Brighton Station to Seven Dials – a walk with plants

Posted on July 21, 2026 by roundhillrob

On the 15th of July I walked up to the Seven Dials via Brighton Station on a beautiful, sunny day – and I happened to have a camera with me.

Walking along a narrow alleyway between the back yards of houses I reached a place where a residential road met the alleyway. The alley is a couple of feet higher than the road, and they join with three steps. One or more local residents have decorated these steps with plants in pots.

At the end of the alley I turned west and walked uphill to the highest point of this road where the Council have created three small gardens (flower beds really). A noticeboard tells us that this is a rainwater interception garden designed to reduce flooding by offering a soak-away. Certainly the Council have helped in the creation of several interception areas on sloping roads where rainwater running downhill has previously caused flooding at the bottom of the hill. These features are engineered to divert flowing water off the road and into catchment hollows where it can sit and slowly soak into the ground – the best known one is probably in Carden Avenue on the edge of town.

Two of the three beds forming this ‘rainwater interception site’.

Being at the top of the hill these beds cannot work in the same way, they will only capture rain falling on them or running off the adjacent tarmac. Nonetheless they offer a better streetscene, and are part of a necessary road narrowing. Perhaps a couple of silver birch trees would add height to these plantings?

Continuing downhill now to the Seven Dials – a place where seven roads meet, probably named after the Seven Dials junction in London. But that junction has the benefit of a central tall seven-sided stone column, each face displaying a sundial – so the name makes more sense.

Whilst navigating the junction I passed a venerable elm tree, and ran my hard around its bark. In 2013 the Council planned to fell this tree as part of a road improvement. Protest at felling a healthy elm was quick to develop, and after two protestors spent a night in the tree to stop the felling the Council relented. Without that protest this fine tree would have been lost.

The Seven Dials elm tree
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A few garden wildlife stories

Posted on July 21, 2026 by roundhillrob

In the last few weeks we have watched a tall ragwort be stripped of leaves by lots of very hungry caterpillars (cinnabar moth caterpillars specifically). I don’t think the rainless month has helped the plant put on new leaves.

early on the beasts were small – but they eat and grow
Later on the leaves all went – this is the last caterpillar I saw – hopefully he later climbed down and transformed into a pupa safely underground.

On the 8th July I was reading in the garden when I noticed several flying ants on my chest, or rather, stuck in the hairs on my chest. They seemed happy to be helped out and usually sat on my fingertip as I raised it high to give them a better launchpad – they are not very powerful fliers, and of course they lack practise.

This one had managed a very short flight from outside the nest just a couple of feet to this ‘elevated place’ on a sundial. Its next flight went high out of my sight.

There were three members of the swift/swallow clan hunting the ants high above me, and later in the afternoon I watched a herring gull walking calmly around the road pecking up more flying ants which had crash-landed. Fortunately for the gull most drivers slowed down for it.

Finally a solitary bee tale. I made some bee dwellings earlier this year nand have waatched bees come and go, bringing pollen to the holes, then reversing in to lay an egg, then closing the nest with mud before repeating the process until the hole is full of eggs and closed off. But I have also seen a hole closed off with green leaves (rather yellow as they dry out). This led me to keep an eye open for the source of the leaves. Proved very easy because they like rose leaves and a nearby shrub had clear signs of leaf-cutter bee work.

The reddish-brown filled hole is mud, but the one just above it is filled with carefully cut bits of leaf.
And this rose bush clearly shows the work of the leaf-cutter bee – neat circles cut from leaves to line the tunnel nest and (rather more chewed up) used to close the full nest.

If you have been, thank you for reading.

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A verbal ramble on garden wildlife

Posted on June 3, 2026 by roundhillrob

Our garden is about a thousand square feet – small, but in near-central Brighton, where many terraced houses have only a small yard, it is fairly big. It is also lightly managed – some might call it unkempt, chaotic, wild. They would all be correct.

The Sussex Wildlife Trust (in a recent on-line 10 point ‘Gardening for Wildlife’ course) had as the final piece of advice: “Resist the urge to tidy up”. I have long resisted. I also like the flower spikes of all grasses, and they only develop their full potential if you cease to cut the grass.

A couple of weeks ago I saw a magpie hunting in the long grass. It moved stealthily, more walking than hopping, and head-turning to peer down all around itself. A sudden jabbing thrust of the beak and it had hold of a beautiful 10 inch long pale brown slow worm The magpie hopped to a nearby stone step where it flayed the slow worm against the sandstone slab time after time. A slow worm is all muscle and would normally twist and turn to escape, but after that beating it was easy for magpie to pick it up in three loops and fly off – presumably to its nest and hungry young.

