28-Feb Evergreens and Winter Colours

Summary

On February 28th, explore the resilient beauty of evergreens and winter colours. Discover the discreet flowers of male yew trees and the vibrant foliage of conifers like Lawson’s cypress and Leyland cypresses. Learn about the unique growth habits and diverse cultivars of these trees, and uncover the surprising colours that emerge in the landscape as winter transitions to spring.

Join us for an enlightening journey through the evergreens that brighten our winter days and the subtle yet striking colours that signal the changing seasons. Whether you're a nature enthusiast or simply curious about the natural world, this article will captivate and inspire you

Article

Evergreens

Some evergreens and conifers are already starting to produce their discreet flowers. Male yew trees are among the most noticeable, producing their small, yellow flowers with enough pollen falling sometimes to colour the ground beneath the tree on still days. Parks and cemeteries often have a wide variety of conifers, particularly funereal-looking cypresses, with their columnar shape and various different coloured foliages. These trees do not have buds.

28-Feb Evergreens and Winter Colours Section Image

28-Feb Evergreens and Winter Colours Section Image

Instead of forming next year’s shoot in the summer and protecting it through the winter inside a bud, they just pause where they were and then continue to grow again in the following spring. Lawson’s cypress Chamaecyparis lawsoniana in its many different forms is particularly abundant in the London area. It can often be recognised by its ‘flopped over’ leading shoot and the white lines on the under-surface of its leaves. It has over 200 cultivars, varying from blue to green, yellow and gold. There are even fifty dwarf versions. Some of these trees now have attractive red tips on the ends of their flattened branches. These are the male flowers.

28-Feb Evergreens and Winter Colours Section Image

28-Feb Evergreens and Winter Colours Section Image

Leyland cypresses are also ubiquitous on account of them being used as quick growing evergreen hedges which Londoners plant to ensure they cannot see their neighbours. They are quicker growing than most Londoners realise, being capable of growing over a metre a year and continuing to over thirty metres in height in some cases. Even a cutting can reach 9 metres in ten years. The weeping Kashmir cypress Cupressus cashmeriana at Kew is arguably the most beautiful of all the cypresses.

28-Feb Evergreens and Winter Colours Section Image

28-Feb Evergreens and Winter Colours Section Image

Other conifers worth seeking out at Kew this month are Pinus patula, and P. strobus for their leaves, Cryptomeria japonica Yoshim for its weeping habit and the Japanese plum pine Cephalotaxus haringtoma fastigiata, Japanese umbrella pine Sciadopitys verticillata and Pinus englemani for their general beauty.

28-Feb Evergreens and Winter Colours Section Image

28-Feb Evergreens and Winter Colours Section Image

Colours

The landscape in February has the least colour of any month. By the end of the month, with sap rising, buds swelling, this starts to change. The predominant colours of wild flowers are white and yellow. Colour is supposed to be inversely proportional to scent; white flowers tending to have the strongest scents and deeply coloured plants such as chrysanthemums the least. Certainly this works for February, where few plants have deep colours and many have strong scents. Yellows particularly abound, primroses, coltsfoot, dandelion, daffodils and the sulphur coloured catkins of hazel are all examples. If the first butterfly of the year is a brimstone, this completes the various shades of yellow.

28-Feb Evergreens and Winter Colours Section Image

28-Feb Evergreens and Winter Colours Section Image

In gardens this colour rule is more difficult to apply, with aliens and cultivars of every hue e.g. crocuses, pansies and anemones. Among trees, the early Prunus spp. starts things off with white to pale carmine flowers. This is followed by more and more pink cherries. More recently, acid yellow mimosa trees Acacia dealbata are surviving our milder winters better and growing taller and may even flower by the end of the month. Bramble and privet leaves are now at their most purple and magnolias at the end of the month provide a whole range of different purples.

One of the most surprising colours is the tiny deep crimson-coloured female flowers of hazel bushes. These along with snowdrops have also been called “fair maids of February”.

