Ants in the Wood

Just look at the size of this wood ants nest - my friend is nearly hidden by it! I gather that these large ones can contain as many as 300,000 ants and can be several years old. To them run trails up to 30 metres long along which come a constant stream of worker ants carrying food and nest materials. It is fascinating to watch the ants carrying huge and heavy objects, sometimes much bigger than themselves.

There is one downside though, don't stand on the trail or you will have them running up your leg. And, boy, can those guys bite! They also can spray venom from their abdomens. My worst experiences tend to happen when I'm looking for mushrooms. I've noticed the best mushrooms often grow on an ant trail and my greed sometimes gets the better of my good sense. So if you see a strange British woman hopping around in a Czech forest flapping at her legs you will know it's me.

Timber

Forestry is a major industry in the Czech Republic and timber a major export. If you are sitting on a train waiting, the chances are you are waiting for a freight train loaded with wood to pass. Worse, you could be driving along a road in the Sumava National Park when you meet a huge lorry, laden with logs, coming in the opposite direction at a speed totally unsuited to the width of the road.


In the old days the logs were transported by water for example by the Schwarzenberg Canal At an exhibition in the history of the Sumava that I visited at the South Bohemian Museum in Ceske Budejovice I saw a wonderful film on work of the woodsmen. The film showed all stages in the journey from forest to sawmill, including its transportation first on wooden sledges and then by river. On the last stage the woodsmen used iron hooks to bind the logs into rafts, that they then rode down to the sawmill. The photo above comes from a site about these timber rafts, you will find it here.

Jiri Trnka - Filmmaker

In my previous post I talked about Jiri Trnka's wonderful book illustrations, but he is probably (rightly) better known as a maker of stop-frame animated films. One of my favourites is shown above - The Hand, (click on the arrow to watch the video). Trnka is perhaps better known for his adapatation of A Midsummer's Night's Dream or the Hans Christian Anderson story The Emperor's Nightingale, but this, his last film, shows the power of puppets and animation in the hands of a master to speak of important things. The film is a powerful allegory on totalitarianism and the artist, it is sad but amusing. Perhaps the best indication of its power is the fact that it was banned by the then Communist government.

When we first visited Prague, my husband, son and I went to the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in the Trade Fair Palace. This is a gallery that is often missed by tourists. It is slightly off the visitors' beaten path and I don't think people from the western part of Europe and the US really appreciate the importance of the contribution made by Czech artists to modern art, we certainly didn't before we went through the doors of the Trade Fair Palace. One of the great things about the museum is that it mixes applied and high arts, hence there is a section devoted to Trnka, including a set from one of his films. It was one of the highlights of the museum for us, especially for our son. Now years later our son is in his final year at film school and over the summer vacation a set was built on our dining room table. Jiri Trnka was partly responsible for that.

Jiri Trnka - Illustrator

I recently bought an old book from a second-hand bookshop called Legends of Old Bohemia. It was published by Paul Hamlyn in the UK and by Artia in the former Czechoslovakia, where the book was printed and designed. The book appealed to me on three grounds - firstly of course the subject matter, secondly it was translated by Edith Pargeter (see my blogpost on her) a favourite author of mine and finally the illustrations were by Jiri Trnka (illustration from book above).


I had first come across Jiri Trnka , when I was working at the Puppet Centre in Battersea. There I had come to admire Jiri Trnka as a designer and maker of animated films. In my next post I will give talk more about his animated films. But he was a man of many parts and created some wonderful book illustrations. And this book is full of them.


I also have a copy of Grimm's Fairytales (again published by Paul Hamlyn) illustrated by Trnka, and again absolutely wonderful. The last three illustrations are from it - very Trnka and very Czech.

Collecting Berries

I was very amused this summer to see on the BBC's coverage one of the RHS garden shows (Chelsea or Hampton Court) an enthusiastic presenter singing praises of a berrypicker. "You can get it in the plastic version or a deluxe wooden version." The plastic pickers' prices began at about £8. At this point I nearly choked on my cup of tea. Goodness knows what a deluxe wood version costs!

My shock was because this wonderful new device has been on sale in Czech ironmongers for centuries. And you can bet they don't cost very much at all and they are made of wood. At the Museum of South Bohemia in Ceske Budejovice I saw a lovely film from the late 1940s of lorryloads of Czechs hitting the Sumava forest with buckets for the fruit and berrypickers. They were picking bilberries and cranberries. So my advice is if you want a deluxe berrypicker take a cheap flight to the Czech Republic, better still get several for presents for Christmas. You might get your money back and you get a great holiday as well.

Fox

Just over a year ago I blogged about my meetings with Czech foxes I wrote then of how they are meant to be lucky. My meetings with our local fox have continued, often I will see it making its way across the fields as I walk up from the bus or down from the woods. And I have come to associate it with creativity, one of my favourite poems is Ted Hughes' Thought Fox, which is for my money the best poem about the writing process I know.

As some readers of this blog will be aware one important reason why I bought my Czech home is that I needed somewhere to write. It is so to speak my den, my dark hole, built into the hillside, a hill called Fox's Lair. Over the last year I have indeed started to write again, and not just this blog, and superstitiously I have partly put it down to my fox companion. Even when I do not see him, I hear him in the woods above the house, tormenting the village dogs. "Ha!" he seems to be saying, "You have sold your freedom for a bowl of meat. I have the woods, all the roots and dark places as my kingdom." And at this the village dogs go mad with vain barking.

I have put his face on my door in the form of a brass knocker, he hangs on the wall as one of a set of horse brasses, I have drawn him in oil pastels. And the more I find out about him and his place in folklore and superstition, the more I think I have found the right familiar. A month or so ago I was telling my husband about this, and how strangely although I had been writing almost continuously, my fox had kept out of sight. My husband stopped me at this point "Look, look," he said. There in broad daylight no more than a metre away from the window my fox was strolling across the grass in the direction of the neighbours' chickens.

Bark Beetles

I was disappointed to see, when I made my visit to the forest above our village, that there has been a lot of tree felling. Swathes of forest have been felled and some of my favourite spots for mushrooms disturbed in the process. Then I noticed these strange boxes on poles.

They are cause for concern, they are bark beetle traps. The bark beetle has been responsible for major damage in the Sumava National Park, sometimes called the Green Roof of Europe. Opinion is divided between those who wish to fell and dispose of infected trees and those who see the beetle's damage as part of a natural process. Direct action has happened with protesters literally hugging trees.

I am normally in the conservationists' side on issues such as this, but find myself in a quandary. I am sufficiently old to remember the destruction wrought by the dutch elm disease in Britain. I have a vivid memory of a fine line of old elms that stood on the top bank of a local field, one of which housed a rope down which the local boy scouts would slide. And I remember running and catching the leaves as the sick trees suddenly let them fall. For a few years the barren corpses of the elms stood until unsound they too fell. England lost a major natural feature, its elm trees, in a matter of months and they have not come back properly. All because of a bark beetle and the fungus that it carried. I would hate to watch the same happen here.