urban nature – Peter Coles

Morus Londinium mulberry blogs by Peter Coles and friends

New series of mulberry tree walks

*Leaning black mulberries in Fountain Court planted for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897*

From the end of June through July I’ll be leading weekly walks, using London’s mulberry trees as waypoints to discover the capital’s hidden past. From Roman bathhouses and Thameside wharves to King James I’s silk project; from Chelsea’s fascinating veteran mulberry heritage to the City’s Monasteries and Inns of Temple …

More information and bookings:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/cc/mulberry-heritage-walks-553939

Stalking the Hardy Ash

I will be leading a photography walk as part of London Tree Week on 29 May, to see the extraordinary Hardy Ash in St Pancras Old Church yard. 150 years ago, the novelist and poet Thomas Hardy was working as an architect’s technician, supervising the removal of gravestones to allow the London and Midlands Railway to come into the new St Pancras station. The gravestones were stacked up around the trunk of the then young tree, and have since become part of its structure.

The walk is being organised by the Museum of Walking (started by Andrew Stuck), with support from the Mayor of London.

Stalking the Hardy Ash

They’re back again

Four swifts screeching and scything through the blue sky over the back gardens of West Hampstead. They’ve come back exactly to the day (see post last year (https://petecoles.me/2013/06/04/theyre-back/). And it was on a 15 May that Ted Hughes published his poem “Swifts”. Curious precision. And at least there are still four of them, as numbers had been decreasing each year.

Green mist

That time of Spring has come, when the bare Winter bones of twigs and branches in the woods are clothed in a thin green mist, as buds open into the most fragile and greenest-of-green new leaves. In a month the whole woodland will have changed and it will no longer be possible to see far.