Tag: nature

  • Millions of years of secret lives

    In the forest which surrounds our little house amid the rolling ranges, are reminders that time truly is an ever rolling stream. 

    The plants and creatures here are older by millions of years than those in Europe which had to recover from the Ice Age 10 million years ago.

    Here in this remote country, New Zealand split off from the ancient continent of Gondwana between 80 and 85 million years ago, and some flora and fauna here date back 250 million years.

    So when I walk in our forest, I’m conscious I’m in touch with life forms that have survived since primeval times in this isolated place, and what recent arrivals on this planet my species and I are..

    Mankind didn’t  arrive on these islands until around 1000 years ago. They found it inhabited by peculiar flightless birds, giant invertebrates, and plants – some having survived more or less unchanged since Gondwanan times. These unique trusting creatures which had never seen human beings before were easily hunted to extinction.

    Roughly 64 endemic species—including at least 51 birds, 3 frogs, 3 lizards, a freshwater fish, and a bat—died out thanks to hunting, and introduced animals like pigs and goats, possums and rabbits..

    The amazing giant bird, the moa, disappeared in two hundred years, and then the Haast’s eagle, known as ‘the biggest, baddest, most magnificent eagle ever to have existed in the world’ died out as it had fed on the moa.

    So sadly, these once isolated islands are now part of the 6th Mass Extinction, in which scientists warn that by 2050, up to 30% to 50% of all Earth’s plant and animal species could face extinction due to climate change, habitat loss, and human activity.

    The forest appears empty, apart from the birds, compared with European woods and forest alive with squirrels and rabbits, foxes and deer, and so many other fascinating creatures, there are no indigenous mammals here except bats, but we host other primeval treasures.

     And we wage a constant battle against the animals introduced by man in the last thousand years, as they eat these native creatures and destroy their habitats.

    So we treasure rare species like our frogs, the Archey’s frogs whose ancient evolutionary lineage stretches back roughly 150 to 200 million years, making them living fossils that coexisted with dinosaurs.. They are only found these days in our forest and two other places in New Zealand. 

    These tiny delicious creatures, only an inch and a half, live on land and their minute tadpoles hatch on their father’s back, and live there until they are old enough to cope on their own. The froglets often stay with their dad for several years, and they can live up to forty years. One night I saw one the size of a fingernail.

    Their cousins the Hochstetter’s frogs, also ancient and endangered, live here too, and they both are our pride and joy, as is the butterfly extinct in the rest of the world, and only found in our forest – Helm’s butterfly, the forest ringlet, so rare and special that scientists come here to study it, even some of David Attrenborough’s researchers.

    And then there are our lizards, known as striped geckos. They are described as ‘rare and stealthy reptiles’. They were first discovered in the 1990s when one turned up in a home nearby.. Now we have teams of scientists turning up here to discover and map these beautiful little creatures hiding in the ferns and trees..

    But besides these rare species, I’m conscious as I walk in the forest that there are others, just as precious, but so plentiful that we take them for granted. There are 170 different sorts of worms in this country, including the beautiful glow worms…  I’ve learned that they, like all other living beings, have their own secret life, communicating with each other through touch and taste and ground vibrations. Being hermaphrodites, after they have mated they can both produce offspring.

    We all know now how vital their lives are to the health of the soil, and that modern farming methods, fertilisers etc, are death to these invaluable forms of life – which are also food for many birds and reptiles.  As long ago as 1881 Charles Darwin wrote: “It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organized creatures.”

    I used to think that spiders were just a nuisance, but have now discovered that they have a massive and vital use in nature. They act as Earth’s natural pest control by eating billions of insects like flies, mosquitoes, and crop-destroying bugs, keeping the balance of the ecosystem. Their exquisite webs are their form of communication, which they can read, knowing what fly or other insect is invading their web, and spinning and retracting and   playing its strands like a guitar.

    The amazing NZ snails are cherished too, there are over a thousand different species in this country, and after learning how intelligent and maternal they are from Elizabeth Tova Bailey’s wonderful book, ‘The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating,’ and reading about dozens of French snails lifting the lid of a basket taking them to market in a concerted effort and scattering, I have a great fondness for them. I’ve watched two snails crawl up the water bowl in my garden, and drink together, and then crawl back  out and away, and I’ve read of a snail making his way over a garden wall and finding more food in that  garden, and coming back to bring his wilting companion to a better place. Snails are more than petunia devouring pests !

