December 2017

We seem to have ended the year much as it started – uprooting western hemlock in Snipes Dene, and continuing to rid the Monument bank of rhododendron. Tending a fire in the rain to burn cut rhododendron is one of the great pleasures of being a Gibside Conservation Volunteer but, this time, it was a pleasure denied. Rangers Dan and Ollie got there first, unchallenged. Don’t know how that happened. Maybe they feel it’s their duty to keep us volunteers safe from the dangers of fire. Or it could be a new National Trust health and safety measure – like the one that now requires a fence to be erected around a fire’s dying embers, presumably for the protection of wandering barefoot backwoodsmen. We used to put them out with water.

The Team Hard at Work

Progress being made

Olly Hard at Work

Olly and Dan Keep Warm

Any way, it was a cold and miserable day, so we packed in early. There’s only so much pleasure to be had from sawing through a seemingly endless forest of rhododendron in the rain - especially when you can’t get near the fire.

Christmas Tree

Decorated Trees in Walled Garden

Happy Christmas to all our readers

Thanks to Nicholas Watts MBE for the robin photo

( www.vinehousefarm.co.uk)

Steve Wootten & Phil Coyne

Autumn Hues

Autumn Trees

Autumn brings an end to grass snake surveys for another year. All the corrugated tins have been collected and the “nesting” heaps examined for any evidence of egg laying. Still no signs of the elusive grass snakes, perhaps next year…

The Wednesday conservation team is back and raring to go with various autumnal tasks. So far this season most of our work has involved pruning and thinning out several different tree species. We have removed Western hemlock from Snipes Dene, we’ve thinned out birches both in West Woods and in another part of Snipes Dene.

Glistening inkcaps

Puffballs

The team thinning out birches from around hazel trees

Oak leaves

Pholiota adiposa

Brash piles

Turkeytail (Trametes versicolor)

Bilberry leaves

Cleared area

The first frosty day of the season saw us thinning out birches and conifers to create small glades in an area of Snipes Dene, thus exposing large areas of heather which will look magnificent next year.

Frosty leaves

More autumn colour

This week we were joined by a team of volunteers from the Cragside National Trust Estate. They were really welcome as there was a huge area of rhododendrons to clear, a bit of a busman’s holiday for them. They also brought a chipper so that all the prunings weren’t burnt, some of them were chipped and will be put to good use. The other thing they brought with them was cake, mmm…

Starting a fire

The chipper in action

Puff balls billowing spores

The trees alongside The Avenue

Phil Coyne

A day in the country

20th September 2017

Northumberland is the best of counties, and the Coquet valley one of its finest landscapes. We were in Cragside for the day, lending a hand with raking cut grass from a double stretch of wild flower meadow, and loading it onto tractor-pulled trailers to go off somewhere or other to become compost for the estate gardeners. There were twelve of us Gibside volunteers plus Ranger Dan. There were seven volunteers in the Cragside team plus three rangers one of whom – another Ranger Dan – used to work at Gibside. And that’s the link. The plan is for them to visit Gibside later in the year and return the favour.

Tumbleton Lake

Raking

Steve at work

It is claimed that when inventor and industrialist William Armstrong planted out his huge estate at Cragside, it considerably changed the climate of the nearby village of Rothbury. You can see why. Much of this would have been sheep-grazed open moorland. Mr and Mrs Armstrong – later Lord and Lady – created lakes and craggy gardens, and planted seven million trees. These days the trees are managed by a small team of foresters, and the rest of the wild landscape by the three rangers and their volunteer helpers. At Gibside, woodland and other habitats are all managed as one, which seems a more cohesive approach. But what do we know?

Loading the trailer

Whilst we toiled in the fields, one of the rangers - the female of the species, of course - popped off and returned with lashings of tea and coffee, and heaps of cakes and biscuits. So, there we sat, tired but happy, beside a half-laden hay wagon, overlooking Tumbleton Lake in the pale sunshine of a late summer’s day. Not quite Cider with Rosie, or The Darling Buds of May, but it’ll do.

