Our knotweed is rusting.
I see that it’s another one of those garden plants which now has multiple, different names: rock, whortleberry-leaved, or rose knotweed. Or if you prefer scientific names, Persicaria (as I’ve always known it), Bistorta or Polygonum vaciniifolium, or P./B./P. vacciniifolia. More importantly for us is that it’s one of our garden’s signature plants. And as a native of the Himalaya/Tibet, clearly enjoys life in the milder climate of upland West Wales.
I usually photograph it when it’s in flower for weeks on end from July to the first frosts, and often humming with honey bees, but this year, a few days of frost in November, together with a rare day of sunshine in December, made its rusting leaves and dead flower stems glow, with its unique, and uniform massed rust colour. This won’t last for long – the leaves and stems will soon drop off, but it’s a fleetingly lovely mid-winter highlight.
It captures my mood of the last few weeks as have many of the cloudscape scenes as we close in on the shortest day after another prolonged wet spell of weather. November 2025 was the second wettest month since I’ve been recording such things (and the wettest ever November, following a record wet September, and a typically wet October). December has begun with another 300 mm plus during the first 17 days, so it may quickly overtake November, pushing it into third place in my wettest month records.
Lest this all sounds very exceptional, I did a screenshot of the closest National Resources Wales river height monitoring station – downstream from us by perhaps 10 miles, after our stream Afon Melindwwr has joined Afon Cothi, on its way to Afon Tywi and eventually the sea. 
The graph highlights the low levels throughout the summer of 2025, but the several spate peaks during this autumn, and slightly less severe peaks in January and February. None of these events are all time highs however – the highest level was recorded in October 1987, the next highest was in October 2018, when Storm Callum brought us 170 mm of rain in 3 days, but thanks to many dry days before and after this storm hit, that month’s total of 233 mm, was surprisingly similar to this year’s 226 mm.
Life is surely ebbing away and decaying for the Persicaria foliage, as it shuts down for winter. This year, the change has coincided with our rusty metal chairs getting their regular wire wool and Danish oil treatment (thanks to William for once again doing this).
However, we always leave the cast iron seats untouched, since they now have over 20 years of painfully slow expansion of mainly rust-coloured lichen, adding a beautiful, vintage patina to the aged metal.
Its unnamed (by me) symbiont algal/fungal combination somehow survives on this harsh, unyielding substrate. Eking out a life from sun, air, rain and whatever in the way of nutrients, this washes over its cells, as well as the more limited minerals (principally iron, carbon and silicon) available to it from the ever so slowly dissolving, rigid iron surface. After a little research I reckon a book about lichen ecology may be a late suggestion for a Christmas gift.
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I’ll preface some recent challenging moments (for me), with the always exciting news of a new arrival. Sarah Anne, our 8th grandchild, arrived more or less on time, to our younger son and his wife, just beyond the planned week long stay that Fiona had with them. She’d travelled to help them both cope with their other at home young 5 children, before their eldest returned from university. 
This meant after a couple of false alarms, including helping to fill and empty the birthing pool in their modest sitting room, she had a chance to interact directly with the new born, before she opted to catch a train home to Wales. Whilst Fiona had swapped quiet Wales for a very busy, noisy and quite cramped Birmingham, I had an extremely rare (even unprecedented in our long marriage) spell on my own, with several important mainly indoor projects lined up to tackle.
Yet the weather, and ‘events’ conspired to drain me of nearly all creative thoughts.
Taking myself off to nearby Llandovery for an evening political hustings event organised by the Campaign for the Preservation of Rural Wales, on the day Fiona left, was an inauspicious beginning to this time. Despite a foul evening, the large hall was packed, and I’m including an excellent recording of the event, for anyone who’s never been to a hustings before (like me). Set up to help locals consider the merits of several individual candidates, and their party’s policies, this event was specifically arranged to explore their different attitudes to the planned renewable energy ‘parks’, which I’ve mentioned recently. I’m afraid I couldn’t force myself to stay to the end, having become too annoyed by the obfuscation delivered by the Welsh nationalist Plaid Cymru representative, and thus missed a couple of questions – and his answers, relating to the evident corruption and links between one of the companies involved, and his party. Anyone who bothers to watch this can assess the qualities of these future potential politicians. And also whether those in the hall were simply nimbies, or intelligent people appalled by the impending, irreversible wholescale landscape wrecking, that these plans would create, if enacted.
