Thought for the Week
21 January 2025
Somehow electricity has become more important
than the worlds that live beneath our feet.
Field Maple
14 January 2025
Running up a hill backwards means we are only looking at where we’ve been.
Running up forwards means we do not take account of the difficulties we will encounter descending. Stop and look!
Field Maple 14-1-25
I put this together in view of the horrendous lack of foresight in Govt housing and planning policies where future flooding is concerned!
07 January 2025
“I haven’t failed.
I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
Thomas Edison
01 January 2025
Nature never stops changing.
Field Maple
25 December 2024
The hopes and fears of all the years are born in thee today.
17 December 2024
The greed of the human being is that we want repetition of those moments of supreme divinity and satisfaction. The cynicism of the capitalist is that they know that. Field Maple
10 December 2024
Say No to a Plastic Christmas
03 December 2024
Say No to a Plastic Christmas
26 November 2024
Waste not, want not
19 November 2024
Make do and mend
12 November 2024
We are like ants.
We go round in circles trying to find the best way to control our territory.
Field Maple
05 November 2024
Is it coincidence or supreme irony that the USA are voting on their new President today, Guy Fawkes Day?
Remember, remember the 5th of November.
29 October 2024
Hubbub found 83% of Halloween costumes use polyester equivalent to 83 million plastic bottles. 18,000 tonnes of pumpkins are discarded annually. Angela Terry
22 October 2024
The Holy Land is all around us.
Albert Einstein
15 October 2024
“Re-wilding” means taking the consequences of far more frequently wild and extreme
weather making a mess of that which we want to ‘be wild’.
Field Maple
08 October 2024
The first half of September was warmer and drier, bees and other insects were making a brave comeback. The latter half of the month was very wet and the absence of all insects is horrifying. October continues with very wet intervals and a small minority of insects are trying their hardest to stock up for winter.
Field Maple
01 October 2024
Our closest friends are slugs. They eat and leave compost for new growth and they are eaten by bigger chaps than them. Field Maple
24 September 2024
Middle class Victorians ‘foraged’ so many ferns from wild places, taking them to warm and dry homes, that they are now absent in the places from whence they were taken.
Stop foraging.
Field Maple
17 September 2024
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.
John Keats
10 September 2024
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more.
John Keats
03 September 2024
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with her how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run.
John Keats
28 August 2024
To love nature is to hear it, wherever it is.
Field Maple
20 August 2024
To love nature is to see it, wherever it is.
Field Maple
13 August 2024
We live in self-adorned fantasy worlds.
Field Maple
06 August 2024
There is nothing more delicious in August, than walking past Buddleia and Honeysuckle and wondering which one gives which aroma?
Field Maple
28 July 2024
It must be said, before we leave July, that this month has been extremely worrying for the lack of bees, butterflies and hoverflies, as well as all insects generally.
Windscreens would normally have to be scraped for dead insects splattered on them.
Not so this year 2024.
Field Maple
23 July 2024
A time of bliss with summer’s kiss
A day that’s meant for rest
When sands are soft and clean and fresh,
The coastline at its best.
Chrissy Geeenslade
17 July 2024
We lay the foundations of our own path long before we tread on it.
Field Maple
09 July 2024
We must take responsibility for the path we choose to tread.
Field Maple
02 July 2024
Knowing and giving time so we understand each other is the most generous
of all our intentions.
Field Maple
25 June 2024
Make hay while the sun shines!
18 June 2024
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age,
which means never losing your enthusiasm.
Aldous Huxley
09 June 2024
Even if I knew certainly the world would end tomorrow, I would still plant an apple tree.
Martin Luther 1483 – 1546
04 June 2024
For those of us who have experienced it, we all know what love is.
It is how we translate it that matters for others.
Field Maple
28 May 2024
There is, perhaps, no solitary sensation so exquisite as that of slumbering in grass or hay, shaded from the hot sun by a tree with the consciousness of a fresh light air running through the wide atmosphere and the sky stretching far overhead upon all sides.
Leigh Hunt (1784 – 1859)
21 May 2024
Foxgloves are aspiring.
Up to what?
One wonders.
Field Maple
14 May 2024
Come, stroll along the leafy lanes,
For summer beckons now
And birdsong in its myriad tones
Re-echoes through the boughs.
Elizabeth Gozney
08 May 2024
Ever since I can remember anything, flowers have been like dear friends to me, comforters, inspirers, powers to uplift and to cheer.
