October 2016 — the Red Admiral butterflies

The Indian summer of recent days has been very welcome, to say the least. Chilled and rain-lashed garden plants have been reactivated and several dozen young House Martens were recently lined out on a sunlit telegraph wire not far from the church. Still in immature plumage, they are flitting and chirping like noisy children and awaiting the signal to begin their southward migration. Meadow Pipits perch on Ragwort dense with seed and while a Jay peers moodily from a gate before lifting off to display wonderful blue wing-flashes, a squirrel methodically ransacks a hawthorn, delicately nibbling each berry like a buyer seeking the best deal.

    A living fossil? At Strinesdale? Yes. A moisture-loving conifer, the Dawn Redwood, was planted next to the lower reservoir during the re-ordering of the site where it is making a very graceful tree. The Dawn Redwood was unknown until 1941, when it was recorded by a forester named T. Kan in a remote province of China. A vast specimen formed part of a shrine and was referred to by villagers as a ‘water-fir’. This new tree was unique, except that the leaves matched fossil specimens millions of years old, leading to it being labelled a ‘living fossil’. In 1948, an American university paid for seeds to be collected, the tree eventually passing into wide-scale cultivation. In the autumn, the whole thing turns pink-gold like the dawn breaking.

   You may wonder what use stinging nettles are. Allotment growers use them to make an effective fertiliser and in ancient times they were used to make a quality cloth. Their outstanding function, apart from stinging, is to provide food for the caterpillars of the Red Admiral butterfly. This most charismatic of insects appeared in our garden (19 August), resting on a Sedum plant. The remarkable thing is that they cross the Channel to breed in the UK. ‘The butterfly will certainly arrest attention by the vivid contrast of black and scarlet, but Nature, ever excellent in her colour schemes, has toned down the glare of the scarlet by the addition of some splashes and dots of white,’ says the Observer Book of Butterflies (1962).

First published in October 2016