By way of comparison, one of the few blogs I follow is James Elkington’s Mountain’s, Myths and Moorlands. He always posts wonderful photographs and stories of upland scenes – usually of the Yorkshire moors and dales where he lives. And unless he airbrushes them out, there’s never a wind turbine in sight. Long may it remain so. Click below for his most recent post.
A couple of day’s after the hustings, I rose early after a poor night’s sleep and produced a tiny poem. It was in response to a discussion Fiona and I had just before she left, which in turn followed on from her recent book group, when the topic of DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) forms came up. One of her fellow ‘bookies’ is a retired local GP, who quoted examples of how easily such forms can get lost just when they’re most needed. She’d even pinned them to patients’ pyjamas immediately before they were ambulanced away for the last time – only to discover later, that they’d been removed by ‘helpful’ staff in the hospital on arrival, and therefor the DNR request, all well discussed and pre-planned, was ignored. I figured that perhaps the best way around this might be a tattoo on one’s chest – tattoos have always been anathema for me, so I shall probbaly never go ahead and get it inscribed, but anyway, something short and pithy was clearly needed:
DNR!
I’ve lived, I’ve loved, enjoyed this life.
Had two fine boys, one darling wife
Accept God’s will, and don’t blame fate,
Time’s come, so DON’T RESUSCITATE !
02/12/2025
It was only after doing a little more reading that I discovered such a request was far too limited – in fact one probably needs to have a longer acronym titled document – an Advance Decision to Refuse Treatment (ADRT)/Living Will. It seems this needs to be added to our list of ‘to do’ actions, since both of us are minded to avoid prolonged medical interventions, having enjoyed good innings to date, and dreading the prospect of lingering at the mercy of medics and nurses.
Having typed this short poem up early in the morning, I noticed a curiously moody and impressive cloudscape at dawn, whilst across the valley, the mist veiled the fields in a voile-like hugging layer. 
Probably unworthy of photos, save that the previous days had been ones of incessant, heavy rain.
A couple of hours later, I found one of our ewe lambs lying down, and barely able to stand unaided. I managed to manhandle her inside, and spent ages trying to warm her up from a moribund and hypothermic state. A horrible parvo-virus like death smell ( familiar to many older small animal vets) pervaded the fleece around her hind legs. I feared the worst, made her as comfortable as possible, and wasn’t surprised to find her stiff and gazing blankly across the valley a couple of hours later. Cause of death unknown, as is sometimes the case, though I feared she might have ingested too many sprouting acorns in this mast year for oaks. For the first year ever, our small flock has rushed towards the ground beneath any oak trees which overhang our field margins, when they’re moved into a new field. No other sheep have shown any signs since, which is a huge relief. It was at this point that I double-checked her ear tag number, only to confirm that it was ‘Lalique’, the star of the BBC’s filming back in April.
Her final journey involved a trip up the mountain, as the light faded. Down the pot hole pitted track to the incinerator, and past the rows of field lining conifers I’d stood beneath in January to film the amazing dawn starling take off and flight. Then further on and around the right angle bend, driving downhill between a frankly other world assorted range of dumped vehicular rubbish, old artic. containers, and some dishevelled ponies before passing a few large cattle sheds and reaching the grim concrete yard and doors to the incinerator shed, hunkered down beneath the mountain’s summit.
