Microcosmic

AKA Rose Hip Hop I got the melody by placing staves on the photo, so hips become notes. ALL the sounds were produced by the rose (with my help) - samples of dropping hips, hitting & sloshing branches, striking a guitar etc - changed pitch of samples, put samples through effects etc. Here's what they didn't say about Shrubstep "It's the freshest new genre around ..based on small trees and/or shrubs" The Sunday Times of Flnnnrff "This music will tear a big hole in the fabric" Bricking for Pleasure & Profit "Who'd have thunk it, etc" The Thinking Mans's Crumpet's Friend "naa mate!!" Hansard

These posters are available as downloads and as prints in my online shop microscosmic.shop Leaves of British Trees Buds of British Trees Bark of British Trees A Hawthorn bud , bursting over the course of two weeks Sycamore from bud to budburst . The stem of the bud begins to elongate and the bud scales are pushed apart. The leaves unfold and spread out their surface, as the stem grows in length.  The bud scales curl back and then after a few weeks fall off. The chlorophyll in the leaves develops fully on exposure to light, then photosynthesis begins. The leaves are available almost at once having already formed in the bud. If buds are an arboreal version of a bird’s egg, then the miniature shoots are the chicks encased in eggshells.  All over patch these embryonic shoots are breaking out. It’s one big beautiful budburst! The explosion of fresh green foliage is a such a notable feature of springtime that it’s easy to forget that the bud

Dandlion seedhead and sparkler seeds radiating from the center - sparks radiating from the center While attempting to organise my unwieldy, burgeoning collection of photographs from the patch I kept noticing something. My brain was continually making connections – "that lichen looks like cracked mud, that flock of birds resembles smoke, there's a face on that tree". Why do things in nature often look like other, completely unrelated, things in nature? The answer to this points to a regularity, order and unity in nature...and to patterns. Grain of an Oak tree and my thumb print A random arrangement of gravel. A pattern could be seen as anything that isn't random Patterns in nature are visible regularities of form - similar patterns appear again and again in  different contexts - in both living and non living things. Why is this? I think there are three overlapping kinds of explanation. 1) Laws of nature - nature has no choice – it has to o

A slightly different post this week - moving away from the patch to look at a more general subject We are in the midst of a mass extinction. These are rare events in the Earth's history, the last one wiped out the dinosaurs. This one is the result of human activity. For a person, with even the slightest concern for the natural world, the reality which confronts them is one of extinction, destruction and devastation. To take a random, recent batch of headlines from the environmental coalface - 'huge fall in African elephant population as poaching crisis continues', ‘the home of the endangered Iberian lynx is under threat’, '40% of UK species show strong or moderate declines. A baleful picture is paraded across our television screens, newspapers and social media feeds. We’re watching a catalogue of catastrophe - a dreadful litany describing a disappearing world. A word that sums this up is 'loss'. We are losing things we love - they are going day by