Hitchin Wildlife

 Hitchin Cemetery June-July 2025 The Friends  of Hitchin Cemetery  group have been busy with their very popular free tours; the final two were in July as part of The Hitchin Festival. There have been various other visitations and trips of differing sorts, more of which later.  The Friday working party, amongst various tasks, have trimmed the grass to highlight graves near the Standhill Road entrance, including those of the Reverends Gainsford (senior and junior). This work fits in with the tone for the older part of the cemetery where meadow regions are surrounded by short mown grass giving a mixture of formal and informal areas. The two Gainsfords were both vicars of Holy Saviour church and the church has recently paid for some plants to enhance the larger of the two graves, working to a design by local author Nic Wilson: her recent series of articles in Gardening World magazine has been on the theme of 'Make a metre matter' and we have been lucky to have her s...

  Hitchin Cemetery Apr-May 2025 The fresh green leaves of the Lime trees in the cemetery entrance look stunning in early April, I hope the cemetery designer, George Beaver, would have been pleased, and should you wish to pay your respects, you can see his memorial in the North-eastern corner of the cemetery close to the big Yew.  These blog posts usually contain mostly natural history notes, but I'll start with a bit of conventional history about the Beavers...    The Beaver memorial is one of those which leads me to try and imagine what the lives might have been like for these Victorians, the details on the stone records: AMY, died June 1867 aged 84 GEORGE (senior) died May 1875 aged 90 SAMUEL their fourth son who died at Monte Video in South America in June 1877 aged 65  GEORGE their second son who died May 1896  aged 86 years A little rummaging on the internet tells me that George senior was a basket maker, and I bet Amy was too and they owned osier beds...

  Hitchin Cemetery Jan-Mar 2025 In 2015 the Countryside Management Service put on a course in Hitchin Cemetery in hedge maintenance with a professional topiarist who had trained in Japan. One aim was to consider the cemetery as a whole and create a unifying theme of curved shapes and one of the techniques studied was that of cloud topiary and below is a rather splendid example, all credit to our leader Veronica's efforts over the past nine years. It was shortly after the course that the Friends of Hitchin Cemetery started life and we look forward to celebrating our tenth anniversary next year.  The Friends group are very pleased with the brand new short guide to the cemetery created by Caroline of the  Countryside Management Service working for  North Herts Council. This leaflet has some details about how to find the cemetery and what can be seen there, and can be downloaded from the council website here: https://www.hertfordshire.gov.uk/doc/env/cms/conservation...

Hitchin Cemetery  October - December 2024 As usual in October, the Ivy along the old cemetery wall was full of flowers which attracted lots of Ivy Bees (below left), plus Honey and Bumble Bees and Hoverflies (below right) and the Ivy fruit will provide food for birds throughout the winter. When the weather got chillier the trunks of trees were a good place to find insects basking on sunny days, such as this Southern Oak Bush Cricket with its extremely long antennae (actually spotted on a Beech tree), and Batman Hoverfly (can you make out the dark bat's wing design?).   The cemetery has numerous Silver Birch trees, which look fantastic all year round and support numerous types of wildlife, some of which I'll share with you later on, but one of the old trees blew over in storm Darragh. It was cleared away very efficiently within 24hours, as shown below. Silver Birches are not long-lived trees with typical lifespan of 100 - 150 years: if this one was planted when the cemetery was...