Going Wild

By C:

In a week of one ‘shock’ news-report after another, the only ‘shock’ at Wallingford Green Gym was this message, sent by the session leader in advance:

Just 10 signed up for tomorrow so we may have too much cake.  Oh dear!

Opinion may vary as to whether England’s Big Fail vs Iceland was in any way a surprise.  It certainly wasn’t in my house: ever since one Green-Gymmer, before the Euro 2016 tournament began, had talked about the format being expanded to include “minnows such as Iceland”, I have been rooting for the men in ice-blue – if not with quite the wild abandon of those who may properly call the team by their nickname, strákarnir okkar (‘our boys’).  One German cartoon I saw, showed a commentator standing in front of an empty football pitch (could equally have been a drawing of a Shadow-Cabinet meeting?) announcing that England having voted for Brexit, Iceland had a bye into the next round!

Opinion may also vary as to whether an over-supply of cake for Green Gym would have been a ‘shock’ in the sense of a problem.  It’s hard work, working out in the wild!  In the event, no such difficulty arose because on the day there were 13 hungry volunteers to cater for.

This from the session leader:

Clearing watercress beds and channels is very like painting this:

As soon as you finish at one end, you start all over again.  Except that they have now used new epoxy paint on the Forth Bridge and it doesn’t have to be painted again for 30 or so years.  No such luck with watercress.

Last time we were here we had cleared a large area and piled the sodden cress and mud onto the concrete bunds.  Lo and behold it was all still there today, although much drier:

So our first task was to fork this off the bunds, into wheel barrows:

This is the downstream team working hard:

And this is their spoil heap:

Being well organised [Ed: not like the England football team] there was, as you will have observed, a team at either end, working towards each other:

Here are two of the upstream team at work, but I am nor sure where their spoil ended up.

[Ed: I know the answer to that, because I was the one wheelbarrowing.  It went to the compost heap.]

When the bunds were clear …

tea-break was highly anticipated.  Some Green-Gymmers were confused by the “coffee-whistle bird”: a very loud avian, somewhere nearby, but we couldn’t catch a glimpse of it, whose call sounded just like the whistle summoning volunteers to refreshments:

The ‘Rocky’ bars were in honour of two of our stalwart volunteers who bear the name of the saint whose Feast Day it will be by the time this blog is up (St Peter, birth-name Shim‘on, nicknamed Kefa, which in Aramaic means ‘The Rock’, and translates into Latin as Petrus).

Some members who were unable to get to clear the bunds had already started on more clearing of channels of cress: cutting/pulling unwanted vegetation – and piling it on to the bunds:

As usual, the stream ran clear – except where there was silt on the bed disturbed by Green-Gymmers’ boots:

Some of us got a glimpse, in passing, of other sights at the site:

Lots of pollinators making the most of the sunshine while it lasted.  Sadly, the Tortoiseshell butterfly spotted, declined to pause for a photo opportunity.

Yellow |Rattle (Rhinanthus minor) in a meadow area where we had in years past placed barriers to discourage people from walking over species considered desirable.  Yellow Rattle is good from a conservationist’s PoV because it is hemi-parasitic: it stunts the growth of grass, and so helps a variety of other species to get a look in.

What looks like a dipping-platform under construction at ‘our’ pond – they’ve taken away some of ‘our’ turf!

So at the end, the bunds were again covered, ready for another group (or us?) to clear.

The high Midsummer pomps

By C:

Whether in honour of the summer solstice, or because new site-warden had been advised that our traditional midsummer task at this location does not appeal to some of our volunteers, today we were initially awarded two tasks at Mowbray Fields:

1. The annual orchid count
2. Repair work to the boardwalk

Now it is the first of those two, which makes some Green-Gymmers groan.  Tramping through the undergrowth – as delicately as we can – and counting flowers?  For some, that would be a pleasant diversion from our normal range of tasks.  For others, it would just be frustrating.  No use trying to lure them out with the poet’s assurance that “soon will the musk carnations break and swell, / … gold-dusted snapdragon, / Sweet-William with his homely cottage-smell, / And orchids …”  No, actually Matthew Arnold didn’t say anything about orchids.  Besides, South-Oxfordshire orchids tend to be a tad less exotic than their tropical cousins:

The second task, we were told, involved “taking away the chicken wire and replacing with fencing staples”.  So a wire-cutter and hammer job: much more appealing to a certain mind-set!

Snipping wire before levering it off with the hammer

Knocking in staples - note the alternative use of coffee mug to hold supplies

Either way, today’s menu made for a change from hedge-care and fence-care.  Both of those boil down to ‘vegetation clearance’, ie weeding, but on a larger scale than in a garden.  Today’s tasks were more to do with the ‘nuts & bolts’ of site management.  In the case of boardwalk maintenance: literally attending to the site hardware.  In the case of identifying and plotting flower-species on a map: generating some of the data which makes for an evidence-based site-management plan – or at least evidence-informed eco-management.

“It’s quite wet/boggy in places so wellies are a must I think!” the site warden had warned in advance.  It would also have helped this particular volunteer if she had remembered in time that one of her wellies had sprung a leak, therefore a new pair required.  (Why does one always have to buy two boots, if it is only one new boot which is needed?) 

More to the point, for those volunteers who were up for orchid-counting (and had remembered their wellies), was the difficulty of seeing the flowers above the level of the water in places.  South Oxfordshire has been a little soggy of late – with some quite spectacular thunderstorms, including one big hit: on a biogas plant.

The Mowbray-Fields fill-pond was therefore once again doing its primary job of preventing local flooding.  This, for example, would have to be logged as ‘No orchids observed in this sector’: 

The flowers might have been there, holding their breath; but we couldn’t see them, so the score would remain a big round zero – like when the England football team are playing.  Are Green-Gymmers tempted to pretend in such circumstances?  Yes, especially when there is rivalry between teams of orchid-counters.  Thus far, scientific integrity has always prevailed.

This year, however, no such scenario could have arisen.  Volunteers began, as usual, with a tutorial in orchid identification:

Then they disappeared from view of the rest of the team, as they looked for the best point from which to begin their survey. 

Meanwhile, the boardwalk-repairers were beginning to think, “We need to get silent hammers!” as well as engaging in some competitive hammering (counting the number of blows it took to sink a staple).  As the morning wore on, and more hands were engaged on hammering, it was visually not the most interesting event to record, but it did sound “like a drumming workshop – for beginners”:

Accessing the fill-pond area of the site, for the orchid count, was always going to be difficult, with the luxuriant growth there has been this year:

Sadly, the explorers had eventually to conclude that it was simply too wet underfoot for the surveyors to get safely on to site.  Very frustrating, because from the path, one could see that the orchids were there ...

there was just no way to get closer to search for those specimens which were not growing quite so tall.

Instead, a third task was hastily arranged.  Guess what?  Vegetation clearance!