The courting colours of birds are generally much brighter and there is much more iridescence now in their plumage. Many birds have an extra sheen to their feathers in February. Even crows have their ‘raven’ sheen. Greenfinches are greener, long tailed tits pinker and the sharp colours of the jay are more defined. Bullfinches have a ‘rosier’ tint and even the blue-grey of herons can look almost lavender in the sunlight.

28-Feb Evergreens and Winter Colours Section Image

28-Feb Evergreens and Winter Colours Section Image

The most common duck in London, the mallard, has as good a range of colours as can be seen anywhere. The males are now resplendent in their breeding colours. Their heads are now an iridescent bottle green set off with a white neck ring and acid yellow bill. They have chestnut breasts, grey backs and white tails with some tail feathers which are deep black as well as sharply curled. Beneath all this show there is a pair of carrot-coloured legs.

28-Feb Evergreens and Winter Colours Section Image

28-Feb Evergreens and Winter Colours Section Image

Leap Day

It actually takes 365¼ days for the earth of travel completely around the sun so every four years we have an extra day to deal with the time that has accumulated. The day created is leap day February 29th, which naturally only occurs if you can divide the year date by four. Perhaps this of all days is the perfect time to take another leap and mention some of the many animals and plants that are almost completely unknown to all but a handful of Londoners. It might be worth remembering that in 1 gram of soil there could be 20 million nematodes, 100,000 mites, 40,000 springtails, 200 different fungi as well as a thousand different bacteria of which only five per cent as yet can be accurately identified.

28-Feb Evergreens and Winter Colours Section Image

28-Feb Evergreens and Winter Colours Section Image

Before the creation of microscopes in the late seventeenth century no Londoner had ever seen or even imagined what could exist in a drop of pondwater. Hairybacks (Gastrotricha) are tiny, transparent flat creatures with blunt ‘whiskered’ heads and forked tails. Even professional microscopists miss them as they always hide, even when viewed down a microscope. Some are large enough that when swimming they can look like flecks of glass in the water. They are famous for “laying” eggs almost half the size of their body. Twenty different species occur in the ponds on Bookham Common including a contender for London’s rarest animal Chaetonotus ophiogaster intermedia.

28-Feb Evergreens and Winter Colours Section Image

28-Feb Evergreens and Winter Colours Section Image

Also in London ponds are an interesting group of flagellates. Gonium is one that exists as a free-living colony made up of just four cells. Pandorina is another, made up of just sixteen cells, Eudorina, thirty two and Volvox a few hundred. Many evolutionists believe this group shows closely the steps we ourselves may have taken as we evolved from a single-celled creature to a multicellular one many millions of years ago.

28-Feb Evergreens and Winter Colours Section Image

28-Feb Evergreens and Winter Colours Section Image

Parasites are another group with often hidden, complex and bizarre life cycles. Anyone who has seen parasitic fluke larvae (cercariae) leaving a host such as a watersnail is both amazed and appalled. For example, if a snail overheats, hundreds of worm-like cercariae simultaneously decide to abandon their host by just boring straight out of any part of its body wall.

28-Feb Evergreens and Winter Colours Section Image

28-Feb Evergreens and Winter Colours Section Image

Some parasitic water fleas look for all the world like miniature monsters. Anchistropus emarginatus is one with a fearsome sword-like beak the length of its body which it plunges into its victims, in this case hydras. They then indiscriminately rip their host apart using their legs to waft pieces of its flesh to their mouths.

Parasitic amoebas such as Hydramoeba hydroxena literally eat their hosts alive cell by cell till all that is left is a few hundred amoebas. Hairworms (Nematomorpha) are equally gruesome. It used to be thought they spontaneously generated themselves from hairs that fell out of a horse’s tail. We usually only ever notice them when we accidentally squash an insect and a worm almost the size of the insect itself is ejected from its body cavity.