I was shocked and then fascinated by the scene as it ran. I do not let the grass grow and flower, build piles of dead wood for cover, nor stack the prunings of shrubs and trees to build a dead-hedge just to feed magpies, but I am delighted to learn of that particular benefit of creating a wildlife-friendly garden.

A slow worm I met one summer – when the grass near the house was cut short for sitting and sunbathing.

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A walk in the cemetery – always interesting, sometimes annoying.

Posted on March 16, 2026 by roundhillrob

Sunny 4th February, headed to Woodvale and Extra-mural cemeteries, my nearest green space. In the Extra-mural I saw more broken monuments than ever before, mainly stone crosses broken from their bases – perhaps pushed over, possibly broke away during the tidy-up process of removing ivy.

one of six seen in the same part of ‘Monument Valley’ – the sheltered valley floor of the Extra-mural cemetery

But the gradual decay of 100 year old structures is inevitable, especially when there is no regular attention paid by visiting relatives, which I believe is the norm here. I have only seen a couple of these old graves showing evidence of recent visits – weeding, flowers in vases and the like.

Nature is still active – these snowdrops may have been planted long ago, but they have taken it upon themselves to thrive and spread.

There is a pleasing mausoleum at the western (lower) end of ‘Monument Valley’, erected for Edmund Chaplin Baldwin, and later his son. The two interments there were in the 1930s and 1970s and the building has an Art Deco feel to me, but others call it Byzantine revival (not my field, mate). It certainly is Grade 2 listed, so it is sad to see most of the panels of stained glass have been broken.

The architect of the Baldwin mausoleum was a prolific local man – John Leopold Denman – who also designed the Masonic Lodge on Queens Road, the HQ of the Citizens’ Permanent Building Society at 20-22 Marlborough Place (now a restaurant just north of the King and Queen pub) and many pubs including the Duke of Wellington in Shoreham – an excellent ale-house.

The local historian Moira McQueeney, ran tours of the cemetery and told the story of the family keeping deckchairs in the mausoleum so they could visit in good weather and picnic in the sunshine in comfort.

Elsewhere I spotted a grave to Richard John Brassey and immediately wondered if he might be related to the Brassey family which once resided in Hastings (1868 – 1886) and is largely remembered today for travelling around the world on the steam yacht ‘Sunbeam’ – the whole family, guests, servants and family pets – which was recorded in the then best selling book ‘A Voyage on the Sunbeam by Mrs Brassey – our home on the ocean for eleven months’

But I don’t think he was – I could find no link between the two Brassey lines. Our Brighton Brassey did not live in Brighton, his address was Albert Mansions, Victoria Street, London. He died in Brighton in April 1888 at the age of 77. He was single and had served as a surgeon in H.M. Indian Service. He left £44,000 in his will – which is the equivalent of over six million pounds today, which makes me think there is more to learn about this guy.

Just a couple of pleasing pics to finish this ramble – on the north side of my monument valley there a series of grave structures built into the sloping valley side – sort of family catacombs. One caught my eye because of the gothic stone frontage and the cast iron post and chain fenced ‘front garden’ space for overflow graves.

even the doors of the tomb are made of slabs of stone!

Having walked all around both cemeteries I headed for home down a pretty path at the very southern edge of Woodvale cemetery.

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Joining the Open Garden Event

Posted on February 22, 2026 by roundhillrob

Here on Round Hill in Brighton a dozen households have decided to open their gardens for local inspection by curious neighbours. No doubt we all have our specific reasons for taking part but for me it is to celebrate sharing the small piece of open space currently in my control with the many and varied other species jostling for access.

Male blackbird hogging the drinking water for a bath

The piece of Round Hill which supports a Society probably has an active core of a dozen people, whose activity and publicity encourages maybe a further twenty or 30 people to get involved. This is out of about 1000 households in all – not by any means everyone. There may be hundreds more who like the sense of community created by the actions of the Society, and there are some who are unhappy with some aspects of the plans – who might prefer weeds be sprayed to keep streets clear, rather than celebrate these wild flowers in season.

Cinnabar moth caterpillars on ragwort in a grassy space (not a lawn for sure)

On the wild animal front most people seem pleased or at least curious when we started to patrol a long flight of steps linking two roads in order to count amphibians making their way across the steps to their breeding ponds each spring. Initially people using the steps in the evening did not know what random strangers were doing shuffling about with torches (or the modern equivalent – the smart phone lamp) peering into crevices in steps and adjacent walls, but soon they were made aware of this annual migration and most were at least careful to use their own phones to avoid stepping on newts, frogs and toads.

