GilesWatson
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Over the next few weeks, several of my books will become available, print-on-demand, here: www.lulu.com/spotlight/gileswa…
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The Flight of the White Horse: Reading
1 min read
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Hogweed
8 min read
See my new documentary film here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gKjAu…
Of all the plant's common names – Alderdrots, Bear's Breech, Bear Skeiters, Bee's Nest, Beggar-Weed, Broad Kelk, Bullers, Bund-Weed, Bunnert, Cathaw-Blow, Clogweed, Cow-Cakes, Devil's Oatmeal, Eltrot, Gypsy's Lace, Humpy-Scrumples, Kedlock, Kegga, Kiskies, Limpernscrimp, Rabbit's Vittles, Scabby Hands, Snake's Meat, Wippul-Squip, to name a few – the official floras had to choose Hogweed. Its second most common names are Cow Parsnip, or more authentically, Pig's Parsnip, since pigs relish the plant, and most especially its root, which is said to taste of asparagus. Sows are not alone in their appreciation; an entire mini-ecosystem depends upon it for food and shelter. Only a human being would be fool enough to scorn a hogweed.
The hogweed understorey teems with more life than that of a woodland. Purple-mottled spikes of woundwort populate its margins, mingling with the milfoil, their leaves hairy and pungent as burnt rubber. The flowers flare, brazen as orchids, and dance about their stems in rings. Sawflies retire from the heat under the shade of the leaves of buttercups. Brambles unfold their blooms like crinkled paper. White campions and tassel-seeded nettles jostle for space, and in places where the hogweed has not grown, there are temporary campion-forests, wind-shaken and sun-splashed, punctuated with grass-inflorescences. There are red-campions too, and powder-pink hybrids, nodding in the shadows amongst the cleavers. By summer, the cowslips are making seeds, and the campion leaves are mined by caterpillars, safe under skins of epidermis. Bumblebees helmet themselves with the flowers of white archangels, and fly off, pollen-pated.
The leaves of hogweed are broad as umbrellas, casting a shade of delicious coolness. Its stems are tall, hollow and bristled, ridged and stringy as celery, each a pillar supporting a canopy as complex as the fan-vaults of a Decorated cathedral. Denizens of the hogweed underworld live out their minutes in a green half-light, occasionally pierced by snail-searing rays of sun, where some caterpillar has grazed a hole to let them in. Some of these creatures come here only to rest in comparative safety; others, like the snails, spend the whole of their lives here, silently devouring wilting leaves with their rasping mouths, indulging in strange, sado-masochistic love-rites, burying little spherical, gelatinous eggs in the soil, and hibernating deep amongst the lifeless stems throughout the winter. Slaters – crustaceans who have spent millions of years on the edge of an aquatic existence – skulk in the damper places. Flies come down, as if to drink the shade – some dumpy, their legs scrunched underneath them like stunted stilts, others, like the mottle-winged, slow-moving Platystoma, coloured for a crepuscular existence lasting twelve hours every day. She sucks the goodness out of decaying insects. Scorpion-flies skulk in the interstices between layered leaves, folding their magpie-coloured wings, their long beaks giving them parsimonious expressions. Pursued, they slide into the shadows, and reappear elsewhere, unwilling to fly for very long. They, too, thrive on decay. A beetle seems to pant in the coolness, its elytra malformed, the underwings disordered – a parachute badly packed. Its minutes may be numbered, but nothing will wasted under the hogweed. A snout-nosed moth sits slightly askew, its wings etched with tide-marks, like contours on a map, or layers of sedimentary stone. Approach too close, and it abandons pretence, flits awhile, then drops, willy-nilly as a dead leaf, waits and hopes. The ruse will be repeated time and again, until it works.
Hidden dangers lurk in the understorey. Agelena labyrinthica has crafted a white, dew-spangled vortex out of threads drawn from the plump lozenge of her abdomen. She lurks at the nadir of her spun funnel, one leg stretched to assess vibrations in the silk. Let your shadow cross her, and she darts back into her anteroom, but walk away a moment, and hunger will bring her out again. Her crystal castle is strung with hidden snares - lines of silk taut enough to trip a grasshopper's leg. Tiny insects cavort on leaf-surfaces, only inches from the tripwires. A cranefly blunders into one; the six spindly, jointed legs do all they can to become the more entangled.
