The Shell Grotto in Pontypool Park


How about this for a truly amazing room. This little cavern is the Shell Grotto in Pontypool Park, found high on the hills above the town. It was built in 1784 and then the interior was decorated with thousands of sea shells as well as bones & teeth from the deer that roamed the park, during the early nineteenth century. The views from the top of the hill of the highly industrialised valleys below must have changed out of all recoginition over the last 200 years.
It's opened most weekends throughout the summer - you'll love it. Oh, & by the way, when you look on Google maps for it don't be put off by Google's ikon for the site - a petrol pump! Shell Grotto not Garage oh Google goons.

The Cowarne Court Oak – a great lost tree of Herefordshire

Several years ago I was looking into the whereabouts of some of Herefordshire’s big trees and turned to the history books. The Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club, established in 1851, brought together the county’s botanists, ornithologists, palaeontologists, mycologists, et al; all of whom loved nothing better than getting together and rambling hither and yon across the county and its immediate neighbours. As they rambled they took copious notes so that accounts of their treks could be recorded in the Society’s journals. As you’d expect with lengthy Victorian diatribes, much of the written legacy is pretty turgid, and some of the opinions can be oddball or simply inaccurate in the light of our knowledge today. However, they did make valuable records of plants, which 150 years on have long disappeared from our countryside. During the 1860s and 70s they also took the time and trouble to make very detailed records of Herefordshire’s remarkable trees.
Trees were always carefully measured and a description of the trees character and health set down. Some trees were illustrated with wood engravings interpreted from members’ sketches while later on the firm of Ladmore & Son were commissioned to take photographs – the actual albumen prints later being tipped into the yearbooks (must have been incredibly fiddly and time consuming process). As often as not a couple of top-hatted club members pose beneath some mighty tree or a little knot of local folk lounge decorously about the base of the bole to bring a sense of scale.
The more I studied the books the more compelled I was to see how many of these trees were still with us. Obviously the humungous King’s Acre Elm, on the Brecon Road out of Hereford, which stood 95’ high & had a girth of almost 19’, is long gone, but I thought there could be fair a chance that the yews and some of the oaks could still be intact.
Perhaps the closest tree to where I live was the Cowarne Court Oak, near Much Cowarne. The old house of Cowarne Court is long gone, and the site where it once stood is little more than a sad tangle of neglected woodland, but I wondered if the oak tree had managed to survive. Since this is now private land I had to ask permission, but the local farmer reckoned that the tree had fallen and that its remains currently lay in a ditch not far from a rather dilapidated medieval dovecote.
I walked down the field margin until I came across the sad spectre of the great old tree lying, half hidden by undergrowth in said ditch. It’s always a bit sobering to find a once stupendous tree which, judging by its recorded girth of over 37’ in 1870, must have been at least 800 years old now reduced to a pile of rotting timber. Okay, so it will be brilliant habitat for invertebrates – all part of its place in the great cycle of life, but as I searched about for some small relic of this departing monster I kicked over this strange shard and, the more I looked at it, I began to see something quite strange. See what you make of it!

Grow your own baby English elm tree

Out in the garden this morning tracking all the potted stuff that might have been drying out a bit in these recent hot, sunny days we've been having.
More than ten years ago we pulled a little sucker shoot from our English elm hedgerow (yes, there is a lot of English elm in our local hedges - but that's another story) and stuck it hopefully in a pot. Happily, it carried on growing, but within the tight confines of the pot its progress was slow. Without really meaning to do it we were creating our very own bonsai elm tree. Every couple of years we've trimmed it back a little, so that we now have a beautiful mini coppice stool which bears tiny elm leaves perfectly to scale with the tree.
We may not see splendid mature English elms in all but a few tiny pockets of the British landscape these days, but this appears to be one way of keeping the spirit of the tree alive and well. As long as this elm remains diminutive it's hardly likely to be clobbered by Dutch elm disease.
The big thing to remember though is that anything in pots needs regular watering to get through long hot dry spells in summer & also be very careful not to splosh water on the tiny delicate leaves as they seem to 'burn' quite easily.