Frog in garden pond, cheeks inflated for croaking.

Back to my garden. I want people to see that a simple act like making a small hole (4″ across) in the bottom of our many flint and mortar garden walls can make it easier for those same amphibians to move across our urban landscape to breeding ponds and back to their living areas.

Freedom to move across the gardens is no problem for flying beasts, but they need food, shelter and breeding spaces, and we can help in all three areas. Insects need food from flowers (leaves, nectar and pollen) and breeding places (hollow stems of plants that died last season and have been left standing, patches of food plants not always seen in garden, such as nettles and honesty, ragwort and ivy.

Comma butterfly feeding on Daphne odora – an early nectar source

Hedges provide shelter and nest sites for birds, even a dead-hedge will be used by wrens and other low nesters. Long twigs and small branches from regular pruning can be stacked between rows of stakes to form a dead hedge, three four or more feet high. Plants and insects will move in, providing food for more species.

Slowworms need shelter to be safe from cats, and foxes – dead-hedge and nettles help.

These are just a few ways to make the gardens we have better for more species – and also my explanation for why my garden looks untidy for much of the year – its not untidy, you are simply not seeing it right.

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A new sweater after 30+ years!

Posted on December 9, 2025 by roundhillrob

Its June since I last posted – I’d like to say I have been soooo busy, but truly I have been lazy, uninspired, doubting what an old man should be doing to make a difference. I doubt this will make a difference, but perhaps for those still believing in the value of ‘Black Friday’, the call to support largely Chinese production and the sale of cardboard packaging.

Anyway, about 35 years ago I bought a lovely Norwegian wool sweater, over the last three or four years a combination of moths and wear have created holes. I have taken up darning – not well, but effective.

Even so the sweater has retained the shape it gained when I got up to 99 kilos (just one kilo from OBESE). Now I am lighter and a little thinner the darned sweater is loose on me. Not as stylish as I’d like.

At a conference on Saturday 29th November I spotted another old balding bearded man in a new Norwegian sweater. He said the best selection in England is to be found in the Norwegian Shop in Keswick in the Lake District. They have a website. I found the modern equivalent of my sweater.

I KNOW, the tension is mounting!

I ordered one. £129 – but if this one lasts 35 years I will be 110. OK, maybe I should have bought it 25 years ago to get most value from it.

I’ve kept you waiting long enough (if you didn’t already scroll down to see it) here is a picture of the old one (paler stretched and darned) and the new slightly different design on top – indicating its new status.

You can see some of my darning on teh right cuff – should you be minded to look.

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Chestnuts and leeks

Posted on June 2, 2025 by roundhillrob

Last Christmas I found chestnuts, cooked and vacuum packed, in Sainsbury’s supermarket. I did not use them as part of Christmas dinner, but bought them just to eat – and they were excellent. A couple of weeks ago they were in store again – I bought more but wanted to cook with them.

Some very nice leeks in the market reminded me of a recipe I cut out of the weekend paper months before. A galette with leeks and cheese on top of a layer of cream cheese and ground pistachio nuts. I simply replaced the pistachios with chopped chestnuts to bake my own version.

Wholewheat pastry folded up and round the heaped filling, baked perhaps a little too long (blackened cheese topping). Delicious none-the-less.

Still about 100g of chestnuts left three days later, and I saw a recipe on the packet. This was for a vegetable pie, what my step-father would call a ‘covered waggon’, just a pastry top, no under-layer. The recipe called for asparagus, but I prefer my asparagus steamed and buttered with bread and butter. Substituted broad beans (the last of our own, grown in teh front garden) and mushrooms. Peas and chestnuts as per recipe.

The creative extra pastry stuck on top was Jackie’s doing – waste not, want not. Big enough for four portions, with a few new potatoes.

I could have eaten a bigger portion, but it has far too many carbs for good management of my diabetes. A big part of my enjoyment of these baked pies is the delicious smell whilst cooking.

Tonight’s portion will have to be heated, so will use the oven for roasting some cooked, crushed and oiled new potatoes to glorious crunchy-capped goldenness.

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Recent Partial Eclipse of the Sun – viewed.

Posted on May 19, 2025 by roundhillrob

On the 29th March this year there was a partial eclipse. Most people probably failed to notice it, only a part of the sun was obscured and our eyes are versatile tools that do their best for us, compensating for small variations of brightness when they can. Being only a partial eclipse it would have been dangerous to those very eyes to look at the sun in the hope of seeing it – but there is a simple way to enjoy the eclipse.

