Nature notes: holly berries

There is a good crop of holly berries this year. This is mainly because July 2013 was a sunny month. The flower buds of the holly tree are laid down in July, and the sunnier the weather is, the more of them are formed. The flowers themselves open in the spring of the following year, and the berries follow and turn red that autumn. They do not foretell what the weather will be like at Christmas. The flowers are small and white, with plenty of nectar to attract bees. Many people think of holly as a sprawling bush in a hedgerow, or alternatively as a neatly clipped garden hedge, but it is really a small, conical woodland tree that grows in the shade of oaks