Celia Thaxter 1835 – 1894
30 April 2024
That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.
Emily Dickinson
23 April 2024
To see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
William Blake
15 April 2024
New Biodiversity Legislation requires developers of housing and infrastructure to compensate for its impact by restoring wildlife by more than 10% above the expected damage done by the development.
Peoples Trust for Endangered Species
08 April 2024
I am only a plant pot away from heaven.
Field Maple
02 April 2024
Hard times make strong people
Strong people make good times
Good times make weak people
Weak people make hard times.
Michael Hopf
Adapted by Mothy
25 March 2024
When does a farmer get the time to bask in the wonders of what she or he produces?
Field Maple
20 March 2024
It is our duty to bask in the wonder of our body.
Field Maple
12 March 2024
It is our responsibility to bask in the wonder of nature.
Field Maple
06 March 2024
Knowledge is so proud
It knows so much
Wisdom knows
So much less
27 February 2024
Snowdrops fill the corners, bouncing, nodding, waving, being full of absolute determination.
Field Maple
20 February 2024
Disappointment will only ride, sulking and unhelpful in the back seat.
Michelle Obama
13 February 2024
Can’t is a feeling.
Can is an attitude.
Field Maple
06 February 2024
While with an eye made quiet
By the power of harmony
And the deep power of joy
We see into the life of things
William Wordsworth
30 January 2024
A single 1-litre bottle of water could contain 240,000 microscopic plastic particles …. early research suggests such particles could travel into various organs within the body.
New Scientist Jan 2024
23 January 2024
I am more worried about natural stupidity than Artificial Intelligence.
Paoli Benanti
Franciscan Fria AI Advisor to the Pope
16 January 2024
Boggy corners, ponds and slow-running ditches need conserving and maintaining.
Jeremy Hobson
(Particularly now when floods over the last month have not been drained by maintaining waterways)
08 January 2024
Earth is crammed with heaven
And every common bush afire with God
And only s/he who sees takes off their shoes
The rest sit round and pluck blackberries
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
26 December 2023
Love your neighbour as yourself
Jesus
07 December 2023
Say no to a plastic Christmas
28 November 2023
How often have you tried to set tomorrow’s pattern with today as a guide?
Anne Kreer
21 November 2023
A treasury of green glints, a scattering of tiny satin circles, the fairy-like pennywort,
or liverwort, or navelwort – the centre of everything –
a bodily enchantment in the hedge-world.
Miriam Darlington
14 November 2023
The copper of the beech, the red hip of the rose, the black of the berry, the sweeping of the rain, the row in the hedge, the yellow maple of the field and autumn all around
07 November 2023
This too will pass.
Whether in pride or in failure.
Abraham Lincoln
31 October 2023
Hurt is like a broken steering wheel.
Michelle Obama
24 October 2023
The haws of the Hawthorne hedges are punctuating the fields with mighty displays of their red-berried branches
hanging and swaying in excitement and majesty, heralding a winter season.
Field Maple
17 October 2023
Rage can be like a dirty windshield.
Michelle Obama
10 October 2023
A mature oak tree will support over 280 different species of insects.
https://www.gardenorganic.org.uk/trees-wildlife
04 October 2023
The aspect of nature is devout.
Like the figure of Jesus, she stands with bended head and hands folded upon the breast.
The happiest (wo)man is s/he who learns from nature the lesson of worship
Ralph Waldo Emerson
26 September 2023
See the plant, touch it, help it to grow, know that you are thinking about
something else that lives – and it is not about yourself.
Field Maple
19 September 2023
It takes 1000 cranberries to make one litre of Cranberry Juice.
Michael PortilloCranberries are farmed in water
12 September 2023
To be happy is to be successful.
But to be successful is not necessarily to be happy.
Field Maple
09 September 2023
The “hidden sources” of personal carbon footprints has not been taken into account
in any of the decarbonisation policies world-wide.
digitaldecarb.org/data-carbon-ladder/
29 August 2023
A one-kilogram plastic garden chair creates two Kgs of CO2 to manufacture in the UK.
In China it creates 7 Kgs.
22 August 2023
An average person creates 22 tonnes of Carbon Dioxide from the data we generate through photos, videos, texts and emails each year – equivalent to flying to New York 26 times.
Nilima Marshal
2 August 2023
15 August 2023
A few metres back from the beach the true shore specialists gave way to low, wind-stunted mats of wildflowers like intricate tapestries stitching the shifting sand together.