A pinhole in a sheet of dark paper will allow you to project the sun onto a second sheet, and with a bit of tinkering with distances and darkness indoors (leaving the curtains open a chink of course) you will see the sun, and the slow progression of the moon’s shadow over it. Better still is one half of a pair of binoculars, or a low power telescope, to project the image onto a sheet of card. This gives a bigger image with less fuss. Let the sun shine into the larger lens, and out through the eyepiece onto the white card, like in the photograph below. No curtains were closed, it works in full daylight.

The moon’s shadow is just starting to break the full disc of the sun. You can also see the shadow of my monocular (like half a pair of bins).
A few minutes later the shadow intrudes more.

If you have been, thank you for reading.

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Huge pine needles

Posted on May 12, 2025 by roundhillrob

Just a little thing, catching up on old pics and places. Back in April 2022 we visited Wakehurst Place. Chilly day, not a lot in flower, just looking at the ground when I saw yet another thing I’d never seen before – a really long twinned pine needle. I had to pic one up, and then look up and around to see the source. A fairly small tree just a dozen yards away. I resisted the strong temptation to reach up and take a living needle, but I brought two fallen ones home.

You need to see them – they are very long.

I got the Latin name from the handy metal label on the tree – Pinus engelmannii

SW USA, known also as Apache pine. Sort of smoky look about it. But such needles.

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Moths and More – a bus out and walk back.

Posted on October 20, 2024 by roundhillrob

Up early on Saturday 17th August 2024 to catch a Devils Dyke but out of Brighton. Hopped off just over the bypass and walked with two women going to the same event at the ex-golfcourse, now rewilding site that is Waterhall. Joined a lot more people there to examine the contents of an overnight moth trap.

Oak eggar – female, a big one, perhaps 4cm long

beautiful creatures, a bit dopy in the daylight, which made handling the egg boxes, and even the moths easier. But extra challenges keeping them safe. Some fall to the grass at our feet – “nobody move until we get it to a safe place” (nearby hedgerow). Or one takes to the air, notices the sunlight and quickly seeks cover – under the brim of my hat, or under the collar of a neighbour’s jacket – help needed again. Learning co-operation from the antics of moths – who expected life-lessons?

Pretty Garden Tiger, safely removed to a spot under the hedge – we had a lot of these.

After moths we followed our leader (Paul Gorringe) to peek under some sheets of corrugated iron – adder spotting. Saw a couple as they were surprised and briefly stunned into a fixed moment before quickly taking off into the long grass. Easier to observe was the slowworm, carefully picked up and admired. It would have been unkind to pass it around (about 18 of us) but I know how they feel – dry smooth and muscular as the wind around fingers (possibly enjoying warm human skin). We have a lot on the allotment and some still survive the cats and foxes in the back garden – mainly taking shelter, warm and food in one of the compost heaps.

Then it was a walk with sweep nets to examine some of the butterflies on our flower rich chalk downland sward. Meadow browns and common blues dominated. After 3 hours a snuck away to eat a sandwich and admire the view before heading back into town. Walking across a grassy park and cricket pitch in Patcham I heard a buzzard calling. Scanned the tall trees bounding the park and finally spotted what I believe to be a buzzard – pic not as crisp as I might hope.

Buzzard in a sycamore? Certainly sycamore.

Walking into Patcham old village I noticed the end elevation of a Co-operative store. It must have been built to serve the growing Patcham community that came with inter-war development. Pleasing tiles and brickwork.

You will have spotted that the theme has moved from wildlife to built environment – and it will continue in that vein. Having walked the length of Preston Park I found myself at the BRZN Arms – that’s how the owners call it, who am I to disagree. A couple of their pleasing cloudy and fruitily hopped beers before moving on.

Outside the bar is a beautiful brick built railway viaduct, and at its foot is a pavement crossover for heavy vehicles, constructed from red and grey igneous setts. Such structures deserve (but don’t get) listed-building status, to protect them from random damage and destruction (probably in the name of progress!).

I don’t know the source of the red rock, but the grey ones streaked with whiter veins, are probably diorite from the Channel Isles. Many quarries were established there to cut and shape kerb stones and setts. They acted a ballast on ships returning to England, but unlike ordinary ballast these stones had a value.

Last architectural gem coming up. I must have walked up and down Ditchling Rise hundreds of times over the last 50 years, but only on this occasion did I notice the rare cast iron columns supporting the (common) cast iron front fences. I have seen bigger ones in Kemptown and up the hill near Hove, but these more domestic scale columns new to me. They even continue along the adjacent Vere Road suggesting this bit of development was all by the same builder.

Cast iron hollow columns – tap with your knuckles and hear the metallic ring (feel the pain as well if you do it to enthusiastically)
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