Where, fortunately still hidden in my builder’s bag, I hauled her out and left her, abandoned. Beside half a dozen other mud soiled sheep carcases, most with eyes pecked out, that looked like they might have arrived as an earlier job lot. Picked up from sodden fields somewhere. Filling out the necessary form, and posting it into the wall hung box completed the grim task for me. There was no one else around. There never has been on the few occasions I’ve made this trip. In the pervading weather I can think of few more depressing locations in Wales.
I left, and drove back, as the darkest imaginable daylight front of clouds and squally winds hit the mountain top, blowing up from the Preseli mountains. There weren’t even any dusk returning starlings to lift my spirits – this year they’re all flying north west up the valley to a different roost site, as is their usual pattern of behaviour, alternating roost sites from year to year.
I made it back to Gelli, just as the downpour hit, retreated inside and lit the stove.
Life’s fragile thread was exposed twice more that week – firstly our most productive honey bee colony seems to have died out in all the wet weather since I filmed it, apparently very active, in early November. A couple of days later, I’d picked up one of the pre-filled watering cans to water in some recently potted up snowdrops, only to realise as the water flowed from the rose, that it had a really foul smell. Immediately, I stopped watering the pots, took off the rose, and started to empty the can before re-filling it.
Mid-flow, out from the spout came the culprit – a drowned mouse.
Perhaps retired vets are more attuned to coping with such events as the normal flip side to the temporary journey of life that all living creatures are party to – however long, or short. But cumulatively, these events hit me hard this time. I was relieved to eventually hear that Fiona was on her way home.
As far as we know, true immortality is a figment of creative imaginations.
Yet as this point to change the mood somewhat I’m including 2 different recordings of a memorable song composed by Brain May of Queen. Apparently quickly sketched out in a car after he’d watched a short trailer for the film Highlander, (which explores the fictional immortality of a 1530’s Scottish clansman transported to contemporary New York – from the trailer I watched, it doesn’t look like our sort of film choice). The first version shown below was recorded as part of a live concert given in Budapest, Hungary in 1986, in front of 80,000 fans as part of their ‘Magic Tour’. This was the first and largest pop concert given anywhere behind the Iron Curtain, and was the only Eastern European concert that Queen played. It was 3 years later that the Berlin wall was toppled, and this was to be Freddie Mercury’s last concert tour with the group, just 5 years before he died.
No immortality then, for either him, or ‘Lalique’, but certainly a wonderful visual and audible record of him at the peak of his performing powers. Will this still be available to watch/listen in any recognisable way in 100, or 1,000 years? It’s clearly very dependent on multiple technologies and freely available electricity – things we all just assume will readily be available at the flick of a switch.
The second, much more recent version from 2024 features a much older May, with whiter locks, joining Andrea Bocelli for a duet, and with full choir and orchestral backing for a huge out-door concert audience. I’d be hard pressed to choose which I enjoy most.
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With limited opportunities for good photography, I’ve managed to keep up with my efforts at molehill monitoring. Begun when their activity seemed to be increasing in October. For the last couple of months, I’ve adopted a strategy of counting and raking out all molehills on our fields, roughly once a fortnight. 
Since this involves a detailed walk around 5 of our 6 fields lugging our ridging hoe (for some reason one of the fields currently appears to have no resident moles), it occupies a fair bit of time and results in moderate exercise, given the hill climbing and raking. I figured that one might eventually be able to estimate both the number of resident moles, and the distance of tunnels that they mine annually.
Individual molehills vary hugely in size – I count anything that has appeared as a single hill, but already there seems to be a consistency of effort, perhaps only diminished in one of the lower fields after a very wet fortnight, with new main tunnels regularly being created, and with the moles clearly operating mainly in different areas of the meadows to those explored last year.
Here are the counts so far:
118, 24, 11, 56, 17 (October 18th)
208, 54, 16, 114, 17 (November 2nd)
190, 68, 25, 124, 6 (November 16th)
163, 115, 47 / 116, 6 (November 28/30th)
178, 101, 48 / 125, 3 (December 12/13th)
Whether the work involved will ever diminish, as the whole of each field becomes completely criss- crossed with tunnels is a moot point. The main, deeper tunnel network, the excavation of which generates most of the larger molehills, can remain stable for years or decades. With the (for most of the year) solitary moles patrolling and managing it by regularly travelling along it, several times a day. And repairing any damage to the walls, or removing fallen debris. Heavy machinery or large livestock pounding the field above can limit tunnel durability, as can soil type, but neither of these are significant factors for our land.
