NATURE NOTES
Have you ever experienced one of those unique, magical moments, of seeing or doing something that has never happened before? The hairs rise up on the back of your neck! Thirty or so years ago, on the top of a local coal mine slag heap, I was looking for fossils among the lumps of stone and shale that had come from hundreds of feet down in the ground. Picking up a flat, oval stone about 4 cm across, I noticed a crack along its circumference. As I handled the stone, it fell apart into two halves – and what an exciting scene caught my eye! The perfect imprint of a fern, which had experienced the sunlight here in North Warwickshire some 250 to 300 million years ago. No one had seen it grow (there weren’t any humans around in those times), some catastrophe had sunk it into the ground as part of the carboniferous coal layers – and here it was now, lying in the palm of my hand, never before looked at by any other living being. What excitement! I assume that it was originally green in colour, like the vast majority of plants today that use chlorophyll to trap the energy of light and make their substance.(With that ‘wonder chemical’ in our skins, famine would become a thing of the past – perhaps there are “green” humans on another planet!)
As I look out of my window, the leaf colours never cease to amaze me, some light green, some dark, some yellow, and one bush, a berberis, with red leaves, all different appearances of chlorophyll. The young leaves in the spring show even greater subtleties of green, and then in the autumn the chlorophyll gets broken down and taken back into the plant, and the magnificent reds, browns and yellows give a magical feel to the countryside before the leaves fall and winter sets in.
As you look out at your garden today with its green factories – the grass, the leaves of many trees and shrubs and the flowers – reflect on what it was like 250 million years ago when my fossil fern was a living dynamic plant, part of a tropical forest where tree-like giants Sigillaria and Lepidodendron rose to a height of one hundred feet, with magnificent ferns, mosses and liverworts forming a luxuriant undergrowth full of spiders, scorpions and early insects. Above these darted a dragonfly with a 30 inch wingspan, while the pools below were filled with strange fish, including a vicious shark only 28 inches in length. It would be millions of years before dinosaurs and humans appeared on the scene. What a story my fern could tell me about life in those far-off times! Who knows what will be in your garden 1,000 or 1,000,000 years from now?
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Big Cat – where is it now
[Stories alleging that the Big Cat can be regularly seen sitting in the Bird in Hand enjoying a pint of sheep dip bitter are to be treated with caution. It does in fact much prefer pints of Pedigree ! - the web editor ]
