grounds used for an increasing number of events. This may have led to thinning of the
vegetative cover, giving the bees more opportunity to burrow.
The slope is home also to a rare plant in this area, Birdsfoot, Ornithopus perpusillus,
which is low growing and perhaps may not be affected by the trampling. However
another rare plant in the area which grows here is Harebell, Campanula rotundifolia).
This, I suspect, will not benefit from humanity in the same way as the bees may be!
Doing a search on the internet for Andrena cineraria a day after contacting Peter, I
was surprised to find an entry relating to Wanstead Park; what was even more surprising
was that it was my own - a record from 2009. I had photographed a bee (see Plate 10)
that I hadn't seen before and had tentatively identified it as A. cineraria. However it
was so tentative an identification that I'd forgotten it! That particular specimen was
found a little further south in the Park than the Temple, on 19th April.
A tiny wonder in the corner of the black shed
Rodney Cole Elizabeth Cottage, Bells Hill Road, Vange, Basildon, Essex SS16 5JT
At the top of our south-facing meadow there stands a long black shed, with its broad,
corrugated-iron door opening to give a generous view of the sweep of grassland and
fruit trees occupying the slope downhill. In springtime, the sunshine pours into the
aperture created when the door is allowed to swing open, bringing warmth and life to
the otherwise dark end of this decades-old structure, and the early insects bask and
buzz, enlivened after several months of deep-winter torpor.
The age of the shed is a mystery. Like so many black sheds, it consists of corrugated
iron sheets pinned upon a rough timber frame, and such is its age that it hugs the
shape of the hill, its roof curving with the lie of the land, so that it embraces the very
hillside of which it has become part. Periodically, black bitumen has been regarmed
upon its outer surfaces, and periodically due repair and replacement of the sheets has
taken place, so that it is now impossible to determine which parts, if any, of the structure
date from the original construction. It goes on, seemingly interminably.
Immediately behind the shed an even older oak pollard grows in the hedgeline, and it
is this tree that gives the shed its particularly sheltered advantage - that, and the fact
that the hill carries on uphill beyond the oak, so that the coldest nor-easterly winds of
winter are deflected by the hillside and the nearby hedges. The shed occupies a distinctly
favoured location, on a promontory which commands a broad view of the Thames-side
marshes - a prospect which in winter is open to the savagely cold blasts which funnel
through the valley from the North Sea.
Like so many old hedges, the straggly line of bushes behind the shed harbours a
considerable variety of wild plants during spring and summer, and there is one particular
spot which, year in and year out, supports a sprawl of jack-by-the hedge - known as
14 Essex Field Club Newsletter No. 62, May 2010