Crime scene

My neighbour is having her garden landscaped at the moment and over recent weeks it's been heavy duty stuff, with a JCB levelling out and knocking down. They've also had the chainsaw out and cleared most of the old apple trees, leaving one to here and there.

One survivor is an ivy-covered hazel that was to close to the boundary fence for felling and had to suffer radical surgery instead. Then a night or two ago the wind blew and one of its main limbs snapped off and dropped into our garden.
Or would have done if the trailing ivy didn't keep it in its grip. I had to get a saw out and cut it free.
Looking at closely at it, the mass of entangled ivy stems completely encase the hazel limb, which was dead and beginning to rot. In my picture there's two or three times as much of the light ivy wood as there is darker hazel.
That limb was carrying a lot of weight. Which made me think about the relationship between ivy and its host tree once again. A friend of mine is convinced that ivy kills trees and looking at the way the ivy had this hazel held it's really easy to see it as one strangling the life out of the other.My friend would look at this picture as evidence of murder committed. But it's really more about ivy flourishing on trees that are already on the last lap.
The RHS says of ivy "its presence on the trunk (of a tree) is not damaging and where it grows into the crowns this is usually only because the tree sare already in decline or diseased and slowly dying". An innocent bystander then and guilty of no 'crime'. 

Indian Summer

It came, it went. We had one beautiful day of September sunshine yesterday and it was heavenly. A single world-weary small tortoisehell spent all day in the sun on the iceplant and there was a comma on the ivy that covers the old apple tree.

Comma (Photo: Tim Bekaert, Wiki Commons)

The comma had that mint condition new look about it as though it only just emerged. In the bright sunshine it looked so vividly orange that I decided I needed to take a photo, but of course by the time I had camera, memory card and batteries there was no sign of it.
It did get me to spend some time looking at the ivy and the dozens of flies of all kinds that were buzzing around the flowers on the sun-warmed side of the tree. There were so many of them that it really underlined what an important part late-blooming ivy plays at this end of the year.
I also had a look at my 'followed tree' for the first in a while. With hindsight it wasn't a good choice because you have to sight your way through nettles to get to it.
Hidden away in the vegetation the cut end of ash looks more than ever like the head of some sort of animal to me. The minotaur, maybe.
It's leaves are still mostly green, but they are starting to show signs of change. Brown spots are forming and leaf edges are curling.
And throughout the day there were swallows feeding over the valley. When I went into the garage after dark there was no sign of the last lonely fledgling that has been roosting on its own in there for a week or more - hopefully it joined up with the others and is now on it's way south.
 

Berry chilly weather

Not a gardening day today. It's grey, wet, cold and muddy out there and I don't think anyone who could choose, would be outside rather in by the fire.

In fact, it's the perfect day to start out on a new blog while watching the birds from the window. Over the last week or so our cherry tree has become the focus of attention from the garden's birds, or actually the thick covering of ivy that grows up the trunk to a height that's way above my head.

Throughout the day blackbirds, a couple of woodpigeons and a song thrush have been busy in the dense leaves of this ivy (Hedera helix) that covers most of the tree. They rustle about inside the dense foliage throughout daylight hours.

Every now and again one of the berry-gatherers will pop out for a moment for a quick look around before going back for more fruit. Together the mixed flock can forage in relative safety.

Purple-tinted droppings are scattered around on the grass under the tree and the nearby shed, evidence of just how much birds are relying on the little black berries at the moment. Ivy berries are very energy-dense - comparable with a Mars bar apparently . The fact that they ripen so late in the winter - long after other wild fruit has been eaten - makes it a must-have wildlife garden plant.