Melissa Harrison
08 August 2023
A dog barks. The whole village hears it.
Field Maple
01 August 2023
Worms are full of water at high pressure, like the air in a tyre.
Ben Hoare
25 July 2023
It is said that to hear your neighbour singing is to know that, ‘All’s well with the world’.
18 July 2023
When going for a ‘nice walk’ in the countryside, ‘to improve our well-being’, we often do not stop to recognise or acknowledge what it is that causes us to feel connected to nature.
Rebecca Gent
11 July 2023
Adopt the pace of nature
Her secret is patience
Ralph Waldo Emerson
04 July 2023
June 2023 was the hottest month on record.
Field Maple
29 June 2023
Turn the tables on time: find joy in waiting.
Field Maple
20 June 2023
Come sit in the sunshine
Count blessings awhile
Elsie Randolph
13 June 2023
The dearth of winged insects these past few weeks has been abnormally severe, as if 75% of observable insect life had been wiped out by a May Gale – only we hadn’t one . . .
Matthew Oates
10 June 2023
06 June 2023
The longest hour is waiting.
The shortest hour is joy.
Field Maple
30 May 2023
Hawthorne, the May Flower of hedgerows, is blooming rapaciously throughout the countryside in long and slender lines of glorious triumph.
Field Maple
24 May 2023
Few things I know can rival hearing a cuckoo for pure, unadulterated joy.
Melissa Harrison
16 May 2023
Hoverfly larvae are gluttonous predators of between three and 10 trillion million aphids every summer, thereby helping to protect our crops.
Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson
09 May 2023
Our dainty and beautiful English Bluebells are under threat
from the invasive and enormous ‘Spanish Bluebell’.
Field Maple
02 May 2023
Good thoughts, our best friends
Our wealth a well-spent age
The earth our sober inn
And quiet pilgrimage
Thomas Campion (Circa 1600)
26 April 2023
Cotton is a thirsty plant: it takes at least 10,000 litres of water to produce a kilogram of cotton fabric, enough to make one pair of jeans and one T-shirt.
Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson
18 April 2023
A snail has not one, but several tiny brains.
Ben Hoare
11 April 2023
Never argue with a fool. Onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.
Mark Twain 1835 – 1910
04 April 2023
Millipedes are vegetarians and eat only dead and rotting plants.
Ben Hoare
29 March 2023
Wild and free, you don’t need to plant celandines, you just watch them arrive. . . . . true gold in humble places.
Jonathon Tullock
21 March 2023
You can’t choose wild life. It chooses you!
Alan Titchmarsh
14 March 2023
It takes 400 cocoa beans to make one pound of chocolate.
Each cacoa tree produces around 2,500 beans.
40 to 50 million people worldwide rely on cocoa beans to make a living.
07 March 2023
The Government is committed to halting the decline of biodiversity by 2030
and to protecting 30% of our land and sea area for nature
by the same date – the so-called 30×30 target.Peoples Trust for Endangered Species
28 February 2023
The 560-million-year-old 7 inch ‘Dawn Lantern’ fossil has recently been discovered. It was a predator and lived on the sea bed created by a great volcanic rush of ash. Its Latin name is Auroralumina Attenboroughii.
Shannon Headley
21 February 2023
The greatest gift is fleeting.
Field Maple
14 February 2023
Slugs can eat forty times their weight in one day.
They not only eat our favourite plants but also decaying leaflitter and other dead creatures.
They are an essential food source for other insects, amphibians, birds and earthworms.
07 February 2023
Rooks rowed overhead, jinking and calling, falling into aerobatics, delighting in the sky.
Melissa Harrison
31 January 2023
Our opinions are limited by the
limitations of our own experience.
Field Maple
24 January 2023
Our collective amnesia prevents us from grasping just how much we have altered nature. We continuously get used to the new ‘normal’ – whether it is fewer squashed insects on our windscreens, the absence of old and dead trees
in the forest or ever more frequent extreme weather.Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson
18 January 2023
We tend to assume nature will ‘bounce back’ but what happened in 2022 is terrifying.
The stark truth is, our world will never be the same.
Melissa Harrison
10 January 2023
The hills are shadows, and they flow
From form to form, and nothing stands;
They melt like mist, the solid lands,
Like clouds they shape themselves and goCanto CXXIII Tennyson 1850
03 January 2023
Iceberg means Island Mountain
27 December 2022
I make the most of all that comes, the least of all that goes.