Travel up the stems to where the umbels advertise gifts of nectar on the wind, and you will find another spider. The filaments of her web are drawn between the stems of hogweed, forming a sheet over an umbel. She hides beneath it, striped forelegs extended. Other dangers walk on only six legs. Malachius bipustulatus has a carapace handsome as malachite, the ends of his tail-coat dipped in orange paint, his protruding bottom ringed with white. He has all the appearance of a dandy, but is a predator at heart: those jaws are a giveaway. Empis tesselata, a fly whose head is almost entirely composed of eyes, will sometimes use that needling beak for sucking nectar, but it is equally well adapted to puncturing chitin. Lesser flies need to be nimble in the company of a plethora of yellow dung flies, who eked out an existence in their larval form by subsisting inside cowpats, but are now interested in higher-protein foodstuffs. Their legs support them like hydraulic jacks as they fastidiously wipe their hands, sustaining themselves on hogweed-nectar whilst they wait for something more savoury to come their way. Chaffinches chatter, and blackbirds spill molten honey from their bills, unaware of this maliciousness in miniscule. Tiny black beetles crawl beneath those great hairy pylons, oblivious in their armour-plating.
Some of the umbels' visitors, drawn by the gratuitous surfeit of nectar, are more-or-less impervious to such perils. Sawflies, like their stinging wasp-cousins, bear warning colours. One sawfly visitor is lean and elongated, black as obsidian, banded with bright yellow, the wings held splayed as she drinks, then closed as she reaches momentary satiation. Her antennae are constantly a-twiddle. Another is orange of abdomen, each joint of her yellow legs knobbled with black; the head, thorax and antennae wasp-black and seemingly dangerous. Her hindlegs caress her wings as she is drinking. Wasps come to the umbels too – some of them a positive threat to spiders – their colours flaring. At times, they hold their wings outwards, and flex their abdomens upwards, as if in nectar-fuelled ecstasy. The amber colours seem to be stitched through them, entering their bodies at the legs, and emerging at the antennae. Other Hymenopterans perform a complex, nectar-tasting dance, pirouetting with their abdomens raised aloft. Ichneumons are graceful little murderers.
The uppermost reaches of the umbel-canopies are the provinces of bees. Little, solitary burrowing bees brave the wind, their legs haired, ready for a burden of pollen. The individual flowers of the hogweed are almost as big as them: white-lobed landing-pads surrounding a fount of nectar. They are determined little customers, hanging grimly onto the umbels when the wind tosses them, plying their trade until their wings turn ragged. Their competitors are honey-bees, sleek and businesslike, and bumble-bees who fly, impossible as winged potatoes partly burnt, borne aloft on sheer bluster. One bee can cause a whole umbel to bend to her weight. Tiny beetles scurry for cover, or drop off the umbel entirely in their panic. Andrena cinerara, in her black and white suit, is dauntless in defending an entire umbel for herself – indeed, she seems to burn up an umbel's worth of nectar-energy in the process of establishing her sovereignty.
Because bees are equipped with stings, the harmless hoverflies imitate them. The umbels attract a number of different species, all sharing the same flowers. Some are as large as honeybees, but bear only two wings. Their abdomens pulse as they gorge themselves on nectar, their semi-flexible proboscises sucking it up systematically from each flower on the umbel-head, like little vacuum-cleaners. Eristalis arbustorum is medium-sized, and no match for a honey-bee. It hops between each dome of flowers with a little burst of buzzing. When tired, it too retires to the understorey, perching nervously on a blade of grass, assessing dangers with its head-engulfing, multifaceted eyes. Even greenbottles, who spend most of their time seeking out carrion and dung, cannot resist the gift of sugar, and other flies come in still more surprising colours. Spotted crane-flies do not drink much, but when they wish to imbibe, the hogweed provides their beverage of choice. Their legs, impossibly twiggy and long, splay haphazardly across the flowers as the crane-flies bend to drink, their tiny feelers twitching with excitement. Each crane-fly has a pair of little club-shaped stabilisers at the base of its thorax. Its wings blow suddenly vertical when the wind catches them.
But most of all, hogweed flowers are homelands for the tribes of beetles. Ladybirds are not built for gainly feeding; their rigid, rotund structures dictate that a little upending is unavoidable when it comes to collecting nectar. Some umbels play host to hordes of tinier beetles, to whom the nectaries must seem as wide as lakes. Chafers chew the flowers with a lazy iridescence. Most handsome of all is Oedemera nobilis, a slim, nattily-dressed metallic green gentleman whose pantaloons are baggy on the back legs. His antennae twitch alternately, tasting the breeze for vibrations.
