About this Blog

This blog reflects our twin interests in walking and natural history, especially botany.



"Ich wandle unter Blumen

Und blühe selber mit ..."

Heinrich Heine





Walking is important to us as a way of being in direct touch with the environment, experiencing species and habitats in their ecological and historical context. By walking between different flower sites we experience the character of the general countryside, getting to know as much where flowers are not as where they are. Walking allows for the serendipitous - chance encounters with animals, meetings with local people, unexpected species - which enrich the experience.

We set up this blog to share a variety of mainly day-long walks centred on "iconic" flower sites and locations of rare plants, where these are publicly accessible. The accounts include descriptions of the routes taken, key plants seen, other wildlife encountered, and anything of general environmental or historical interest. All the walks allow time for looking around (some flowers need searching for), photography etc, and usually include a half-way stop for refreshment at some suitable establishment. The walks are seasonal, depending on the flowering/fruiting times of different species, although one cannot hit the peak time for all species seen on one walk, and the best timings will vary from year to year. Lengths vary but the walks may be anything up to 12 miles or more, so an early start is recommended.



A certain knowledge of our flora is assumed, but those less familiar should be able to identify most of the plants mentioned with the help of one of the good field guides - Blamey, Fitter and Fitter Wild Flowers of Britain & Ireland (A&C Black) or Francis Rose The Wild Flower Key (Warne) - although occasionally recourse may be needed to more technical tomes such as Clive Stace New Flora of the British Isles (Cambridge) or the specialist volumes published by BSBI (Botanical Society of the British Isles) on grasses, sedges, umbellifers etc.



While examining plants it is interesting to note the galls, leaf-mines and fungi (rusts etc) that are often specific to particular taxa. For galls we use Redfern and Shirley British Plant Galls, for leaf-mines http://www.ukflymines.co.uk/ (which also includes lepidopteran and other mines), and for fungi Ellis and Ellis Microfungi on Land Plants, although this is a technical tome rather than a field guide.

Our completed walk around the coast and borders of England is described on http://www.coastwalking.blogspot.co.uk/ and our current walk around the coast of Wales is on http://www.coastwalkwales.blogspot.co.uk/




Thursday, 6 October 2011

Buckinghamshire: Bazeley Apple? near Ley Hill

4 October 2011             OS Explorer 181 Chiltern Hills North
Length: 20 minutes

The Bazeley is a variety of apple developed in the 19th century in The Lee, a village west of Chesham (= “Best-of-The-Lee”).  It was once grown widely around the local area at the turn of the century when orchards were flourishing.  The variety is now very rare, although they are still propagated in small numbers by nurseries such as Bernwode Plants in Bucks, who obtained stock from a former orchard now part of the home of actor Geoffrey Palmer in Hunts Green.  Very few other examples survive.  The apples were usually cooked, especially for mince pies, but can be eaten if picked in October and stored until January to mature.
          Having heard of an old Bazeley beside a particular green lane, we parked at SP9902 where Leyhill Common funnels into the little village of Ley Hill just east of Chesham.  There is plenty of room for parking here and a choice of two pubs unusually side by side, the Crown and the Swan, for refreshment after the short walk. 

Adjacent pubs at Ley Hill

We took the bridleway along the north-west side of the common, which is now mostly golf-course.  After less than 200 metres we encountered an old Malus domestica cultivar on the left where the ground was littered profusely with yellow apples.  Here there is also an entrance to Crabtree Wood or Plantation, a joint biodiversity project between the landowners and Ley Hill School.  The land here used to be orchards and the tree seems to be a survival from these.

Possible old Bazeley tree with windfalls

Unripe apples on tree

Windfalls

The tree fruits vigorously and the apples are not as small, hard or tart as crabs.  Their yellow waxy skin is typical of a Bazeley, although they have degenerated with age to a size of only 4-5cm and many lack the typical oval shape.  A characteristic of the Bazeley is a protuberance that often forms beside the stalk, and a good number of these apples showed this character, often in an exaggerated manner.  In some cases the protuberance took the form of a second apple and was obviously derived from a second flower close to the first and the merging of their two fruits.

Selected windfalls, some showing protuberance by stalk

Extreme form of protuberance

Although the flesh was sweet we found the skin rather tough and acid at this stage, but we collected a good batch of windfalls for cooking.
          The continuation of the green lane takes one past plenty of old trees, especially of wild cherry Prunus avium, oak Quercus robur, hornbeam Carpinus betulus, and ash Fraxinus excelsior, as well as many coppiced stools of hazel Corylus avellanus.  At this time of the year these were largely fruiting abundantly, this being an excellent year for acorns, beech mast and holly Ilex aquifolium berries. 

Acorns

Hornbeam fruit

Hazel coppice

Abundant holly berries

Crabtree Wood has many other fruiting bushes such as spindle Euonymus europaeus, blackthorn Prunus spinosa, sweet chestnut Castanea sativa and red osier dogwood Cornus sericea.
Sloes

Spindle

Sweet chestnut
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