Tim Holt-Wilson

@timholtwilson.bsky.social

820 Followers 372 Following

The story of the Earth - geoconservation, museums, the poetry of things old & wild - based in East Anglia, UK. https://futureheritage.wordpress.com/

A potted Broadleaf Plantain (Plantago major) on a white-tiled windowsill. It has a rosette of many broad leaves and several tall flower spikes rising from it. Tree branches can be seen through the window. Sunlight is playing on the leaves.
A strand of microscopic algae with cells looking like a stippled ribbon.
Micrscopic copepods like little sparks in watery space.
A green drainpipe leading to a green gutter which is filled with rainwater coming off a tiled roof dotted with pads of moss on a redbrick cottage in Suffolk.
A gritty tufaceous deposit with a very uneven, knobbly texture. It is pale grey in colour.
A black polythene field drain emerging from the side of a ditch with a stiff drippy, looking deposit of gritty tufa almost completely blocking it.
A green teasel leaf with patches of white mildew.
A complex of red bramble stems and green leaves, set against a background of dry, grassy sward.
Four damp pads of moss in a terracotta bowl.
A remarkable microscopical darkfield photo of a pseudoscorpion, length perhaps 3 mm. It has red claws and pedipalps, white legs, orangey thorax and a yellow abdomen with brown horizontal bars across it
A pseudoscorpion with a an elongated, amber-coloured body and red pincers on long, jointed red pedipalps. The eight legs are clear and uncoloured.
Plump, green pads of moss on a tiled roof with upright sporophytes decorated with sparkly raindrops
A photo from 1910 showing Rev Leonard Holt-Wilson and his daughter Edith on the diving platform at Redgrave Lake, Suffolk. Leonard is seated on the platform and Edith is seated on the gangplank with her legs drawn up and a broad-brimmed straw hat on her head. The other side of the lake is visible in the hazy distance, with mature oak trees coming down close to the water. The picture has had all its thrips removed.
A pert but yellowing pad of acrocarpous moss with some sporophytes sticking up: set against the background of a roof made of old peg tiles.
A fly paper hanging from the ceiling studded with dead flies. The effect is decorative but macabre.
A print of the portrait of Thomas Paine by Romney. It is a half portrait and shows the subject next to a table with papers. Paine is leaning g slightly towards the papers, as if he were just turning from his desk. He is well dressed and has an amiable, intelligent expression and a slight smile.
Creeping Thistle (Cirsium arvense) making a show of nectar-rich mauve flowers in a field. There are trees and blue sky in the background
Over 0.5 metres of sand from a sediment core laid out on a straw mat next to a tape measure. The first 20 cm of sand are fine, grey then grading down into medium, yellow.
A field full of thick grass with woodland in the distance. A group of researchers can just be seen waving in the middle distance.
A woman and two men (Prof Helene Burningham; Gilbert Addison and Les Leach) carrying out sediment coring in the middle of wheat field. Gilbert is holding up a green umbrellas a sun shade and Helene is pushing the core into the ground. The cross-bar handle of the corer is outlined against the sky.
A close-up photo of two of the winged ants. They have the typical glossy black exoskeleton and cordate head of L.fuliginosus.
The attractive cover of a 'Prospects' leaflet advertising training courses for young people, 2005/6. The artwork is in cartoon form and depicts a young man and a young woman in colourful clothing seated around a table, discussing some paperwork.
A drystone wall made of roughly rectangular blocks of honey-coloured Jurassic limestone. The blocks have been snugly fitted together horizontally, and the uppermost row are set vertically along the top of the wall. There is some stony rubble in the foreground and some trees with blue sky and clouds in the background. The scene is viewed through a car window and the grill of a wire fence. It is a pleasing composition with a complex of layers.
Dark green, heart-shaped leaves with a sparkling gloss on them, caused by a waxy surface.
A black and red wasp with long, black legs hunting over sandy ground dotted with dried rabbit droppings. Hot sunlight casts stark shadows.
The flowering spike of Yucca filamentosa plant, a native of the SE USA. The plant is about 2 m high and consists in a dense cluster of cream-white flowers rising from a clump of dense, radiating, strap-like pointed leaves.
A looping caterpillar on the underside of a Wych Elm leaf seen under UV light at night. It is showing up as pale blue against a predominantly purplish-red background of the leaf with blueish ribs.
Members of the SFG roving through long grass with alder trees in the background.
A gnarled looking brown flint boulder covered with condensed moisture. The stone is embedded in a gravel trackway and has chilled the warm, sweaty atmosphere to dew point.
A man stands next to a tree guard made of wood and wire netting containing a Black Poplar sapling. He is standing in thick grass with willow trees behind.
A ladder is leading down to the bottom of the trench. A plastic sewer pipe can be seen near the foot of the ladder and a black flexible pipe is leading up into the hole.
Curled and distorted leaves on a cherry tree. Groups of black aphids can be seen under two of the leaves.
Prof Carl Sayer (wearing an orange coat) explaining the finer points of pond restoration. About twelve people are listening to him near a shallow pond , with a wood in the background.
A file of about 25 people walking through open birch woodland towards a pond. Someone has a green umbrella. A patch of blue sky can be seen above trees in the distance
A horse leech (Haemopis sanguisuga) looking like an elongated, dark-coloured worm with a tapering head end. It is seen in shallow water in a white collecting tray, along with two water lice (Asellus sp) and some floating duckweed plants (Lemna minor)
A large group of naturalists investigating plants and invertebrates on a summer outing in Suffolk. There is marshland and a lagoon in the middle distance and a low line of wooded hills in the distance.
A scrum of spiky-looking, shiny black caterpillars eating nettle leaves. There is safety in numbers.
A female Green Drake Mayfly seen in profile on a broken twig. He has big, clear wings with dark markings. She has a long abdomen, also with dark markings. She is sitting up in a spectacular way, with her head and forelegs raised.
A large white sheet on a washing line, with a red plastic laundry basket on the ground at the left side of the picture. There are oak trees in full leaf and glimpses of blue sky in the background
The bristling leaves of a hogweed plant sprouting from a crack in a concrete patio. Some outdoor furniture can be seen nearby.
A swampy area of land, with sedges and alder trees. A human figure is standing in a glade in the background. The scene is lush and green.
A colourful diagram showing pathways whereby neonic pesticide pollution gets from domestic dogs and cats into the aquatic environment.
Two splats of rufous brown pigeon droppings on the polished surface of a car bonnet. The splats have dried, showing surrounding fields of ejecta and internal polygonal desiccation structures reminiscent of mud cracks.
A close-up photo of the chert at about 20x magnification. It is composed of lots of little, grey, oolithic-looking grains set in a fine-grained white matrix. The largest grains are about 1 mm in diameter; the smallest are perhaps 0.2 mm / 200 microns.
A man in a white hazchem suit spraying Pirri Pirri Burr plants on a grassy heath with Glyphosate herbicide. There are some people in the distance.
Two click beetles coupling on a grass leaf but - strange to tell - one of them is hanging belly-up.
Willy Lott's Cottage near Flatford Mill, Suffolk. Rain is stippling the surface of the mill pool in the foreground. Fringing reeds and trees make complexions of green around it.
A large Ash stub, hollow at the base and showing rotten heartwood. The living wood is growing well and partly occluding the hollow. A limb may have broken off here at some time, perhaps 30 years ago.