    We also have a very long centipede with a painful bite – not my favourite life form, but I was fascinated to discover that their  pairs of legs are a different length so they don’t trip themselves up!

    Birds, butterflies, moths and bees, so many forms of life which we so often take for granted, but when their lives are decoded, turn out to have intelligent, intricate rituals and systems which support not only them, but the planet.

    Insects, which are fast disappearing, are the tiny workers that keep nature alive. They pollinate three-quarters of our food crops, feed countless birds and fish, and clean up dead waste to enrich the soil. It’s estimated that without them, our global food and natural systems would completely break down.  Yet the total extinction rates for insects are happening up to eight times faster than for mammals, birds, or reptiles.

    It turns out that our world could not exist without them, and since they lived for aeons before we latecomers trampled across the planet, they could probably manage without us for many aeons, world without end.

    So I try to tread softly in this forest among its ancient creatures, and marvel at the silent secret lives of the senior partners in our life here. While I grapple with technology and use electricity, gas, oil and other resources of the earth,  invisible primeval lives continue to support the planet as they have done for more millions of years than I can imagine. 

    Food for Threadbare Gourmets

    When I’m really up against it for time or energy, there’s nothing like that packet of pasta and tin of tomatoes always lined up in the pantry. My favourite pasta is angel hair and my husband loves macaroni, so I do both, it’s so easy.

    Thanks to Nigella Lawson, I no longer bother with boiling water, but just use cold water, and cook until the pasta is done.

    With long pasta like angel hair ( capellini) I use a big frying pan and plonk the strands in the cold water with some salt.

    The tin of tomatoes is embellished with garlic and chopped onion ( cooked for five minutes in the microwave) and a big dollop of butter, maybe a slurp of soy sauce for the umami flavour. Gently simmer for ten minutes or so, and tip over the drained pasta. Freshly grated parmesan is a must…I sometimes stir some cream into the tomatoes too.

    Food for Thought

    We say ‘I have done nothing today.’ What! have you not lived? That is not only the fundamental, but the most noble of your occupations.” 

    French philosopher Michel Montaigne

  • The House in the Forest

    The house in the middle of the forest, among the endless ranges stretching as far as the eye can see in the picture above, is ours.

    There are a few neighbours hidden around us in the thick canopy.

    We’ve lived here for almost eleven years now, since my husband left his far off home to join me in this remote little country of just over five million people. I was in my late seventies, he in his sixties.

    It was a leap of faith for us both, and since we had no money between us after leaving our previous lives, a tough start.

    He had left his ranch, and I left my beautiful clifftop cottage in a little fishing village.

    He found this place on the internet – a tiny wooden cabin surrounded by trees, gazing across to an amphitheatre of hills and forest.

    We joke that we own a quarter of a mountain.

    We used to gaze at the ad on the website every night for a year before he arrived on these shores, causing the estate agent to believe that there was massive interest in this remote cabin with no running water, no electricity, and no amenities.

    The forest is hidden from the winding dirt road with 298 hairpin bends by huge wrought iron gates, and is a protected area, so that it cannot be spoiled, developed or changed in any way..

    The dirt road, we discovered, was notorious for its difficulty, danger and beauty. The river which runs alongside it far below has its source on our forty acres of land.

    When my husband- to- be landed in this country, we packed up my beautiful possessions, walls of books, French antiques, china, lamps, pictures and rugs, in two 20foot containers, and arrived here on a sunny day just before Christmas. One loving friend had given us a Christmas wreath to hang on the door, and a tree one foot high equipped with tiny Christmas lights. I brought a stock of beeswax candles to light the cabin at night.

    We’d packed the bed last in the crammed container, along with candle sticks, a French mirror, a small table and lace tablecloth, and when I’d scrubbed and cleaned the inside of the cabin, we installed the bed, made it up with beautiful linen sheets and French counterpane, hung the mirror above the bed, arranged the tall candlesticks on the table under the window, and felt we had a home !

