Authors Electric

  The Hidden Life of Trees I think this book has blown my mind. I'll give you a quote. Wohlleben is discussing coppiced trees: that is, trees that have been felled, or partially felled, so new trunks sprout from the root. It was commonly done in the past to trees such as hazel and yew, to 'farm' trees by producing a continuous growth of new wood. But how to measure the age of these coppiced trees? Are they as old as the new growth? In which case, they're just a few years old, since coppicing is done roughly every eight to ten years. Or, are these coppiced trees as old as the roots they re-grow from? In which case, they may be hundreds of years old. Peter Wohlleben tells us that scientists investigated this question by: '...researching ancient spruce in Dalarna province in Sweden. The oldest spruce in Dalarna has grown a carpet of flat shrubby growth around its single small trunk. All this growth belongs to one tree, and its roots were tested using carbon 14 dating.....

      Game of Thrones fans will no doubt be keen to watch the new prequel  House of the Dragon  based on George RR Martin's  Fire and Blood  series, which tells the story of House Targaryen... Season 1 on DVD is definitely top of my Christmas list this year! Like many fantasy authors, George RR Martin has also explored other aspects of the genre. I recently discovered in a charity shop his science fiction collection Tuf Voyaging, which combines several linked novellas (previously published in SF magazines) into an entertaining yet deeply unsettling novel of bio-engineering and planetary disaster. Working on the principle that such books appear when it is the right time for me to read them, I couldn't help but read Tuf Voyaging against the backdrop of the past two years, and the comparison caused me to wake in a cold sweat on more than one occasion. In the first story, our hero - Haviland Tuf of the title - is an independent space trader hired t...

Oikology - when we need to look after our home In February last year I was  preparing  to teach a poetry course to my WEA students and I wrote this introduction. The course was cancelled after two sessions and I was left with a large file of unused poems. Never one to throw anything away and looking back over an extraordinary year it seemed an  appropriate juncture for me to give the piece, if not the poems, to a wider audience. “Record heat in world’s oceans is ‘dire’ warning on climate crisis.” This was a newspaper headline recently and as I write there is a meeting in Davos, Switzerland, attended by American President, Donald Trump, and 17 year-old Swedish climate activist, Greta Thunberg, whose book,   No One is Too Small to Make a Difference , sits on my desk. Indeed, there is now so much information about the climate problem that it is difficult to pick out one particular aspect that should command our attention.   However, as this is a course about p...

The Purple Emperor: wingspan 8cms 'High up, skimming a tree's silhouette and framed against the sky, the emperors look black -- like a rainforest butterly. At a glimpse they can be mistaken for birds... The males attack anything that comes near them, defending their territory and the pick of the females. An unwary chaffinch is chased away. Blue tits shriek in alarm -- a comeuppance for them since, from October through to April... they are the butterfly's main predator. Emperors have even been known to attack sticks and bricks thrown up into the air. From time to time a couple , or even three, male emperors lock horns, tussling in flight -- 'having a bundle', as Neil puts it...'  From 'Wilding' by Isabella Tree.  'Wilding' by Isabella Tree. Thanks to our destruction of the environment, not only by our roads and shopping malls but also by modern farming practices, this large, blue-tit bothering butterfly, the purple emperor, has be...

The view from my window: A squirrel feasts on mulberries. The back-alley view from where I sit right now would be uninspiring but for a large and living intruder. A sprawling canopied , out-of-place, forty-foot-tall, spreading wild mulberry— Morus rubra —plays constantly with the incoming light. As I compose this post, pausing and drifting off more often than I'd like, I note its serrated, heart-shaped leaves now bright summery green, on branches rich with dark red fruit, fluttering gently in the mid-afternoon breeze coming off the lake.  Brown specked, white-throated sparrows hop from twig to twig—this being their usual hour of appearance. A chubby, rust gray fox squirrel scampers impossibly along lacy branches, then freezes and wall eyes me through the open window, protected by a screen. Squirrels carry on that way, often within arm's reach, even when our hefty aging Maine Coon orange cat, Oliver, crouches on the windowsill to gaze upon the scene like feline real...