blogger's take of their past year, helping me get some tips on perspective. But I also like to blur the edge between years; to make the dividing line between 2013 and 2014 less important. Like everyone else, I enjoy making and breaking resolutions, but more are broken than persevered with.

I make resolutions as I meander through the year, which is helpful because it means that I can just get on with whatever I've decided on and find out quickly if it's something that's going to stick or just a passing fad. Here is a brief overview of some aspects of my 2013.

Magnolia Stellata and the promise of things to come...

 

This is a photo of my Magnolia stellata. It was given to me as a present for my birthday in 2012. It was a tiny thing and, I guess, it still is! But it has bushed out quite a bit and put on a good show of leaves this past year. It didn't flower, but being so small I hadn't expected it to. But this year as the leaves dropped one by one, I began to notice these little buds.

I'm very much hoping that they are flower buds. The flower buds are fuzzy, allowing the bud to insulate itself from the worst of the cold weather. This is important because the tree flowers before producing foliage. Stellata roughly means star and the common name for this magnolia is the star magnolia. It produces lovely flowers reminiscent of stars with both the petals and sepal being white.

So all of those leaves that I enjoyed seeing this year and put all of their energy into producing these flower buds. I hope that they manage to survive the winter, which in the UK hasn't really started yet.

Either way, for me, it's the promise of good and positive things to come.

I hope you all have a very Happy Christmas and New Year.

Thanks for reading for my blog.

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The history of our passion flower

The passion flower is not a native of the UK and until recently they haven't done too well in our climate, as botanist Trevor Dines explained in the third episode of Wild Things earlier this year.

So imagine our surprise when one popped out of nowhere and started growing right under our living room window! I didn't know what it was when all we could see were leaves, so we allowed it to grow hoping that it would flower - which would then help us to identify it and see if it's a plant we wanted to keep.

Well it obliged and gave us a display of a couple of flowers. From the flowers, we judged it to be the common passion flower (Passiflora caerulea).

A lovely floral display from our passion flower this year.

We did wonder how it came to be in our garden in the first place and suspected that perhaps one of the previous owners had planted it. It's the ideal location with the front of the house being the southern-most facing.

Then Lucy happened upon an old photograph from an estate agent website. So we then thought that the people we bought the house from had hacked the plant down as there was no sign of it when we viewed the house or in the estate agent listing when we bought it. And that it was planted by the owners previous to them. As you can see in the photograph it used to be well established.

Passion flower far right.

Our suspicions we proved correct when we were chatting to a lovely lady that walks her dog past our house. She told us that the passion flower was very vigorous and used to grow all the way down the grass!

Being happy to keep it, but not to let it get out of control, I fastened some wire to the front of the house earlier this year. This allowed the plant to grow up to the window and be a nice cover for the wall under the window. We've then kept pruning it back when it gets a bit too much! This way it will also be easy to cut out old stems and have the new stems held in place by the wire as they grow.

Either about to open or about to close!

The passion flower has been superb this year and the flowers even went to fruit, which was fun to watch. The fruit begins green, but over time, turns to orange. I think that this makes it a plant of real interest, first the flowers and then the fruit, all through summer.

As Trevor Dines mentioned that it was edible, I took one of the fruits inside. It's a really interesting fruit to look at when it's opened, revealing lots of seeds surrounded by a sticky liquid! I did try some raw, but as is mentioned all over the Internet - it's not a nice flavour and not an experiment I'll try again. Apparently the flower can be used to make a tea that alleviates anxiety.

The ripe fruit cut in half.

As our house is a 1970s build, there is no real history and it's the same as every other house on the street. So it was quite nice finding out something of interest in the history of the house - especially because it's plant related.

Thanks for reading.

What to expect on Notes of Nature

The idea of this blog post have been sat in my head for a while now. Seeing the 'What to expect on Loose and Leafy' post and that it's World Mental Health Day has spurred me into action.

If you follow my blog you've probably noticed that for a blog entitled notes of nature, there aren't many notes! There are lots of photos and some basic information, then once in a while there will be an attempt at a note, either scientific or nature writing. There's a reason why the blog has a high ratio of photos compared to writing.

