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Not quite as good as a walk in the woods, but the next best thing! Relax and read about what’s happening on the land where Alcemi Essences are made - observations and information about the natural life of the woodlands and their surroundings as they progress through the seasons.
We can learn a lot from nature. Apart from traditional wisdom accumulated over centuries of close contact with the natural world, there is the modern approach of biomimicry, which copies features from nature to improve inventions and innovations. Alcemi Essences are a range of organic flower essences created from nature to inspire you - click here to view the range. Here we'd like to share some of the natural environment that inspires us. This page is updated approximately every six weeks.
Notes up to 8th February 2008
The annual orgy has begun on the wildlife pond, a couple of weeks earlier than last year. We created the pond a few years ago as an extra wildlife amenity. Fed by natural run off water from a field it has been fascinating to see how quickly the pond was discovered and colonized by many different creatures. All the frogs in the area seem to be making their way there now. For hours every night it sounds like a very large tiger purring (so I imagine) or an engine left running. A torch beam shone over the pond will pick out hundreds of white throat patches and beady eyes of the frogs bobbing on the surface.
Soon the pond will be more like a large jelly with a mass of frogspawn, quivering as it hatches into writhing masses of black tadpoles. Of course most of these tadpoles will never survive to become frogs, or we would soon be completely overrun. Cannibalism keeps the population in check. One tadpole will swallow another almost the same size, and is a gruesome sight to see. Then there are predators of all kinds. Herons will be keeping a watchful eye on the pond, while under the water the fierce great diving beetle and its larvae will attack anything that moves. Apparently this can include frogs as well as tadpoles, even though the frogs are much bigger than the beetle!
The great diving beetle will have found our pond by moonlight - they fly by night to locate new territory by looking for reflections on water. Well equipped to dive with their smooth shape and air supply stored under their wings, they have probably being active throughout this mild winter. Will the deluge of rain we have experienced over the past few weeks, the land is quite saturated, so the frogs should find it really easy to make their way to the pond this year.
Last year we had snow at the beginning of February, this year has so far been unseasonably warm. Snowdrops are in flower. Small and pale, they might be unremarkable if they were summer flowers, but as the first flowers of the year snowdrops are looked for eagerly and are always a joy to see. Snowdrops belong to January and February, but other flowers have been confused by the mild winter. Some primroses have been flowering on and off since November.
The trees are still mostly dormant sleeping with their sap sunk and their branches bare, except the hazel. Here and there a few hazels started unfurling their catkins at the tail end of January. On most of the hazel trees leaf buds are noticeably swelling, and over the next few weeks the catkin pioneers will be followed by the rest in displaying their yellow catkins.
Although the trees, with the exception of holly, are just leafless skeletons, there is still plenty of green in the woods, including some of the honeysuckles which are already in leaf. This is the time of year when the mosses carpeting the woodland floor come into their own. Many are now a bright, almost iridescent lime green. This year the mosses are particularly luxuriant, plumped up by the surfeit of rain.
Mosses thrive on moisture, and a film of water is essential for fertilization to take place. Instead of flowers, mosses reproduce in two distinct stages. After fertilization, a tiny new plant, the sporophyte develops. Simple in structure, it exists purely for the production of spore which it sheds to be spread on the wind. Where the spore lands it germinates and grows into new plants, and so any available suitable surface in our woods is soon colonized. There are apparently around a thousand species of mosses and liverworts in / Britain , and a large proportion of these occur in Wales . Like a miniature forest on the scale of Lilliput, they come in a bewildering variety of shapes - which I’m still learning how to distinguish, and that feels like a giant challenge!
Alcemi Essences are a range of organic flower essences inspired by nature and created from the flowers of native British trees thriving in their natural environment. The essences are made in a beautiful unspoilt location in the Brecon Beacons National Park.
View the Alcemi range with information about each of the essences
Read about Alcemi Essences or more about How Alcemi is Created in this special environment
For articles linking the seasons with the creative cycle of success visit Seasons of Success
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