Sarah Teasdale (1884-1933)
19 December 2022
A silent wish sails the seven seas
The winds of change whisper in the trees
And the walls of doubt crumble tossed and torn
This comes to pass when a child is born.Fred Jay
14 December 2022
Hope is not only a dream. It is an attitude.
Field Maple
06 December 2022
Say NO to a Plastic Christmas
29 November 2022
Emotions are not plans.
Michelle Obama
22 November 2022
Diatoms, part of the plankton floating in our oceans,
produce one third of the oxygen on Earth.
Ben Hoare
15 November 2022
On Thursday 10th November 2022 Edinburgh night temperature recorded 16 degrees C. This is 13 degrees higher than usual. Four months ago, record 40-degree temperatures throughout the UK were 13 degrees higher than usual July temperatures.
The climate has changed. We have ‘tipped’ over.
Field Maple
09 November 2022
What was Newton’s principle BEFORE the apple fell?
He observed it.
Field Maplehttps://www.history.com/news/did-an-apple-really-fall-on-isaac-newtons-head
03 November 2022
Hazel dormice hibernate over winter – for up to seven months
and their heart rate drops by around 90%.People’s Trust for Endangered Species
25 October 2022
I once watched a long queue of women and children waiting to drop their buckets down into a very deep well in Nigeria. Towards the end, all the buckets weren’t filled, but they shared what they had between them, and their joy was terrific.
Sister Stanisklaus Kennedy
18 October 2022
We can often become a victim to our own stupidities.
Field Maple
11 October 2022
Silver Birch: Betula Pendula
Older trees play host to bracket fungi and birds such as woodpeckers.
They can support 229 associated insect species – important food for all types of birds.
Their seeds are popular with over-wintering birds and small mammals.
04 October 2022
Hazel dormice eat blackberries, hazel and sweet chestnuts, beechmast and small insects.
We are recreating habitats for them in mixed woodland.
People’s Trust for Endangered Species
27 September 2022
Nasa’s probe today rammed an asteroid millions of miles away so that the same technology can prevent a future cataclysmic asteroid hit on planet earth.
We don’t need asteroids to create cataclysmic destruction of this planet.
We are already doing it for ourselves.
Field Maple
20 September 2022
Nature is about time.
Time to see, to study, to allow, to change and to observe.
Time to let it and you collect itself and yourself.
Field Maple
15 September 2022
We mourn the loss of our Queen, but also for ourselves and all that has been lost because of coronavirus, the terrors and implications of war and the climate that has changed.
Field Maple
06 September 2022
Eight million dogs in the UK drop approximately 1,000 tonnes of waste a day.
They will also have eaten on average half a pound of meat daily amounting to around
1,750 tonnes of dead animals all of which will have contributed to climate change.
31 August 2022
What is the point of a child seeing a leaf
if the child does not see the branch?
What is the point of a child seeing a branch
if they do not see the trunk?Roots of the Earth
23 August 2022
We just keep moving
from strange times
to strange times.
Anita White
16 August 2022
Wildfires scorched and burnt 1.8 million acres in ten USA Sates in July 2021.
Charlie Mitchell
09 August 2022
Sunflower heads turn to face the sun throughout the day.
Should we do the same?
Field Maple
02 August 2022
The Tibetan name for Mount Everest is Qomolangma, which means Mother Earth.
26 July 2022
Over a 100-year period, methane is 28 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at warming the earth.
Over 20 years, that comparison jumps
to approximately 80 times.bridgerphotonics.com
20 July 2022
Permafrost – permanently frozen ground or rocks that never thaw – covers the majority of Siberia
(13 million square kms).
It is now melting, emitting enormous volumes of atmosphere warming, methane.
This is why today, 19th July 2022, England broke all temperature records with 40*C.
Our climate has changed.Field Maple
12 July 2022
On a hot day, shady woods
can be 10*C cooler than in cities.
Woodland Trust
04 July 2022
Play the ball, not your opponent.
Christine Truman, Champion Tennis Coach
28 June 2022
It is never too late to be what you might have been.
George Eliot
20 June 2022
A poppy seed may lie in the soil for 50 years and suddenly, when turned in the soil, it may grow.
14 June 2022
June green – the jewel-green of chiff chaffs, iris leaves; curiosity green – of duckweed and new creatures; bright and exotic green – a new velvet flash of moss to wash your face in; aphid green; living, breathing and wet-kneed green, oh wildness and wet, let it be left.