As some of you many know, in January 2012 the world stopped, well my world stopped. I woke up one morning and I literally couldn't do anything. Well I managed to get my shirt on for work, but couldn't manage the tie. Incredibly disappointed with myself, I called work and told them I couldn't come in today. My girlfriend (now fiancée *yay*), Lucy, managed to get me in at the doctors and took me there. The doctor immediately signed me off.

Over the next few weeks nothing happened. I couldn't do anything. Physically and mentally drained and in lots of pain. My doctor diagnosed me with depression. After more time, I underwent counselling and then CBT for many months. Here's the graph that shows the results to answers to the standard questionnaires that are required to be filled in after each session.

The graph shows my social phobia (at the top) and depression (at the bottom) scores. For depression I'm told it shows my going from major depression to mild depression. With CBT and finding (after many attempts) the right medication, I've been able to stabilise at mild depression.

One of the things that helped me find inspiration for life again was taking photographs of flowers. I don't really know what made me start, but after a while it was all I could think about. I couldn't drive any more due to fatigue and headaches, so I would spend every car journey looking out at the road verges for flowers. This led to a passion for plants; photographing them, identifying them, and learning about their biology.

As the depression stabilised the tiredness and pain continued. To cut the story short, I was recently diagnosed with fibromyalgia. So I have regular appointments for physio, occupational therapy, and check ups. I feel positive that I can manage this and get back to a 'normal' life. I can't wait to get back to work and have a family - I want this to happen - managing fibromyalgia and the depression is the priority. I've found that when I replace them with other priorities - I fall back: badly.

It's a lesson I've had to learn a few times.

So, back to the focus of the blog post: what to expect on Notes of Nature.


1) Mainly photographs: Photo posts use much less energy and make me feel productive. Most of my photographs are from months ago - before all of my fibromyalgia-related appointments and starting a part-time AAT course. I will try to take some new photographs soon, but will keep posting the old ones until I run out.
2) Expect some gaps in posting. Some would say that's a good thing! When my photographs run out, I will try to make some profiles for the plants already on the blog - but this will take time.
3) Book reviews: As I can manage the fibromyalgia better I will be able to read more nature and plant books and will review them as I have in the past.
4) Science writing: I will try to write four posts per year on plant science - I've already done my four for this year, so the next will be in the first quarter of 2014. If you have any suggestions - let me know in the comments!
5) Desktop calendar photos: Jessica Burke who writes the Moss Plants and More blog makes calendar images from her moss photographs and I hope she won't mind if I do the same with my plant photographs. We're already into October, but I'll post one for this month anyway - to get me going!
6) Nature writing: As I am able to get out more again,I'll blog about some of the places I go. Sometimes it may well be a post about something nature I see down the street - but sometimes they're the most interesting places!

I think that's about it. I've probably missed something, but if so I'll make a new post and link back to this!

If you've got this far - thank you - while I always feel I'd continue the blog even if nobody reads it, it's always so nice and appreciated when people comment.

For more information on depression, see this video:
For more information on fibromyalgia, see this video:

Book Review: Seed to Seed

Seed to Seed is a year-long narrative of a thale-cress plant that the author found in a churchyard. The book starts quite sparsely with a loose idea of documenting the life of a thale-cress plant and the entries for the first couple of months tend to be shorter and mainly filled with weather reports with some natural history writing. The author makes clear that this book is really for his children, so when reading I tried to keep this in mind.

I started this book at a bad time. Our cat was ill and subsequently we lost him, to what seems to be heart failure. I didn't know if I would continue reading this book, due to the writing not motivating me and the sadness of the time.

I thought this book would be a year in the life of a plant scientist and in the end it does sort of become this. While the natural history writing and the entries about the holidays the author takes with his family can be quite drawn out, Nicholas Harberd really comes into his own when communicating science. While the book, I felt, was a bit long; I did enjoy the entries about the plant biology research the author has been performing.

We hear a lot about the thale-cress plant research at John Innes Centre, especially about DELLAs which seem to restrain the growth of the plant so that it can respond to the environment rather than grow far too quickly regardless of environmental conditions and then die, perhaps without successfully creating seeds for the next generation.

For the science, this book is worth reading. But I learned that I could miss the first paragraph of most entries, which were weather reports, and many of the entries written while the author was on his holidays - without missing the science writing. Overall, I'm glad that I persevered as I feel that it is an important book.