28-Feb Evergreens and Winter Colours Section Image

28-Feb Evergreens and Winter Colours Section Image

February was a time when Londoners used to complain about fleas as they tend to get more active towards the end of winter. Their jumping ability is legendary with some being capable of jumping several hundred times an hour for several days looking for a new meal. It is said if one was the size of a man and stood on the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral it would be able to leap straight over the dome.

28-Feb Evergreens and Winter Colours Section Image

28-Feb Evergreens and Winter Colours Section Image

On a lighter note, micromoths are another group hardly known to most of us. They are just tiny moths which because of their larger and more colourful relations just tend to get ignored. However, there are a thousand of them, mainly straw, beige or fawn in colour. We do notice those that eat our clothes as well as some of the more unusual such as the longhorns, plume moths, ermines and leaf miners. Others likely to catch our attention are the grass moths (Crambinae) which we often see running through the grass during summer picnics.

28-Feb Evergreens and Winter Colours Section Image

28-Feb Evergreens and Winter Colours Section Image

Stoneworts (Characeae) are yet another curious group. They look like delicate underwater horsetails but are in actual fact algae but so different they are in a class of their own. They tend to appear after ponds have been dredged but only as long as the water is crystal clear and unpolluted. They are usually coarse to touch due to an encrusting of lime. What is unique about them is that they can have individual cells up to five centimetres long which makes them the longest plant cells in the world. Several species turn up from time to time in London’s canals and ditches but Basingstoke Canal has long been the most reliable place to find them.

28-Feb Evergreens and Winter Colours Section Image

28-Feb Evergreens and Winter Colours Section Image

Nostoc is equally unusual. It is a cyanobacterium that is capable of creating blooms in lakes yet also lives on paths where it remains invisible until there is a shower of rain when suddenly the path is covered in small gelatinous balls. It is hardly surprising they were called witches jelly.

It would be quite easy to continue describing unusual creatures which are poorly worked upon and therefore relatively unknown, but before finishing water bears (Tardigrada) have to be mentioned. Their preferred habitat is the film of water that covers the surface of mosses.

29-Feb Leap Day Wonders

Summary

On February 28th, a bonus article for leap years! Take a leap into the fascinating world of unseen creatures that inhabit London. Discover the microscopic marvels and bizarre life forms that most of us never notice, from the tiny Hairybacks in pond water to the parasitic water fleas and the resilient water bears. Learn about the hidden lives of these extraordinary organisms and their unique adaptations.

Join us for an eye-opening journey through the hidden wonders of nature. Whether you're a science enthusiast or simply curious about the microscopic world, this article will captivate and inspire you

Article

Evergreens

Some evergreens and conifers are already starting to produce their discreet flowers. Male yew trees are among the most noticeable, producing their small, yellow flowers with enough pollen falling sometimes to colour the ground beneath the tree on still days. Parks and cemeteries often have a wide variety of conifers, particularly funereal-looking cypresses, with their columnar shape and various different coloured foliages. These trees do not have buds.

29-Feb Leap Day Wonders Section Image

29-Feb Leap Day Wonders Section Image

Instead of forming next year’s shoot in the summer and protecting it through the winter inside a bud, they just pause where they were and then continue to grow again in the following spring. Lawson’s cypress Chamaecyparis lawsoniana in its many different forms is particularly abundant in the London area. It can often be recognised by its ‘flopped over’ leading shoot and the white lines on the under-surface of its leaves. It has over 200 cultivars, varying from blue to green, yellow and gold. There are even fifty dwarf versions. Some of these trees now have attractive red tips on the ends of their flattened branches. These are the male flowers.

29-Feb Leap Day Wonders Section Image

29-Feb Leap Day Wonders Section Image

Leyland cypresses are also ubiquitous on account of them being used as quick growing evergreen hedges which Londoners plant to ensure they cannot see their neighbours. They are quicker growing than most Londoners realise, being capable of growing over a metre a year and continuing to over thirty metres in height in some cases. Even a cutting can reach 9 metres in ten years. The weeping Kashmir cypress Cupressus cashmeriana at Kew is arguably the most beautiful of all the cypresses.