Will I ever notice a reduction in molehill numbers? It would be nice to think so, but I suspect my enthusiasm for this self imposed task is likely to wane, before the mole’s extraordinary efforts do.
Such tedious, repetitive work does at least mean one traverses most of most fields on an occasional basis, and providing one keeps the mental count accurate, there’s time for a little mind wandering. This being the time of year for Christmas carols, I was minded to include a recording of an interesting, and less familiar American carol, and also the background to its creation. We have a British CD arrangement composed by the great Sir John Rutter, but I’m including a different version here, recorded with wonderful sound, by a contemporary Florida based American choral group, Seraphic Fire arranged and conducted by their choirmaster, Patrick Dupre Quigley.
Thanks to Chicago Chorale for these notes about the carol/song “I Wonder As I Wander,” written by the American folklorist John Jacob Niles (1892-1980), and based on a song fragment he heard while travelling in the southern Appalachian mountains:
Niles was born in Louisville, Kentucky, into a musical family. As a young man, he travelled through the Appalachian Mountains, working as a surveyor and transcribing folksongs he encountered along the way. After service in World War I, he studied music formally, eventually committing himself to what we now term ethnomusicology, collecting and transcribing folk songs, and researching and building folk instruments. He is also well-known as a composer and performer of music in the folk idiom, informed by what he collected.
In notes for an unfinished autobiography, Niles writes:
“I Wonder As I Wander” grew out of three lines of music sung for me by a girl who called herself Annie Morgan. The place was Murphy, North Carolina, and the time was July 1933. The Morgan family, revivalists all, were about to be ejected by the police, after having camped in the town square for some little time, cooking, washing, hanging their wash from the Confederate monument and generally conducting themselves in such a way as to be classed a public nuisance. Preacher Morgan and his wife pled poverty; they had to hold one more meeting in order to buy enough gas to get out of town. It was then that Annie Morgan came out—a tousled, unwashed blond, and very lovely. She sang the first three lines of the verse of “I Wonder As I Wander.” At twenty-five cents a performance, I tried to get her to sing all the song. After eight tries, all of which are carefully recorded in my notes, I had only three lines of verse, a garbled fragment of melodic material—and a magnificent idea.
Based on this fragment, Niles composed the version of “I Wonder as I Wander” that is known today, extending the melody to four lines and the lyrics to three stanzas. His “folk composition” process caused confusion among listeners and singers, many of whom believed the piece to be an authentic folk song, anonymous in origin. Niles went to court to establish his authorship, and charged other performers royalties to perform it.
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Simply wandering around the garden at this time of the year fills me with wonder – how plants have grown over the years, and how daily, in what looks like being another quite early snowdrop season, many of the bulbs I’ve planted over the years are already pushing through and lifting the spirits. Although what several of them are called, is sometimes challenging, since not all are labelled! 
Add in the scents from the Daphne bholua, which are, by mid-December filling the air, and daily walks are needed to ensure that one doesn’t miss the next new thing. 
This year I’ve spotted a very early, single cream/white Crocus bulb in the long croquet border. 
Might it be a seedling hybrid, since it seems far too early, and too pale for a C. ‘Cream Beauty’?
In the tyre garden an equally very early G. ‘Trymming’ snowdrop emerged to one side of its tyre. Yet it has a much more interesting inner segment marking than the real ‘Trymming’. Sadly, the flower has very unusually fallen off. 
Closer inspection of my earlier photo shows a linear slice across the ovary. Perhaps I damaged it a few weeks ago, when I lifted a few bulbs for potting up. Might this have prompted the early flowering? But what about the different inner segment markings? I’ll have to wait until next year to find out.
