Countryside Notes – Oct 2024

October 9, 2024

In 1917, Max Weber, sociologist and philosopher, named “disenchantment” as the distinctive “injury of modernity”. You would think he might be referring to a disenchantment or melancholy one might feel at the news of the use of chlorine gas in the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915, or even the deployment of tanks, en masse, for the first time, at the Battle of Cambrai in 1917. No. His “injury of modernity” he defined as “the knowledge or belief that there are no mysterious or incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation.” For Weber, not necessarily knowing, but perceiving, feeling, and wondering was the hallmark of enchantment. Do you believe in fairies, children?

And so four quotations that might enchant, as we tip into our Autumn:

There is something so special in the early leaves drifting from the trees, as if we are all to be allowed a chance to peel, to refresh, to start again

“The first breath of autumn was in the air, a prodigal feeling, a feeling of wanting, taking, and keeping, before it is too late.” (J.L. Carr)

“Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.” (George Eliot)

“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.” (Albert Camus)

Long associated with fun and happiness, growing ivy up the walls of your house is said to bring good fortune. Ivy covered poles or “ale stakes”, were raised outside inns to show good wine & ale could be found within. And to dream of your future bride, a man must place an ivy leaf under his pillow on 31st October. Presumably snatched from the ale-stake garland upon leaving the pub!

As you will know, ivy flowers are an important source of late nectar for bees and hoverflies. And I have learned that there are some 30 species of UK hoverflies that rely on ivy nectar, such as the common Batman hoverfly, which has the superhero’s logo plain on the top of his thorax (middle section, anchoring the legs and wings), and the Noon fly, about 1cm long, black and hairy with big eyes, which can pass for a big housefly except for the telltale orange patch at the base of their wings. It will often bask in the October sun around midday. And then, the Hornet hoverfly, obviously masquerading as a Hornet but with larger eyes, at 2cm long, is the largest of our hoverflies. Another helpful differentiator, I read, from the European hornet was that this hoverfly has no sting. I wondered at what point, exactly, as you are being mobbed by a Hornet hoverfly, would you stop and exclaim, “Oh, cease panicking everyone. This is a harmless imposter. For, see, it has no sting.”

The winter will bring us all a remission from many irritating insects, whether Hornet or Wasp or the ubiquitous Housefly invading our homes, but as Melissa Harrison notes, “no sooner have (the Houseflies)… left the stage, than their understudy appears in the form of the Cluster fly, which looks like a house fly but moves much more slowly and ponderously”. They have short golden hairs on their thorax and pale and dark patches, like an irregular chessboard, on their abdomen. Also known as the Attic fly or the Grass fly, the life cycle of the Cluster fly is really rather grim… and short. In the summer, they will fly to your lawn and lay their eggs in cracks in the soil. Within three days, these hatch and the larvae (the maggot) will creep around until it latches on to an earthworm. They burrow into the earthworm and feed off it for several days until they are ready to pupate. They will then leave the worm and sit in the soil until they are ready to emerge. There can be four generations in a summer and on a warm day, you can see their swarm clustered on the side of a building basking in the sunlight. If they have invaded your home (usually, the attic), then you will know how difficult they are to remove permanently, as it seems that next year’s generations will hone in on the chemical trail left by previous generations.

My diary says that on 1st October last year, there were Wild snapdragons (Linaria vulgaris) also known as Butter and eggs, Common toadflax or Flaxweed, flowering along Ashwell Street. They have yellow/cream flowers, which, as with your garden Snapdragons, children will want to pluck and squeeze the sides to make the flower “talk”. And the leaves, arranged in spirals, but steeped in hot water seem to cure almost all ills, is apparently a laxative and diuretic, and also cures jaundice, piles and enteritis!

The Wild or Dog rose’s hips or haws are also standing out in the hedgerows by now. Oranges were an early casualty in World War 2 and the Ministry of Food turned to our schoolchildren to collect Rose hips. By 1945, 450 tons or so of Rose hips were gathered in the autumn, to make into a syrup by Delrosa. This was rationed and provided to mothers because it had been discovered, only in 1930s, that Rose hips had thirty times more vitamin C than imported oranges as well as vitamins A, B & K also.

You will notice beech leaves turning bronze, and yet with green patches still on the leaves. There are caterpillars of the moths Stigmella titirella and Stigmella hema girella, which burrow away inside the leaf, and inside these caterpillars is a bacteria which causes the caterpillar to release a hormone in its spit, that delays the process of senescence (my word of the month: the process of deteriorating through age) on patches of the leaf which stops it turning brown or bronze.

And the Hunter’s Moon, another Supermoon, will rise after sunset on 17^th October.

Perry Littleboy