Miriam Darlington (adapted) June 2022
09 June 2022
You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.
Joni Mitchel
31 May 2022
40% of us talk to an artificial intelligence voice assistant at least once a day.
Stuart Russell
25 May 2022
Each dandelion seed head has 100-150 fluffy seeds.
Ben Hoare
17 May 2022
Mayflies rise from the water, lift into the air, spiral there with dozens of others, for only one day.
Field Maple
10 May 2022
The Opening of Parliament Ceremony today reminds us that good democracy relies on us opening our minds.
Field Maple
03 May 2022
The Cornflower is also known as the bluebottle, bachelor’s buttons, blue bonnets, brooms and brushes, corn-blinks, ladder love, logger-heads, miller’s delight, pin-cushion, and blavers.
Plantlife.org
26 April 2022
The more we appreciate the full impact our built structures have on the natural world, the more we can carve out spaces around them that really work for wildlife.
Helen MacDonald “Hidden Wilds of the Motorway” BBC 2020
17 April 2022
“And be assured, I am with you always, to the end of time”
Matthew 28.20
13 April 2022
One of the chief reasons of documenting, studying and researching the natural world is to protect it.
Alfred Russel Wallace (Naturalist and collaborator with Charles Darwin) 1858
05 April 2022
The moment is our lifetime.
Field Maple
29 March 2022
A group of buffalo is called An Obstinacy
22 March 2022
China produces annually, the most honey in the world – around 500,000 tons.
15 March 2022
India has the most beehives in the world with 12.25 million.
08 March 2022
There are 250 species of bees pollinating flowers in the UK.
24 February 2022
The adjective ‘naufragous’ describes anything that causes a shipwreck.
We are living in naufragous times.
08 February 2022
… power slowly but surely corrupts the mind,
robbing the uneasy head that wears the crown,
of its wits.Alex Lecanda-Moreno
01 February 2022
The Brook rises in a clear, grey, trembling basin at the foot of a chalk hill, among flowers of lotus and thyme and eyebright and rest-harrow.
Edward Thomas
25 January 2022
The problem is not that the world is filthy, it is that we are making it filthy.
Field Maple
18 January 2022
Make joy when we can
Vanessa Feltz
11 January 2022
When we become aware of the beauty we are grateful for everything.
Without this awareness we can become frantic and relentless in our demands.Sister Stanisklaus Kennedy
04 January 2022
The melting of Siberia’s long-frozen tundra and limestone is warming 2.8 times faster than the global average and is releasing greenhouse gases that scientists fear could frustrate global efforts to curb climate-warming emissions.
Reuters Oct 2021
28 December 2021
Temperatures due to rise this week to 16C.
For years the people of Pompei could feel the heat of the earth rising and hear deep rumbling beneath them before Vesuvius blew in AD79.
21 December 2021
A ray of hope flickers in the sky
This comes to pass when a child is bornFred Jay
14 December 2021
I have known shadow;
I have known sun and now I know these two are one.Rudyard Kipling
07 December 2021
Say NO to a plastic Christmas.
Field Maple
30 November 2021
We make our fantasies become digital.
Nature is no fantasy.Field Maple
23 November 2021
Coca-Cola sells more than 100 billion throwaway plastic bottles each year.
BBC
16 November 2021
371 litres of water are required to produce one litre of almond milk.
48 litres required for oat milk and 28 for soya milk.Peta Bee
11-9-21
09 November 2021
Real Eyes
Realise
Real LiesAnon Graffiti
02 November 2021
Imagine all the people . . . . cleaning up after themselves.
With many thanks to John Lennon
26 October 2021
I lean and loaf at ease . . . . observing a spear of grass.
Walt Whitman
19 October 2021
14-year-old Vinisha Umashankar has designed a mobile
solar-powered rickshaw, in India.Earthshot Finalist
12 October 2021
Logging in is not about taking wood, it is about attitude.
How will I be using it?Field Maple
05 October 2021
For too long the economy has run like driving on fumes;
the car never travels faster but it is forever about to conk out.
We’re running on empty.Philip Aldric 25-9-21
28 September 2021
Money is like time, it is easily wasted.
Field Maple
23 September 2021
Sharing is not about taking, it is about giving.
Field Maple
01 September 2021
Every adult human being consumes nearly 1000 kgs of oxygen
every year.
The Times: 24-4-21