29-Feb Leap Day Wonders Section Image

29-Feb Leap Day Wonders Section Image

Other conifers worth seeking out at Kew this month are Pinus patula, and P. strobus for their leaves, Cryptomeria japonica Yoshim for its weeping habit and the Japanese plum pine Cephalotaxus haringtoma fastigiata, Japanese umbrella pine Sciadopitys verticillata and Pinus englemani for their general beauty.

29-Feb Leap Day Wonders Section Image

29-Feb Leap Day Wonders Section Image

Colours

The landscape in February has the least colour of any month. By the end of the month, with sap rising, buds swelling, this starts to change. The predominant colours of wild flowers are white and yellow. Colour is supposed to be inversely proportional to scent; white flowers tending to have the strongest scents and deeply coloured plants such as chrysanthemums the least. Certainly this works for February, where few plants have deep colours and many have strong scents. Yellows particularly abound, primroses, coltsfoot, dandelion, daffodils and the sulphur coloured catkins of hazel are all examples. If the first butterfly of the year is a brimstone, this completes the various shades of yellow.

29-Feb Leap Day Wonders Section Image

29-Feb Leap Day Wonders Section Image

In gardens this colour rule is more difficult to apply, with aliens and cultivars of every hue e.g. crocuses, pansies and anemones. Among trees, the early Prunus spp. starts things off with white to pale carmine flowers. This is followed by more and more pink cherries. More recently, acid yellow mimosa trees Acacia dealbata are surviving our milder winters better and growing taller and may even flower by the end of the month. Bramble and privet leaves are now at their most purple and magnolias at the end of the month provide a whole range of different purples.

One of the most surprising colours is the tiny deep crimson-coloured female flowers of hazel bushes. These along with snowdrops have also been called “fair maids of February”.

The courting colours of birds are generally much brighter and there is much more iridescence now in their plumage. Many birds have an extra sheen to their feathers in February. Even crows have their ‘raven’ sheen. Greenfinches are greener, long tailed tits pinker and the sharp colours of the jay are more defined. Bullfinches have a ‘rosier’ tint and even the blue-grey of herons can look almost lavender in the sunlight.

29-Feb Leap Day Wonders Section Image

29-Feb Leap Day Wonders Section Image

The most common duck in London, the mallard, has as good a range of colours as can be seen anywhere. The males are now resplendent in their breeding colours. Their heads are now an iridescent bottle green set off with a white neck ring and acid yellow bill. They have chestnut breasts, grey backs and white tails with some tail feathers which are deep black as well as sharply curled. Beneath all this show there is a pair of carrot-coloured legs.

29-Feb Leap Day Wonders Section Image

29-Feb Leap Day Wonders Section Image

Leap Day

It actually takes 365¼ days for the earth of travel completely around the sun so every four years we have an extra day to deal with the time that has accumulated. The day created is leap day February 29th, which naturally only occurs if you can divide the year date by four. Perhaps this of all days is the perfect time to take another leap and mention some of the many animals and plants that are almost completely unknown to all but a handful of Londoners. It might be worth remembering that in 1 gram of soil there could be 20 million nematodes, 100,000 mites, 40,000 springtails, 200 different fungi as well as a thousand different bacteria of which only five per cent as yet can be accurately identified.

29-Feb Leap Day Wonders Section Image

29-Feb Leap Day Wonders Section Image

Before the creation of microscopes in the late seventeenth century no Londoner had ever seen or even imagined what could exist in a drop of pondwater. Hairybacks (Gastrotricha) are tiny, transparent flat creatures with blunt ‘whiskered’ heads and forked tails. Even professional microscopists miss them as they always hide, even when viewed down a microscope. Some are large enough that when swimming they can look like flecks of glass in the water. They are famous for “laying” eggs almost half the size of their body. Twenty different species occur in the ponds on Bookham Common including a contender for London’s rarest animal Chaetonotus ophiogaster intermedia.

