The site

I thought it was time for a few pictures of the Nature Reserve on which I keep the bees (for now). It's small, but lovely, and is a real urban site, nestling in between two large residential houses on the border of Maida Vale and St John's Wood in London.

Central to the site is a tremendous Copper Beech. Beech is a tree which is known for greatly shading out plants below it, so the nature reserve is rather dominated by the tree and its effects. I think the muscly, smooth bark is wonderful.

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Another lovely feature of the nature reserve is an ancient mulberry tree. These trees have a tendency to fall prostrate and in fact often self root as this one has done. Examining this tree it's not at all clear which bits of the tree reach into the ground for nutrients. It looks very much like a dead log at one end, but the rich canopy and beautiful and bountiful fruit (a little past it in these September pictures) show the vigour of the old plant. Mulberry trees can often look ancient even when they are not: a popular method of propagating is to chop a branch off and plant it and the resulting trees can look ancient even after a few years. However, the old irons seen in the picture (notice that the tree has now grown around the irons) indicate that this tree was tended a long time ago. It's unclear to me what the history of the site is, but the presence of this mulberry tree seems to say that once the grounds were part of a house.