Month: August 2018

Common Darter

common darter

I realised that I stood a chance of photographing this male common darter, Sympetrum striolatum, because, as its name suggests, its hunting technique was to keep darting out from the corner of the herb bed then returning to sit in the same spot, soaking up the sun on the stonework.

Thinking that it would be too restless for me to get close to it, I went for my 40-150 mm zoom lens but, when it went on to settle by the pond, I could have got close enough to use the macro. The zoom couldn’t focus any closer than a couple of feet.

darterThe female common darter yellow, which gradually fades to dark olive.

When I cleared duckweed from the pond in the early summer, I came across perhaps a dozen dragonfly larvae which were about the right size to become darter dragonflies, each of which I coaxed back into the pond.

The highlight on its compound eye is hexagonal, as are the individual lenses that make it up.

It has yellow stripes running along the length of its black legs.

Potting Bench

Our greenhouse has a bit of a question-mark hanging over it because we’re keen to keep getting away in the springtime, which is just at the time when we should be getting things going in there.

Long Hot Summer

Last year while we were away, an earlier than expected scorching spell of weather withered the young tomato plants and they never really recovered, so it was a lot of work and watering for a few handfuls of not so brilliant tomatoes.

This spring we were away so much that we didn’t put any plants in at all but we were glad of that later when it turned out to be a record-breaking hot, dry summer. They would have struggled to survive in the searing temperatures that can build up in the greenhouse.

The drip irrigation system that I rigged up a few years ago for when we go away has never been as successful as hand-watering would have been.

Shuffling Sheds

Most mornings this summer it was too hot to enjoy sitting out on our southeast-facing patio, so hot that on occasion, when I sat down to put my gardening shoes on, I’d lay down my gloves on edge of patio because the paving slabs were uncomfortably hot to sit on.

We realise that we need a shady corner where we can sit out, so our plan is to dismantle the greenhouse, move the shed down there then construct a simple shelter in its place that we can use in either sun or rain.

The Modern Greenhouse

The Modern GreenhouseWhen bought our house thirty-five years ago, we were offered the greenhouse as well (at a price of course!), so it’s going to be a wrench to let it go.

What I can’t bring myself to part with just yet is my dad’s book on The Modern Greenhouse, as I’d like to browse through it to get a bit of insight of what his ambitions were during my school and student days when he got so into growing under glass in his cedar-framed greenhouse that he had a second, leant-to, greenhouse built against the high Victorian brick wall adjacent to it.

How up-to-date the book was in 1970, I’m not sure as my dad’s copy is the fourteenth edition of a book first published in 1938 and revised only once, in 1955.

My drawing of the potting bench (top) was made on my iPad in Adobe Draw, tracing from a photograph. I’d already reduced the photograph to pure black and white but I realised that I shouldn’t be too literal as I traced it, or it wouldn’t look like a pen and brush ink drawing, so I tried to be fairly free.

Poplar Hawk-moth

This poplar hawk-moth was attracted to the ultra-violet light of a moth-trap that I set up in our garden a few years ago. They like willows, watersides, woodlands and gardens, so our location here at the lower end of Coxley Valley offers a perfect habitat.

Unlike other hawk-moths, it holds its hind-wings out at right angles so that they project in front of the fore-wings.

Drawn from a photograph on the iPad using Adobe Sketch, my first drawing using the program.

Young Dude

Richard as a cowboy, aged about 5 or 6.

If I hadn’t become an illustrator, perhaps I could have had a career as a cowboy. This photograph from the mid to late 1950s of me toting six-shooters brings back so many memories.

Richard as a cowboyThe shiny new silver six-gun in my right hand fired the kind of caps that come in a ribbon while the old gold model in my left needed to be laboriously loaded for each shot with an individual paper cap, which wouldn’t be a lot of use if you were being attacked by a whole posse of baddies.

However, I remember that it was engraved with curlicue patterns, so I reckoned that if I ever got lost in deep in canyon country, I could use it as a map.

I can still remember the smell of gunpowder and metal.

I’m pretty certain that the holster was one that my mum had made from skiver, a thin sheet of sheepskin leather. Not sure if it really was green with red trim, but I did once have a waistcoat from a cowboy outfit in those colours. The hand-knitted Aran pullover was most likely grey but probably not the kind of thing that gunslingers wore in the Old Wild West.

My drawing was made as a way of getting familiar with Adobe Illustrator Draw, a vector drawing program, using an Apple Pencil on my iPad.

