The sheer seasonal joy of a little doggo and her very own advent calendar... 😍 Thank you @greyauk.bsky.social and your Mum. 💚

Sets the bar that whole chunk higher for unboxing videos... 🎅#archaeology #ancientBluesky 🏺 #Santa #Christmas

Gorgeous Christmassy shenanigans from @elizacarthy.bsky.social and @jonboden.bsky.social at St Dunstan's, Cranbrook for last night of The Wassail Tour. Made my Yule. 😊🎄Had to rush off - taxi going frantic: 'Sorry I'm late, there was this song about a hippopotamus...' 😀🦛 Merry Christmas, guys! ❤️

This will be brilliant! Wendy is a fabulous lecturer who makes archaeology accessible, exciting, and often hilarious - and she's right, this'd make a great Xmas gift for the archaeophile in your fam - and it's helping fight the good fight at the same time. #AncientBluesky #Archaeology 🏺 #History

If, like me, you grow a lot of lovely insecty plants in pots and containers, here are five little jobs for this time of year which will get things through the winter months so they're raring to go in the Springtime. And yes, I'm still banging the crocus drum! 💜

And what in the world am I to wish from fifteen magpies, strafing the bluster with expectant drumrolls, chalk and coal chequering the streaked overcast, each a-seesaw on an oak's fingertips to catch the sun's last copper... And away, in a shrapnel of curses, convocation disbanded.

Top marks to National Gallery shop for its yummy display in 1600sish (?) still life. Why would one *not* want candles looking like cheese, bread and fruit? Or sparkly glass vegetable baubles, pretty, if, at the core, decidedly odd? I coveted the mediaeval glassware. And the #crustmas brooches! 🦀

It's finally getting chilly out - time to frost-protect your dahlias if you grow those flamboyant lovelies for your bumbles, bees, and hoverflies. Either overwinter in shelter or lift and take into protective custody! Link below. youtube.com/shorts/5T4Er...

Wonderful news for a quietly brilliant little bird - thanks so much to everyone involved. #GoodGreenNews

This list of people's favourite natural things to see is a treat. 😊💚

Look at this glorious idea! For the pyromaniacs and creatures of hygge among us, a whole candle a day is much more sensible dose of candlelight! Thank you @loreandordure.com for sharing this wonderment! 😍🕯️

Genuinely the best news I've had for months.

Red in tooth and claw...

Gorgeous seasonal going on in Nicola's part of the world - was just having wreathy thoughts myself... Yours is wild and wonderful @nicolawriting.bsky.social 🎄Glad you're getting back on your feet! 💚

Corky perfection. Looks like a little clover-leaf. This is the blossom-end, but corky, warty protuberances that a pumpkin sometimes grows result from excess sugars developing genetically or during particularly warm weather. Thanks for this, @lynda-art-write.bsky.social, and Happy Thanksgiving, all.

Even in the bleakest times, this little herald of the returning sun lights up the earth - Crocus are good for a sunny windowbox, doorstep-pot, or balcony, if you're short of space. Possibly also money off on some websites now, too! Here's my take on crocus - a very important plant for early bumbles!

Leeds Castle's Neverland Christmas was still under construction when I visited last week - and building it looked like the best fun ever. 😀 Much piratical cheerfulness was evident, including sea-creatures galore. ⚓🦀🦜

Most people don't realise that this part of possibly the largest colossus Ancient Egypt ever created is for storing your eraser to stop it getting dusty. #Egyptology

Me, championing Chequertrees again, in the last little part of this series - unless, fingers crossed, the seeds germinate and I have reason to make a celebratory video in the Spring! 🌱 A bit more history here on the tree's two names and its use in making BEER! 🍻

Welcome to the Iron Age. Slippery when wet.

Despite what the silly screengrab says this is about Witch Hazel, Hamamelis. Perhaps it's actually a Freudian slip, as the UK native Hazel is MUCH better for UK wildlife, and much as Witch hazels are very pretty, they have nothing to do with witches!

Very unexpected little visitor to the ivy on Saturday morning - and seemed much larger than usual! The photobombing greenbottle is trying on butterfly-wings. A third generation this late in the year is apparently unusual, but could be a sign of our changing times.

The extraordinary benefits to which human ingenuity and inquiry can be put - probiotic treatment boosts bat survival from white-nose syndrome, a catastrophic fungal infection. Just as pro-biotics balance your tum, so they balance a bat's chance at life. Thanks for this incredible work, WCS!

Yes, gardens can save the world. 😊💚 At least, our little part of it where we personally can make change. Even containers, if you have extremely limited outside space, can bring insects and birds to you through colourful, nectar-/seed-producing plants. And if you have a garden, scale up from there.

The wheel is turning, and around we go again. Into a tree canopy's withering, ivy springs up to give shelter in its place, offering the last sweet nectar before the flowerless dark, and berries to fill out the thin times. Light the fires. Broach the barrel. Life is too brief, and the winter cold.