29-Feb Leap Day Wonders Section Image

29-Feb Leap Day Wonders Section Image

Also in London ponds are an interesting group of flagellates. Gonium is one that exists as a free-living colony made up of just four cells. Pandorina is another, made up of just sixteen cells, Eudorina, thirty two and Volvox a few hundred. Many evolutionists believe this group shows closely the steps we ourselves may have taken as we evolved from a single-celled creature to a multicellular one many millions of years ago.

29-Feb Leap Day Wonders Section Image

29-Feb Leap Day Wonders Section Image

Parasites are another group with often hidden, complex and bizarre life cycles. Anyone who has seen parasitic fluke larvae (cercariae) leaving a host such as a watersnail is both amazed and appalled. For example, if a snail overheats, hundreds of worm-like cercariae simultaneously decide to abandon their host by just boring straight out of any part of its body wall.

29-Feb Leap Day Wonders Section Image

29-Feb Leap Day Wonders Section Image

Some parasitic water fleas look for all the world like miniature monsters. Anchistropus emarginatus is one with a fearsome sword-like beak the length of its body which it plunges into its victims, in this case hydras. They then indiscriminately rip their host apart using their legs to waft pieces of its flesh to their mouths.

Parasitic amoebas such as Hydramoeba hydroxena literally eat their hosts alive cell by cell till all that is left is a few hundred amoebas. Hairworms (Nematomorpha) are equally gruesome. It used to be thought they spontaneously generated themselves from hairs that fell out of a horse’s tail. We usually only ever notice them when we accidentally squash an insect and a worm almost the size of the insect itself is ejected from its body cavity.

29-Feb Leap Day Wonders Section Image

29-Feb Leap Day Wonders Section Image

February was a time when Londoners used to complain about fleas as they tend to get more active towards the end of winter. Their jumping ability is legendary with some being capable of jumping several hundred times an hour for several days looking for a new meal. It is said if one was the size of a man and stood on the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral it would be able to leap straight over the dome.

29-Feb Leap Day Wonders Section Image

29-Feb Leap Day Wonders Section Image

On a lighter note, micromoths are another group hardly known to most of us. They are just tiny moths which because of their larger and more colourful relations just tend to get ignored. However, there are a thousand of them, mainly straw, beige or fawn in colour. We do notice those that eat our clothes as well as some of the more unusual such as the longhorns, plume moths, ermines and leaf miners. Others likely to catch our attention are the grass moths (Crambinae) which we often see running through the grass during summer picnics.

29-Feb Leap Day Wonders Section Image

29-Feb Leap Day Wonders Section Image

Stoneworts (Characeae) are yet another curious group. They look like delicate underwater horsetails but are in actual fact algae but so different they are in a class of their own. They tend to appear after ponds have been dredged but only as long as the water is crystal clear and unpolluted. They are usually coarse to touch due to an encrusting of lime. What is unique about them is that they can have individual cells up to five centimetres long which makes them the longest plant cells in the world. Several species turn up from time to time in London’s canals and ditches but Basingstoke Canal has long been the most reliable place to find them.

29-Feb Leap Day Wonders Section Image

29-Feb Leap Day Wonders Section Image

Nostoc is equally unusual. It is a cyanobacterium that is capable of creating blooms in lakes yet also lives on paths where it remains invisible until there is a shower of rain when suddenly the path is covered in small gelatinous balls. It is hardly surprising they were called witches jelly.

It would be quite easy to continue describing unusual creatures which are poorly worked upon and therefore relatively unknown, but before finishing water bears (Tardigrada) have to be mentioned. Their preferred habitat is the film of water that covers the surface of mosses.