There are myriad other reasons not to scorn the hogweed. One of them escaped me almost as soon as I saw him: a lean, black longhorned beetle, dressed like an undertaker, who bowed once and took his leave, flying away in an instant with a flick of opened elytra. Perhaps I will see him again on my next visit. Perhaps I shall find some new delight as the flowers turn to seeds. More than likely, some other stranger will emerge over the brink of a lobe-petalled dome as I approach it – and he too will take fright, and his undulating flight will draw me on.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gKjAu…
Of all the plant's common names – Alderdrots, Bear's Breech, Bear Skeiters, Bee's Nest, Beggar-Weed, Broad Kelk, Bullers, Bund-Weed, Bunnert, Cathaw-Blow, Clogweed, Cow-Cakes, Devil's Oatmeal, Eltrot, Gypsy's Lace, Humpy-Scrumples, Kedlock, Kegga, Kiskies, Limpernscrimp, Rabbit's Vittles, Scabby Hands, Snake's Meat, Wippul-Squip, to name a few – the official floras had to choose Hogweed. Its second most common names are Cow Parsnip, or more authentically, Pig's Parsnip, since pigs relish the plant, and most especially its root, which is said to taste of asparagus. Sows are not alone in their appreciation; an entire mini-ecosystem depends upon it for food and shelter. Only a human being would be fool enough to scorn a hogweed.
The hogweed understorey teems with more life than that of a woodland. Purple-mottled spikes of woundwort populate its margins, mingling with the milfoil, their leaves hairy and pungent as burnt rubber. The flowers flare, brazen as orchids, and dance about their stems in rings. Sawflies retire from the heat under the shade of the leaves of buttercups. Brambles unfold their blooms like crinkled paper. White campions and tassel-seeded nettles jostle for space, and in places where the hogweed has not grown, there are temporary campion-forests, wind-shaken and sun-splashed, punctuated with grass-inflorescences. There are red-campions too, and powder-pink hybrids, nodding in the shadows amongst the cleavers. By summer, the cowslips are making seeds, and the campion leaves are mined by caterpillars, safe under skins of epidermis. Bumblebees helmet themselves with the flowers of white archangels, and fly off, pollen-pated.
The leaves of hogweed are broad as umbrellas, casting a shade of delicious coolness. Its stems are tall, hollow and bristled, ridged and stringy as celery, each a pillar supporting a canopy as complex as the fan-vaults of a Decorated cathedral. Denizens of the hogweed underworld live out their minutes in a green half-light, occasionally pierced by snail-searing rays of sun, where some caterpillar has grazed a hole to let them in. Some of these creatures come here only to rest in comparative safety; others, like the snails, spend the whole of their lives here, silently devouring wilting leaves with their rasping mouths, indulging in strange, sado-masochistic love-rites, burying little spherical, gelatinous eggs in the soil, and hibernating deep amongst the lifeless stems throughout the winter. Slaters – crustaceans who have spent millions of years on the edge of an aquatic existence – skulk in the damper places. Flies come down, as if to drink the shade – some dumpy, their legs scrunched underneath them like stunted stilts, others, like the mottle-winged, slow-moving Platystoma, coloured for a crepuscular existence lasting twelve hours every day. She sucks the goodness out of decaying insects. Scorpion-flies skulk in the interstices between layered leaves, folding their magpie-coloured wings, their long beaks giving them parsimonious expressions. Pursued, they slide into the shadows, and reappear elsewhere, unwilling to fly for very long. They, too, thrive on decay. A beetle seems to pant in the coolness, its elytra malformed, the underwings disordered – a parachute badly packed. Its minutes may be numbered, but nothing will wasted under the hogweed. A snout-nosed moth sits slightly askew, its wings etched with tide-marks, like contours on a map, or layers of sedimentary stone. Approach too close, and it abandons pretence, flits awhile, then drops, willy-nilly as a dead leaf, waits and hopes. The ruse will be repeated time and again, until it works.
Hidden dangers lurk in the understorey. Agelena labyrinthica has crafted a white, dew-spangled vortex out of threads drawn from the plump lozenge of her abdomen. She lurks at the nadir of her spun funnel, one leg stretched to assess vibrations in the silk. Let your shadow cross her, and she darts back into her anteroom, but walk away a moment, and hunger will bring her out again. Her crystal castle is strung with hidden snares - lines of silk taut enough to trip a grasshopper's leg. Tiny insects cavort on leaf-surfaces, only inches from the tripwires. A cranefly blunders into one; the six spindly, jointed legs do all they can to become the more entangled.
