Discovering the Biodiversity Heritage Library. The amazing Biodiversity Heritage Library is one of the most astonishing resources for those with an interest in biodiversity. It is an open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives and operates globally for the benefit of all. It is a consortium of natural history, botanical, and research libraries…

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Beauty in snowflakes

The snowflake is a uniquely beautiful structure created from water. How do snowflakes form? Compare one snowflake with another. No two snowflakes are identical yet all snowflakes are created from the same simple compound that is water. Two hydrogen atoms combining with one oxygen. How then is it possible that they are all different? ‘How…

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What are the holloways? Scattered across the countryside of Britain are old track ways, the holloway lanes, ancient routes across the countryside. Some of these ancient paths were stabilized with asphalt but many were left as un-metaled tracks.  In certain parts of southern England, these track-ways have deepened, hollowed out by centuries of traffic to…

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Snake-Stones a Hampshire name for Ammonites

We gathered snake stones on the corrugated shore at Charmouth. Just as hundreds of children, over hundreds of years have done, we gathered our precious little finds and took them home, turning them over and over in our pockets, little snake stones. Some still held fast in the parent rock but escaped, others caught in…

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The apple tree

The Importance of the Apple Tree. As we creep towards the shorter darker days of the year and the festival of Halloween, it is a good time to reflect upon how our ancestors viewed the switch from light to dark and their interpretation of it through the plants and landscape around them. Samhain is a…

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