Incredible creatures stomping along in a remote swampy area of America. Beautifully written encounter, and phenomenal image - worth a click of your morning. Thanks to McAulay Jaunsen, and to @oriannesociety.bsky.social for this surprising treat.

Extraordinary - thanks for sharing that! 😍

There's a fine Wild Service tree near here, and I've got some seeds cold-stratifying in the fridge as I type! I'm not sure I'd ever seen one in the wild before finding this huge stunner, thanks to a tip-off from a kind local farmer. He's keen to have more on the farm, so fingers crossed...

£8mill raised so far - one year left to raise the rest.* This is truly the project to rattle the bucket for - a real chance for positive change for UK Wildlife. *£22mill's a single night's TV fund-raising - IT CAN BE DONE. @patrickbarkham.bsky.social's great action on similar projects prove it.

This... challenges me. I only buy beautiful books, as my budget is very small - I'd kick anyone who marked them, including myself. And a dear old friend of mine gave his *200 yr old books* to an artist-friend to dismember and reuse, and I did not know how to respond to that. 😨1/

Ooh, I'm sure this is on the tip of my brain - another clue - smells like parsley. Any guesses, folks? 🥕

Planting bulbs, a yearly recitation of hope, half the wheel wished away. Cheerfulness timebombs, fuses unpredictable as luck.

Vampire Crab

Call out for scientists! 👇🚨 We are still looking for scientists who would like to work on a deep sea art project. A view artists are still looking for a teammate to create gorgous art and to celebrate the deep sea. 🦑 🐟 🐡 🐙 🦀 #SundayFishSketch

When you hear how a young person starts a bat club at school because she loves bats and has learned how important they are in nature and to us... you realise the world might just stand a chance after all. (Also, great pet choice.) #GoodGreenNews. Go Talia, go, and thanks @wcscanada.org 🦇

This is so true. She says, gawping at a pristine red admiral on the sunlit ivy. 🦋

The Rosetta stoned? #Egyptology #AncientBluesky #Archaeology 🏺 #pharmacology #medicine #trade #commodities

Vizier Pepy-Ankh wanted to have his cake and eat it! Specifically, a delicious-sounding creamy honey-sesame stuffed pancake, preserved by ingenious vacuum-inducing cookware for 4000 years since the reign of Pepi II. Discovered at Meir, Egypt, in 1913, it's officially the world's oldest cake. 1/

“Anything can happen, the tallest towers Be overturned, those in high places daunted, Those overlooked regarded.” — Seamus Heaney training.poems.com/poem/anythin...

That CCTV footage. 'C'est une boucle.' Clever, actually, breaking in in the midst of restoration works. Always respect an 'in plain sight' trick. Hope to blazes they get the missing pieces back, though they'll have been faked by now. 😢 (Swear to God it wasn't me, I left on Friday.)

I'd never seen so many whaups as I did in Orkney, a place whose beauty gets into the mind, and lingers. Stoats there are down to their final round-up, thanks to hard work and tech. Eradications *work*, people. Of course killing is unsavoury, but saving is everything in biodiversity crisis.

Here's a lovely thing! Become a Bat Conservation member and win a bat box! #conservation #wildlifegardening #gardening #ukwildlife #gardens

What a lovely post trip perk-up to be shortlisted in the @newwritersuk.bsky.social Sense of Place Competition! At 100 words, 'Derrible Caves, Sark' was the shortest short prose I've ever done. Huge congrats to the winners, and very many thanks to everyone on the competition team. 🌊

One of the loveliest bookshops, especially the library up beneath the 1600s beams, with an antique typewriter in a cubby for folks to play on and a table to sit and scrawl a few lines. Open windows looked out over the Seine. Interesting selections, inc @damianbarr.bsky.social's recent release. 😊

'like musical leaves' - perfect capture by @jamesgilbertmr.bsky.social

Spectacularly #GoodGreenNews : Suriname leading the world in protecting 90% of its forests, forging ahead with a prosperous forest- and biodiversity-centred economy, while working towards recognising ancestral lands of Indigenous and Tribal peoples. International coalition provides valuable support.

Ireland already felt like an attractive place to live and write, and with this news even more so. It's a wonderful country you live in @cauverymadhavan.bsky.social! 💚 I thought of you, @erinconnally.bsky.social also? #arts #basicincome

Everything they've ever told you about voles is true! 😀 Well, maybe not 100% true. I was so chuffed to find vole tunnels in the long grass around the base of the new(ish) hedge-planting - and a few trees had been nibbled. But owl pellets more than made up for it! #wildlifegardening

Hedge care tips for settling down a recent hedge-planting for Autumn - open up the base for light, air and moisture, but leave plenty of cover for little creatures who've hopped in to take advantage of the habitat you've created! 🐸

Experimenting with end cards and trying to usher people gently from a short to a video. It likely won't work, but Tube of You doesn't notify the lovely folk who've followed along for my ramblings of shorts. Which is frustrating. Still - apples are marvellous! Half for me, half for the birds.