My first seedling Daphne bholua plant has now opened a few buds – nothing earth shattering, but still a result, barely 3 years after collecting and sowing the seeds. It looks like 3 or 4 more of these plants will produce first flowers this year.
While I was up in this part of the garden, and walked through into the Sorbus/Malus copse to collect a few fruit for possible seed extraction, and sowing, I noticed a small tit inspecting the russet yellow fruits of a Malus tschonoskii at the rear of the tree. 
I turned away, and as I looked back, it flew onto a branch at the front of the tree. A quick bit of fiddling with focus modes, apertures and ISO numbers, whilst pointing the camera at the base of the tree, allowed me to swing the camera up, and take just 3 images over 5 seconds before it moved off.
Possibly my most pleasing bird composition of all time. The bird is, I think, either a willow or marsh tit. Which are evidently extremely difficult to distinguish without hearing the bird sing. Which it’s reluctant to do. No matter, a late November seasonal delight.
Finally, in this slightly melancholic post, another sad fatality from just today. Returning the wheel barrow to its customary resting place in one of the cowshed doorways, I noticed a round ball of fluffed up feathers snucked up against the base of the door jamb. I grabbed the camera from inside, and the bird, which was clearly a curled up dunnock, hadn’t moved. 
After a couple of flash photos, I gently touched it, and its head briefly emerged before it tucked it back beneath its wing and into its feathered globe. 
30 minutes later when I returned from feeding hay to the sheep, life had already left its tiny form.
Perhaps, like Lalique, it had found a quieter, calmer spot to breathe its last. Dunnocks are constant, largely unfazed and cheerful companions as we move around the yard. Low level, ground exploring little birds. However only in death could I appreciate just how intricate and beautiful its feathers in shades of simple brown and grey are.
We are fortunate to witness so many wonderful and sometimes melancholic sights and sounds in this beautiful Western part of Great Britain. It is a mystery to me why so many of the current crop of Welsh politicians seem to undervalue this. Although if you read this latest piece, maybe not so surprising. (Our local Plaid Cymru MP laid the ground work for the current plans by removing all the 18 designated Special Landscape areas from the county development plans and shortly afterwards unveiling an externally produced grand plan for energy policy by 2040 that designated a third of the county’s land area as suitable for large scale renewable energy developments.)
I’ll finish with a short and very recent YouTube poetry reading from the wonderful Malcolm Guite, of 2 poems by John Masefield. The first will be familiar to many. 
The second Malcolm reads is ‘The West Wind’ which was new to me, and although written with the West Country in mind, could just as well apply to wonderful West Wales.
‘The West Wind’ by John Masefield, written around 1902
It’s a warm wind, the west wind, full of birds’ cries;
I never hear the west wind but tears are in my eyes.
For it comes from the west lands, the old brown hills.
And April’s in the west wind, and daffodils.
It’s a fine land, the west land, for hearts as tired as mine,
Apple orchards blossom there, and the air’s like wine.
There is cool green grass there, where men may lie at rest,
And the thrushes are in song there, fluting from the nest.
“Will ye not come home, brother? ye have been long away,
It’s April, and blossom time, and white is the may;
And bright is the sun, brother, and warm is the rain,–
Will ye not come home, brother, home to us again?
“The young corn is green, brother, where the rabbits run.
It’s blue sky, and white clouds, and warm rain and sun.
It’s song to a man’s soul, brother, fire to a man’s brain,
To hear the wild bees and see the merry spring again.
“Larks are singing in the west, brother, above the green wheat,
So will ye not come home, brother, and rest your tired feet?
I’ve a balm for bruised hearts, brother, sleep for aching eyes,”
Says the warm wind, the west wind, full of birds’ cries.
It’s the white road westwards is the road I must tread
To the green grass, the cool grass, and rest for heart and head,
To the violets, and the warm hearts, and the thrushes’ song,
In the fine land, the west land, the land where I belong.