Oak Apple

oak apple

Oak apples are at their freshest – spongy and sometimes rose-pink – around the time of Oak Apple Day, the 29 May. The day commemorates the Restoration of the Monarchy in Britain on 26 May 1660, when Charles II returned from exile.

The summer generation of the gall wasp Biorhiza pallida, has already emerged. As many as thirty of them live in separate larval chambers in the gall but they’re often joined by parasites and by inquilines: live-in lodgers that don’t attack the resident larvae. The variety of species sharing the gall probably explains the different sizes of the exit holes that they’ve made.

The fertilised females will go on to penetrate the ground and lay their eggs in the roots of oak trees. The larvae usually spend two winters developing underground, each in its own root gall, then emerge early in the year. This early spring generation will all be wingless and all female.

The unfertilised females climb into the branches of the oak and lay numerous eggs at the base of a bud. An oak apple forms from each bud and, as in my photograph, often several of them are clustered together. Males and females develop in separate galls.

These were on a small sessile oak growing by the towpath alongside the Calder & Hebble Navigation, downstream from Horbury Bridge.

Artichoke Gall

artichoke gall

These artichoke galls began to form earlier this summer when a female gall wasp Andricus fecundator laid a single egg in each of the terminal buds of this branch of a sessile oak.

Artichoke galls are also known as larch-cone galls or hop galls. The larva develops protected by the overlapping scales.

An adult female will emerge in the spring to lay her unfertilised eggs in the emerging catkins of the oak. The alternate summer generation of male and female gall wasps will emerge from the resulting hairy catkins galls in May or June.

This sessile oak was growing on the embankment of the disused colliery railway which formerly connected Hartley Bank to Addingford, crossing the canal and river en route.

Codlins and Cream

great willowherb

Great willowherb, Epilobium hirsutum, gets its common name codlins-and-cream because the rose pink of the flowers resembles the colour of a codlin, or codling, apple when cut into or cooked.

In my photograph taken at the top end of Newmillerdam, you can see the flower’s four stamens dotted with grains of pollen surrounding the pistil, which is made up of the female parts of the flower: the ovary, style and stigma.

great willowherb

With stamens and stigma in the same flower, how does the willowherb avoid being accidentally self-fertilised?

As a new flower opens, the pistil emerges first with the stigma – the receptive part of the flower – appearing as a furry-looking white cross in the centre. You can see that this is already dotted with pollen.

Once the flower has been fertilised the stigma is discarded and the stamens start to appear.

Coot Feet

You can tell that I took this photograph in an area popular with walkers because the coots have incorporated a walking pole into their nesting platform, here by the dam head at Newmillerdam Country Park.

The juvenile coot in the foreground hasn’t yet developed the bulging forehead of its parents, nor has the colour in its legs begun to show.

But its flanged feet match the adults in size; ideal for trotting over mud and floating vegetation and almost as useful for swimming.

Link

My Walks around Newmillerdam booklet

Bats in the Lime Trees

lime fruit and leaf
Fruit and leaf of Common Lime

Lime trees, particularly a variety of the Common Lime, Tilia X europaea, with a columnar shape, were a favourites with the Victorians and were planted in the grounds of a now-vanished villa, here in the Dearne Valley between Barnsley and Rotherham. The century-old trees were given preservation orders when new houses were built in the old walled garden.

Unfortunately, even with preservation orders, trees do eventually start to die back and one of trees here needed major surgery to keep it alive.

The nursery colony of pipistrelle bats which were resident in its cavities each year during the summer months moved to snug new quarters the following summer, in the apex of the house next door.

On Saturday evening, around 9 p.m., we watched them emerging and lost count of home many there were. I’d say well over a hundred. There would be a pause and then several would shoot out one after the other.

Some of them headed straight for the tree that had been their nursery roost, others hawked about overhead, appearing and disappearing at lightning speed in the gathering gloom above us.

 

sandstone boulder

We’re on coal measures here. This sandstone boulder serves as a garden feature at the foot of a still-thriving lime.

Just my Cup of Tea

cupa and saucer

At the weekend, we were invited to a family birthday party and I was pleased to see a set of six well-worn blue-and-white china cups and saucers set out on one of the tables in the garden.

When Barbara’s mum, Betty, died we’d got them all ready to send off to the Hospice Charity shop when our niece Joanne spotted them and asked if she could take them. It’s great to see them still in use for family occasions.

I suspect that they might date back before Betty’s time. Her mum ran a boarding house in Blackpool between the wars, so perhaps they date back as far as that. There’s no maker’s name stamped on them, so they’re not anything special, like Crown Derby.