With enough of us to make light work of a big job, we were done by mid-afternoon. The teams went their various ways, and we bloggers meandered around the estate to pause for a while beside Nellie’s Moss Lake. Autumn had begun to touch the trees: a reminder that the leaves will have started to fall on the Avenue at Gibside, and there’ll be more raking to be done.

2 Views of Nellie's Moss Lake

Amphibious bistort

The Gibside Team

Steve Wootten & Phil Coyne

Gibside Blog August 2017: Some unexpected finds

Terry hunts for small heather clumps

A welcome break

Terry hard at work amongst the heather

We found Terry and Mary under the spreading chestnut tree by the track close to the Hollow Walk. That was as expected. They had been working here for weeks, uncovering and freeing young, planted heather from a blanket of grass and bracken.

We left them to it, and went off to see what could be done to salvage another area of heather in the lower reaches of Snipes Dene. A few years back this area had been harvested of its Forestry Commission conifers and left to regenerate naturally, which it soon did – mainly with birch. But here and there grow patches of heather, and even some bilberry. The bilberry looked well-nibbled by deer, with no sign of flower or fruit; the heather all around was blooming. There is much to be done to keep the heather free of encroaching bracken, birch, raspberry and bramble. A winter’s job, we decided.

Some of the heather at lower end of Snipes Dene

Patch of heather (ling)

Bell heather

Back by the Hollow Walk, Mary guided us on finding the often tiny fronds of heather, and rescuing them. Painstaking work, but we found loads. Other finds included my forty-five year old Swiss Army knife – only lost for five minutes but, as any Swiss Army knife owner will tell you, enough time to induce panic – and a straggly little rose with two strange growths. Initially, we were puzzled by these hairy, red and green pom-poms, the product, it turns out, of the gall wasp (Diplolepis rosae)to house their larvae, and is popularly known as Robin’s Pincushion. Apparently they’re quite common. So much for our observational skills.

Robin's pincushion

Inside the Robin's pincushion - larvae visible

Though we have yet to spot a Gibside grass snake, the corrugated tins we use to attract them frequently provide us with some other interesting finds. Common toads are common, newts less so. In recent weeks we have also uncovered some fine, sculptural, abandoned wasp nests, ants in plenty, a nest of angry common carder bees and, best of all, a nest of minute short-tailed vole babies.

Delicate, paper-thin cell of wasp nest

Wasp and soldier beetle on umbellifer

Common carder bee nest under corrugated tin

Vole pups in nest

Grass snakes, who needs them?

Steve Wootten & Phil Coyne

A people’s garden

July 2017

Not that it’s any of our doing, but Gibside’s walled garden just gets better and better. Over the last few years, the collapsed wall has been expertly bricklayed back into place, the allotments extended, and the flowerbeds and fruit trees nurtured into splendour. Currently there is a sculptural, living willow maze growing on the grassy area previously occupied by washing lines full of beautifully and wittily stitched and appliqued tea towels. Head gardener, Debbie, and her team have transformed the place into a unique, exquisite gem – a people’s garden.

The Amazing Maze

Such an attraction is the walled garden these days that we seem to have permanently lost at least four of our Wednesday conservation volunteers to it. Some had always worked the winter months with the rangers, and gardened through the growing season, but the new, improved garden now gets year-round attention – and it shows.

Walled garden flowers

Another colourful border

Domes

More flowers

Whilst we bloggers spend our summer months seeking out grass snakes and collecting wildlife data, some regular conservation team volunteers take to the lawnmower. There was a time – a period of eight or nine years – when Wednesdays could be relied upon to be fine, sunny days whatever the season, but no more. It’s just as likely to rain on a Wednesday as on any other day of the week – and it does. The grass cutters, though, are still out there come rain… come rain.

John cutting the grass in the rain

You might think that pushing a lawnmower all day to be a tedious, torturous pursuit in any weather, but seemingly not. Apparently it induces relaxation – variously through daydreaming, or a state akin to meditation. Our nature study meanderings are a bit like that as well.

Common centaury

Poppy seed head

Shaggy inkcaps

Soldier beetles and a longhorn beetle on an angelica flower head

Small skipper butterfly

Steve Wootten and Phil Coyne