     Also to hand was a tiny gas camp stove, a frying pan and some plates and cutlery, and I cooked all our meals on a picnic table at the side of the house. It didn’t rain at all for the first few weeks, and we were able to unpack one container into a hastily erected garden pavilion so we could turn the now empty container into a minuscule kitchen and sitting room. We had bought a ranch slider from a demolition yard in a town an hour and a half away, carried home on top of the car, and installed at the end.

    Undeterred by our primitive conditions I persuaded my helpful new partner to hang up a big gilt Victorian mirror and several very large pictures in antique gold frames, we unpacked several bookcases and books to line the rest of the walls with books,

     furnished it with a sofa and two antique French armchairs, an oriental rug, and screened it from the kitchen with a weathered old grey French shutter.

    When our neighbours came to call, they were enchanted – one called it ‘petit Versailles’, another brought her mahjong group for afternoon tea to view it, and another, his daughter and then his sister out from England to view this extraordinary ‘room’ in the

     middle of the forest.

    Our neighbours were a fascinating group of people drawn here by the environment and the opportunity to help preserve both the trees, as well as some of the rare and endangered species which dwell here.

    Among the twenty so, are a well known architect, and a professor of aeronautics, who when he retired, went back to University to obtain a degree in zoology, and is now one of the foremost authorities on lepidoptera ( moths and butterflies ) in the country. He has discovered over three hundred new species of moth on the estate in the last ten years. 

    Our nearest neighbour is a Dutch cello player, and further away lives one of the country’s most renowned landscape architects and botanist wife, while further up the road, is a Dutch restaurateur and his artist wife. Nearby are a couple, one of whom is Swiss, who run a bungee jumping company in various parts of the world, an engineer, who’d retired from running African gold mines, and his Russian wife, and other fascinating characters.

    My husband is one of these fascinating characters, having started life in the US Navy as a highly trained nuclear specialist in a nuclear submarine, and when he left Hawaii to join me, was working at a famous observatory on top of one of the highest mountains in the world. He’s not only creative, designing and building our house, using a skateboard to create a sliding door and other ingenious devices, making concrete spheres and series of waterfalls for the garden and creating a thirty foot tree of lights at Christmas,  but he’s also the best informed person I’ve ever met, whether we’re talking about space and the stars, or how the body works, or the waves behave, or the theory of magnetism, gravity or Hadley Cells, or Leonardo da Vinci.

    We don’t have a television – instead every night after supper, we read to each other, a ritual we wouldn’t miss. 

    So we live in a world within a world, making expeditions down the long winding road to the nearest town for supplies, which include all the wood, doors and windows, which have been transported up the mountain to build our house on the sturdy roof rack of our loyal station wagon.

    My husband has built the house around us and as the years have gone by we have lived in warmth and comfort and beauty.

     I’ve planted a garden, and learned what flowers and plants the roaming bands of quail will spare when foraging for their salad course. 

    So this is the story of our adventure – the story of the forest and fauna and its rare and precious creatures is yet to be told.

    Food for Threadbare Gourmets

    Apple tart was a staple of our diet, growing up, nearly always eaten after Sunday lunch of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.

    But these days I can’t be doing with all the faffing of pie-making and instead make a quick, easy French galette.

    While the oven is heating to 200 degrees, I grease a flat oven proof dish, and place in it a sheet of frozen sweet shortcrust pastry to melt.

    Three or four eating apples, peeled and thinly sliced, are fried in butter. By the time they’re ready, the pastry has sunk into the dish and the apples are then piled in the middle. Then sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon, fold the corners of the pastry over the apple, making a square… sprinkle with more sugar and cook for roughly thirty minutes.

    Leaves apple tart for dead !

    Food for Thought

    We will be held accountable for all the permitted pleasures we failed to enjoy .

    Hebrew Haggada

  • Beauty that connects

    My Beautiful Things was the name of a blog I followed back before The Horrible Hacker hijacked and ruined my own blog.

