I opened an old book which was written to teach English to Portuguese speakers.
I found it in a box of books in Brazil over 20 years ago.
This list of phrases evokes so many possible stories , that I leave the construction of the narrative entirely to you.
“Put on your hat.”
Enjoy.
This picture is the underside of a Victoria amazonica leaf that had just been hauled out of the water at the botanic gardens in Basel. It was so huge and so extraordinarily spiny it had to be photographed .
Last night I watched the incomparable Green Planet from the BBC with the similarly unequalled David Attenborough. He showed the aquatic battles for light that go on in clean rivers and wetlands between the plants that float and fight so slowly in this apparently peaceful world . The most memorable Timelapse shots were of the gigantic shoots of the Amazon waterlilly sweeping the water clear of other plants to make space for the titanic unfolding of a new leaf. The leaf was armored with the fiercest dagger spines which I well remember gingerly touching in the sunshine outside of the hot house, as the Basel trams rumbled on by . The spines could crush and pierce anything that got in its way as the leaf covered the water in its metre wide plate of photosynthesising aggression.
Ironic that the flower is seen as symbolizing peaceful serenity.
Shows how little we really know!
This post is for those who would like to trap moths and discover what is flying at night when they are safe in bed. If moths give you the heebie-jeebies then skip this post!
I am sure there are other ways of doing it, with other equipment, but I am just sharing my own experience for those who are curious.
I have been trapping for about 12 years on a regular basis. I had been out with other naturalists many years ago in Wales, but it wasn’t until my husband bought me a trap for a present that I started in earnest.
First thing you need is a moth trap.
https://www.watdon.co.uk/ Watkins and Doncaster provided Charles Darwin with his equipment. They send across the world and they know what they are doing. I recommend their basic plastic bucket trap to start with and two bulbs (in case you smash one!).
All a trap is, is a UV light bulb which attracts the moths, above a plastic funnel. The moths then fall down into the bucket below, where they perch on cardboard egg boxes in safety for the night.
The next morning you switch off the light, open the trap gently and carefully remove each egg box one by one. You then photograph the moths (in case they fly off!) and then try to identify them using a good guide book.
I use British Moths by Chris Manley published by Bloomsbury. I have not found a similar single volume guide for France. I am certain there are excellent guides for where you live. There are also some excellent free on line identification sites. I use https://ukmoths.org.uk/systematic-list/ and also http://montgomeryshiremoths.org.uk/ which is very good for showing what is around at the right time of year.
You make a note of the weather and date and keep a list of what you find in English and or Latin. I tick off all the species that I have confidently identified in my guide book, so that I can find them again more easily. I later send my list and photos to my local naturalist organisation, https://faune-alsace.org so that my records can be compared with others, but you can skip this bit!
That is the bare bones and I am aware that it sounds unutterably dull and nerdy. The reason for doing it is because you get to see the most wonderful creatures with your own eyes, while drinking a cup of tea on the back step of your own home and that takes some beating as a wildlife experience. I have been lucky enough to live in Zambia and to spend months on safari, I have lived in Costa Rica for four years and in Brazil for two and spent as much time as possible in the forests, rivers and oceans, seeing wildlife that most people only see on David Attenborough tv programmes and yet I have never enjoyed wildlife in such comfort, or been so amazed on a daily basis as I have been when moth trapping in my own back garden!
Tips.
2. Start by identifying the ones with clear colours or markings. Leave the dull ones until much later. There is no shame in being confused. If the guide book says the moth that you have spent hours identifying is very rare in your area, then you probably have made a mistake.
3. Keep your moths cool. If it is warm and the trap has been left in the sun before you open it, then they will all fly away before you identify them. Move your trap into the coolest shade you can and let them settle before taking out the boxes. If you do this, you do not need to put them in collecting jars to look at. They will sit happily on the egg box while you admire them.
4. Take a photo on your phone or camera, so you can look back at them and identify them when you have time. This final phase often requires a glass of chilled wine and a sofa!
5. Let the moths fly off when they want to, or shake onto a bush. My cats used to try to eat them, but now treat them with feline disdain.
Enjoy!!
1. UV light and plastic funnel.
2. Box containing old egg boxes and electrical connection.
3. Lead to mains or to a big battery if you want to set up the trap in a remote place.
4. Identification guide.
Our flat in Switzerland was like posh student accommodation. Two very small bed rooms and an open plan room with a lot of glass, but no window sill to rest my plants upon.
I never realised how much I needed walls until I moved to Switzerland. Before that I had taken them for granted, but the Swiss are very modern, love glass and see little need for walls. If you couple this with a very high population density then you have dinning rooms that loom strangely in space, over each other. You can admire each other’s cooking, cutlery and even flatulence at disturbingly close quaters with total strangers. I couldn’t get used to such intimacy and did the same as we did in Brazil, blocked it out with plants.
