The king of our garden is a cock blackbird. There he is now, making a royal proclamation from the top of our Scots pine. Perched up on high, he can look out for cats and magpies or his rivals trying to muscle-in from the surrounding gardens. He's a bravado songster and his rich, flutey song bounces back from the brickwork of our house. He is the bee's knees of blackbirds and he seems to know it.
We planted the pine tree over twenty years ago when it was waist high and now it is as high as the roof of our house. Why a Scot's pine? Like most of our plantings it's all about associations. We removed a
Eucalyptus that had no association for us because neither of us had been to Australia, but pine trees remind us of walks among the "granny-pines" in Scotland, or the coastal woods of Maine, Washington State, North Norfolk and many other places. The smell is part of the magic, and there's the crunchy carpet of fallen leaves and cones that drop to the ground every year. In my mind's eye I can see a pine marten, a raccoon, or even a bear up my tree but, being a native tree in its own land, my tree only attracts native wildlife including some birds and many insects that did not visit us before the tree arrived.
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| Holly blue visiting the male flowers. |
Badger-striped coal tits dash in and out to glean insects and the seeds of cones while gold-crests and long-tailed tits hunt for spiders among the needles where a sparrow-hawk sometimes sits to pluck his prey. The list of new insects to the garden is impressive, including bugs, flies and moths that, through sheer ignorance, I can't put a name to.
My blackbird has moved his perch to the tv arial on our chimney and I have a chance to look at the tree more closely. It is May and the lower branches are decked with two-inch yellow "candles" that are the male flowers. When a wood-pigeon clumps down on a branch a cloud of yellow pollen floats up. Pines evolved early in time before most flowering plants and many insects had appeared so, like ferns, they rely on the wind for pollination. There is so much of it this year that the puddles on my patio are encircled by a tide-line of greenish yellow dust. The female flowers are on the ends of the branches, the reddish tips looking like something from a coral reef, waving small tentacles to catch plankton, only in this case the target is pollen.
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| Bluebottle. |
Those female flowers will become next year's green cones. Last year's crop is still green, clasping tightly to the branches between the needles. Older cones are brown. Some completed their role and shed they seed last year while others are still closed. As the sun warms them, around noon, I can hear ticks and crackles as some of the cones open out, sending a miniature shower of small spinning seeds earthwards, each one landing in a different spot due to the angle of their single wing.
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| Male flowers. |
I have spent a spellbinding hour with my pine-tree and I know I will spend many more with this tree and others, perhaps stroking the rust coloured bark or looking among the roots for fungi or perhaps a giant wood-ants nest.
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| The male flower. |
At Paxton Pits Nature Reserve there are only two straggly Scots pines hiding away among poplars. The "Christmas Trees" at Wray House are a mixture of fir and spruce trees. They still manage to attract goldcrests and lots of insects but we have planted three Scots pines to replace them when the inevitable happens. Perhaps one day those pines will be home to a family of buzzards, hobbies or just a familiar singing blackbird.
