Hitchin Wildlife

  Hitchin Cemetery August-September 2025 As usual August saw the cemetery visited by numerous butterflies, some of which were getting towards the end of the their flight period. Here are a Common Blue and the last Gatekeeper of the year.   Other insects making an appearance included a Hornet Mimic Hoverfly and a Red-legged Shieldbug   A rather non-descript flower popped up, but an interesting one: Musk Stork's-bill. Joseph Little, the first head of Hitchin Boy's School is buried in the cemetery and was a keen plant collector and collected a specimen of this plant from Great Wymondley in 1928. He described it as a "Wool alien" meaning that he thought it had been introduced to the area as part of the fertilizer made from the waste product of the wool industry. Joseph's original pressed specimen (below right) is now held by the South London Botanical Institute and can be viewed on-line.   As usual the regular Friday volunteers continue to meet to work on the older ...

 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...