We bought weeping fig trees that loved the reflected heat of our “ wintergarten” and raced away. In the wonderful Swiss second hand store or “brokie” I found a set of shop shelves, with wheels which I loaded with devils ivy cuttings, filched spider plant babies and some geraniums abandoned at the end of the summer that I fed and costeted. They responded by flourishing and giving us some semblance of verdant privacy.
The flat had no balcony, but it did have a set of concrete steps up to the front door that were ours alone. As soon as our first winter was over, I started to buy plants and to move them outside. I started with yellow primroses from the coop and graduated, as the sun strengthened, to ivy leaved geraniums, that trailed red flowers over each open step. In the wonderful botanical garden I snipped a few modest cuttings of lemon, peppermint and rose scented geraniums, potted them up and nursed them and soon it was almost impossible to get up the step and into the flat for perfumed and coloured plants.
Watering became an obsession, as each plant was in a planter small enough to fit each individual step and one day of sunshine could dessicate the whole pot.
We had been given very precise instructions when we rented the flat about what was allowed and what was “verboten”. Using the washing machine or showering after 10 at night was not allowed; hanging out washing was not allowed and shaking a table cloth out of the window was punishable by death. I was therefore very careful not to irritate my neighbours below by over watering and dripping on their doorstep. However after two years of squeezing more and more plants into our improbably small space, My Swiss neighbour actually volunteered to water my babies when we went away and started to talk to me!
At the top of the steps we put the tiniest BBQ known to man and if we each sat on a different step there was just space for us both to eat a chicken leg and for our cat, Bonkers the Magnificent ( who had survived Zambia, Kazakhstan and six months quarantine in England) to survey his new, peaceful and eminently edible kingdom.
Kaskhstan. All My Gardens Part 8
All my Gardens part 7 : Zambia .
All my Gardens- part 6 : Brazil – humming birds and high rise.
All my Gardens -Part 4: Costa Rica and the big world.
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São Paulo Brazil has about 20 million inhabitants and from my first experience, only one tree.
I could see the tree from my apartment on the fifteenth floor. It was in a school yard a long way down and it was completely dwarfed by the high rises that surrounded it. São Paulo was the most relentlessly urban environment in which I have ever tried to grow a garden and yet a city more in need of green it would be hard to imagine.
When we arrived in our first apartment we stepped over the street children huddled together like puppies under blankets. When I looked out onto the balcony I felt I was falling into the most profound pit I had ever seen, as the earth that should have surrounded the building was being excavated to a terrifying depth, to build the sky scraper next door.
We didn’t stay long.
There were a few more trees near the next apartment we lived in, but they too were dwarfed into insignificance by the dimensions of the buildings.
From this second balcony I hung ferns in baskets and tried my best to make a wall of green with ficus trees, crotons and butterfly palms. Bigonias are native to Brazil and an assortment of types gave colour and leaf shapes to my attempt to block out the view of the city.
Wildlife is more tenacious than we think however, and a feeder soon attracted a spectacular swallow tailed blue humming bird that had swapped a life sipping nectar from blossoms in the topical forest for a city life drinking sugar water from a plastic feeder. The blue grey taneger we had first met eating chilies in our Costa Rican garden appeared again in Brazil on this high rise balcony and even built a nest, as delicate as a wren’s, in an old plant pot. She even laid eggs, but three days of colossal thunderstorms sent apocalyptic lightening and biblical rain across the city and somewhere in the storm she was lost and her eggs were never hatched.
(I found her photo in an old scrap book)
In our local bar, where we sat at pavement tables shouting above the roar of the traffic, fruit bats picked ripe fruits from the few road side trees. They must have been able to smell when the fruit was ripe and the bats appeared in their hundreds for a few day only hanging clustered like ghouls with their large intelligent canine faces, observing us drinking cold beer far below.
On the edge of Sao Paulo is a wonderful place called Pedra Grande. Before the city grew into the chaotic megalopolis that it is today, an enlighten city father decided to protect the city’s watershed. In order to do this a very large chunk of Atlantic forest around a rock outcrop was spared the axe and to this day Paulistas can walk amongst the real tropical sky scrapers of giant trees and delight in three toed sloths, howler monkeys and magnificent toucans only a short drive from down town. This remnant of paradise was our salvation and we spent each weekend there buried in the deep green and the brilliant colours that make up a tropical forest.
To climb to the top of Pedra Grande is to understand the true shape of the world.
The walker emerges from the shade of the thick forest, scrambles onto the smooth granite boulders and the conurbation of 20 million souls erupts into view. The tens of thousands of sky scrapers bristle up into the smog hazed sky and then slope away into infinity, as the curvature of the planet is revealed in this awful, breathtaking monument to the human ability multiply and to build.
No balcony garden anywhere could compensate for that knowledge.
All my Gardens-Part5 England and almonds.
All my Gardens -Part 4: Costa Rica and the big world.
All my Gardens – part 3: Wild Wales.
All my Gardens: part 2 Garsington Manor and beyond.
In Cold Time (All my gardens :part 1)
Cathy's real country garden 
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