Travel up the stems to where the umbels advertise gifts of nectar on the wind, and you will find another spider. The filaments of her web are drawn between the stems of hogweed, forming a sheet over an umbel. She hides beneath it, striped forelegs extended. Other dangers walk on only six legs. Malachius bipustulatus has a carapace handsome as malachite, the ends of his tail-coat dipped in orange paint, his protruding bottom ringed with white. He has all the appearance of a dandy, but is a predator at heart: those jaws are a giveaway. Empis tesselata, a fly whose head is almost entirely composed of eyes, will sometimes use that needling beak for sucking nectar, but it is equally well adapted to puncturing chitin. Lesser flies need to be nimble in the company of a plethora of yellow dung flies, who eked out an existence in their larval form by subsisting inside cowpats, but are now interested in higher-protein foodstuffs. Their legs support them like hydraulic jacks as they fastidiously wipe their hands, sustaining themselves on hogweed-nectar whilst they wait for something more savoury to come their way. Chaffinches chatter, and blackbirds spill molten honey from their bills, unaware of this maliciousness in miniscule. Tiny black beetles crawl beneath those great hairy pylons, oblivious in their armour-plating.
Some of the umbels' visitors, drawn by the gratuitous surfeit of nectar, are more-or-less impervious to such perils. Sawflies, like their stinging wasp-cousins, bear warning colours. One sawfly visitor is lean and elongated, black as obsidian, banded with bright yellow, the wings held splayed as she drinks, then closed as she reaches momentary satiation. Her antennae are constantly a-twiddle. Another is orange of abdomen, each joint of her yellow legs knobbled with black; the head, thorax and antennae wasp-black and seemingly dangerous. Her hindlegs caress her wings as she is drinking. Wasps come to the umbels too – some of them a positive threat to spiders – their colours flaring. At times, they hold their wings outwards, and flex their abdomens upwards, as if in nectar-fuelled ecstasy. The amber colours seem to be stitched through them, entering their bodies at the legs, and emerging at the antennae. Other Hymenopterans perform a complex, nectar-tasting dance, pirouetting with their abdomens raised aloft. Ichneumons are graceful little murderers.
The uppermost reaches of the umbel-canopies are the provinces of bees. Little, solitary burrowing bees brave the wind, their legs haired, ready for a burden of pollen. The individual flowers of the hogweed are almost as big as them: white-lobed landing-pads surrounding a fount of nectar. They are determined little customers, hanging grimly onto the umbels when the wind tosses them, plying their trade until their wings turn ragged. Their competitors are honey-bees, sleek and businesslike, and bumble-bees who fly, impossible as winged potatoes partly burnt, borne aloft on sheer bluster. One bee can cause a whole umbel to bend to her weight. Tiny beetles scurry for cover, or drop off the umbel entirely in their panic. Andrena cinerara, in her black and white suit, is dauntless in defending an entire umbel for herself – indeed, she seems to burn up an umbel's worth of nectar-energy in the process of establishing her sovereignty.
Because bees are equipped with stings, the harmless hoverflies imitate them. The umbels attract a number of different species, all sharing the same flowers. Some are as large as honeybees, but bear only two wings. Their abdomens pulse as they gorge themselves on nectar, their semi-flexible proboscises sucking it up systematically from each flower on the umbel-head, like little vacuum-cleaners. Eristalis arbustorum is medium-sized, and no match for a honey-bee. It hops between each dome of flowers with a little burst of buzzing. When tired, it too retires to the understorey, perching nervously on a blade of grass, assessing dangers with its head-engulfing, multifaceted eyes. Even greenbottles, who spend most of their time seeking out carrion and dung, cannot resist the gift of sugar, and other flies come in still more surprising colours. Spotted crane-flies do not drink much, but when they wish to imbibe, the hogweed provides their beverage of choice. Their legs, impossibly twiggy and long, splay haphazardly across the flowers as the crane-flies bend to drink, their tiny feelers twitching with excitement. Each crane-fly has a pair of little club-shaped stabilisers at the base of its thorax. Its wings blow suddenly vertical when the wind catches them.
But most of all, hogweed flowers are homelands for the tribes of beetles. Ladybirds are not built for gainly feeding; their rigid, rotund structures dictate that a little upending is unavoidable when it comes to collecting nectar. Some umbels play host to hordes of tinier beetles, to whom the nectaries must seem as wide as lakes. Chafers chew the flowers with a lazy iridescence. Most handsome of all is Oedemera nobilis, a slim, nattily-dressed metallic green gentleman whose pantaloons are baggy on the back legs. His antennae twitch alternately, tasting the breeze for vibrations.
There are myriad other reasons not to scorn the hogweed. One of them escaped me almost as soon as I saw him: a lean, black longhorned beetle, dressed like an undertaker, who bowed once and took his leave, flying away in an instant with a flick of opened elytra. Perhaps I will see him again on my next visit. Perhaps I shall find some new delight as the flowers turn to seeds. More than likely, some other stranger will emerge over the brink of a lobe-petalled dome as I approach it – and he too will take fright, and his undulating flight will draw me on.
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