Ever since I was a young botanist I have always been attracted to the genus Streptocarpus. I first encountered it in the mist belt forests of KwaZulu-Natal in…
On my walk last week I noticed overnight that someone had adorned the hoardings of the Pegasus retirement complex building site hoarding on the Bath and Bristol…
The Witteberg Mountains are a little-visited part of South Africa that is off the beaten track and is less often visited by tourists and biologists but which…
This week I walked around a different part of Bath mainly along Walcott Street, Milsom Street and the top end of Bath. Again I found lots of empty shops,…
A striking feature of many cities and towns is the spontaneous aggregation of escaped garden plants which decorate the margins of pavements. These pavement…
One of the things about a city one lives in its silent moments or the times that it slumbers gently, often quietest just before or at dawn. This is the time I…
Once on my travels botanizing in the Hex River mountains in the Western Cape in South Africa I was in the right place at the right time. It was dusk and I was…
I love it when one sees things in one's neighbourhood that have always been there but one has never seen them before. They seem to catch one unawares yet are no…
Today I got up at 5.30 am and did a 2 hour walk across Bath and apart from an empty bus, two refuse lorries and one car saw no one. Seems Sunday is still a…
Perhaps the most resonant piece of art at the Matara Centre in Gloucestershire for me is a quiet, almost unobtrusive, sculpture of a man holding a bird. There…
The Matara Centre is a unique Gloucestershire wedding and events venue in the Cotswolds ( https://matara.co.uk/). It is owned by my friend, visionary and life…
In Bath, we have a number of regular street and indoor markets. One of our family's favourite Saturday pastimes before the Covid-19 lockdown was to explore…
I am delighted in seeing a new trend in Bath where people in flats are beginning to populate, where they can, the entrance doorways of their buildings. It is a…
One of the free floral delights in the streets of Bath City in the UK is the Adria Bellfower (Campanula postenschlagiana) which adorns many of Bath's sandstone…
On an early walk earlier this week near my house I popped in to visit the Lower Common East allotments in Bath, which is situated just up the road from where I…
Big global events like Covid-19 create their own physical debris and ephemera. In this posting I decided to document some of the many signs that businesses and…
Many shops have closed in Bath over the last few months and in my walk around the city I noticed some had closed for good. This has been a worrying trend over…
This morning I went for a very early morning stroll through my city having been inside for nearly 9 weeks. It is Sunday morning and a Bank Holiday. If it had…