Not Jesus In Toast, Darwin In A Leaf

I went to check on how Mr Q was getting on with cutting up the fallout from Jude in our former car park and got nice shots of Amblyteles ichneumon wasps that I found under the bark. Mulleins grow there as they love the thin dry substrate. I always look closely at them as hairy shield bugs and mullein moth caterpillars are to be found in season and the beautifully woolly leaves hold beads of moisture.

As I photographed an oak leaf nestled in the bejewelled velvet rosette I saw Darwin’s face with his pointy white beard and bushy white eyebrows looking at me. :)

Darwin wrote about Verbascum in Chapter VIII, Hybridism, in The Origin Of Species. “So that certain individual plants and all the individuals of a certain species can actually be hybridised much more readily than they can be self-fertilised."

It has been said that Darwin got his ideas for his theory of evolution by natural selection from Patrick Matthew who wrote earlier in Naval Timber And Arboriculture of his concerns that man’s interventions preventing natural selection would weaken the oak timbers available to the Royal Navy.

Verbascum, oak and Darwin’s face? It must be a sign. ;)

Darwin’s HMS Beagle became a watch vessel stationed in the Roach near Burnham-on-Crouch to deter smuggling. Eventually it ended up in a mud berth at Paglesham, sold for its timber. It has recently been discovered that the below-deck timbers are still there under five metres of Essex mud. Wish we had known that when our children we young and we used to sail our little boat up the Roach to the Paglesham Plough and Sail to have a pint and see the budgerigars.