    My Beautiful Things was produced by a blonde beautiful retired ex-teacher living in Truro, Cornwall. Produced, not written, because it was a picture of a beautiful thing, object, view, bird, flower, gargoyle on a wall, a delicious plate of goodies,  or whatever else she had noticed that day. And every day, year in, year out, Sally showed us three beautiful things.

    Some would have called this mindfulness, I felt it was noticing – and wondered if perhaps these are the same thing anyway.

    Noticing means being present, which is what mindfulness is supposed to be about in Buddhist terms. It’s supposed to keep you anchored in the present, focusing entirely on the here and now instead of dwelling on the past or future.

    It’s also about non-judgment: observing thoughts and feelings as they pass without labeling them as good or bad.

    Noticing and being present isn’t just a passive thing.  When my daughter was driving along a busy road, she ‘noticed’ a man on crutches trying to make it across the road. So she stopped the car, and let the traffic bank up behind her, while she got out and helped him across the road. So being present – noticing – can enhance the life of others as well as our own.

    I was interested when a neighbour suffering chronic pain was sent to the Pain Clinic, and one of the things they suggested was mindfulness to improve her life.

    Yet no-one mentions there is also a downside to mindfulnes, or noticing. It makes you more aware, and sensitises you, and there’s no going back.

    There is the pain of seeing anguish in a white-faced toddler’s eyes as she is dragged along the pavement by a seemingly uncaring adult, the sadness of seeing a horse or other creature alone and depressed in a field in solitary confinement with no companion, even of noticing that new neighbours have moved in and are chopping down an ancient tree. (In a state of sensitivity all life matters, including the life of trees.)

    In an article on how claiming to have a mental problem like ADHD or anxiety is becoming almost fashionable, the psychiatrist said people have to accept that life can be awful sometimes.

    And this is where the non-judgement aspect of mindfulness comes in, I suppose, when somehow we invoke non-judgement and just  observe. But it’s hard.

    For me, it means  falling back on the ‘small happinesses’ – not just a huge NZ Kereru or wood pigeon drinking from the bird bath, or making the perfect poached egg, but beautiful moments of human contact and connection.

    A few days ago I was at the rubbish tip, browsing through the re-cycle/re-use shop, while my husband looked for treasures, and hearing the sound of birds I went outside. I stood there marvelling at the hillside opposite where a glade of pink cherry trees was in full bloom. They were alive with gleaming black and turquoise tuis, NZ songbirds, thrusting their long orange beaks into the flowers to suck the nectar, and as they did so, they sang and cooed exultantly .

    As I stood enraptured the lady from the shop came and stood by my side, and we stood in silence. Then we looked at each other, and she murmured, “beautiful, isn’t it?”, and we shared a moment of deep connection so beautiful it stayed with me all day.

    Mindfulness combined with connection is the glory of being human.

    In his classic book about the seashore, Henry Beston described connection. He wrote of the day a ship was being wrecked in tumultuous seas too dangerous and difficult for rescuers to reach the crew.

    All day long the local folk paced the sands, desperate to find a way to reach the men clinging to the wreck, barely visible through the mountainous waves.

    When night came, they felt they could not just go home and abandon the men in peril on the sea. They built huge bonfires and kept them flaming all night to tell the desperate men they were there for them. And when daylight came and the sea ebbed, and a few survivors made it to shore, they said what it had meant to them to know that there were people there, being with them, connected across the black night and thundering waves.

    Which has taken me a long way from Sally’s three beautiful things, except that this story of people and peril is beautiful, and fills the spirit with the same awe as a beautiful thing. 

    Food for Threadbare Gourmets

    I’m always looking for shortcuts and the days when I was happy to sit with a wooden spoon and beat egg yolks with olive oil and garlic for a delicious aioli are long gone. The other day I discovered the perfect compromise. Since my daughter introduced me to the Japanese mayonnaise, Kewpie, I find it indispensable.

    In this case, I decided to try using it for aioli. By beating in extra virgin olive oil and crushed garlic, I found a very reasonable substitute for the purist version.

    I also use Kewpie to make Eggs Benedict instead of labouring over a hollandaise sauce, and that works too. Enjoy!

    Food for Thought

    ” When you arise in the morning, think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love…

    Marcus Aurelius. Meditations