Category: Flowers

Ice Plant

ice plant
bumblebee

Yesterday, 4.30 pm: The Ice Plant, formerly know as Sedum spectabile (will I ever remember that it’s now Hylotelephium?), sits in the last patch of sunlight on an early autumn afternoon as the house casts its shadow further down the back lawn. Its candy pink flower heads are constantly being visited by small bees and occasional bumblebee.

bee

The small bees are gingery light brown with 5 or 66 dark horizontal stripes on the abdomen, so they look like our regular honey bees.

buzzard
sparrowhawk

A buzzard circles over the wood and meadow, against a sky latticed with vapour trails alongside diaphanous swirls of cirrus.

dunnock

I’m eyed warily by a bird in the hawthorn hedge. I get a brief impression of an eye stripe, so a dunnock, a wren or perhaps even an autumn migrant warbler dropping in.

long-tailed tit

The blue tit and a long-tailed tit seem to have decided that I’m harmless and they’re coming to the sunflower heart feeders just a few feet away from me.

A comfortable 20℃, 69℉, here in the shade with a hint of breeze to keep it fresh.

Spear Thistle

spear thistle

Back to my Rough Patch drawing a spear thistle but I realise that it is getting to the time of year when I’m going to need to cut back. The birds have finished nesting so I can tackle the hedge that the blackbirds were raising their young in a month ago.

sketching spear thistle

Link

Rough Patch, my ‘sketchbook from the wilder side of the garden’.

Marigolds

marigold seed heads

It’s years since we bought any marigolds but they’re good at spreading their seeds around the garden. We’ll have plenty of seedlings next year at the top end of the border.

poppy seedheads

Also well able to seed itself around, the Welsh poppy. If it just spread by seed that would suit me but, unlike the marigold, it can establish itself as a perennial, building up deep dandelion-like tap roots and crowding out other flowers.

heron
Sandstone cornerstone on the Boathouse, Newmillerdam

This heron, preening in a quiet corner at Adel Dam became watchful and alert when first a buzzard and then a sparrowhawk flew overhead.

Sketches at Newmillerdam this morning.

Coastal Flowers

Restharrow, pyramidal and common spotted orchids, sea plantain and kidney vetch at Whitby and Scarborough a couple of weeks ago.

The orchids and vetch were growing at the foot of a hummocky slope on South Bay Scarborough, the result of a massive landslide in 1995 which undercut the Holbeck Hall Hotel at the top of the slope. The slope has been stabilised using imported boulders and hardcore.

45 minutes with Hogweed

hogweed

It’s forecast to be the warmest day of the week but sitting in the shade at the foot of a woodland slope at Newmillerdam it’s like having air conditioning as I draw the hogweed.

The Hogweed Jungle

hogweed

Monday morning and I’m back drawing by the tangle of hogweed, hemlock, nettle, dock and cleavers at Newmillerdam car park.

hogweed

The Mousy Scent of Hemlock

Hoverflies, hogweed umbels and curled dock leaf

Newmillerdam car park, 19℃ 68℉, humid and overcast: Luxuriant should-high hogweed, nettle, creeping thistle, curled dock and growing to 8ft, hemlock with cleavers scrambling amongst the stems. Several species of hoverfly are attracted to the umbels of hogweed or resting on leaves.

Working under an umbrella, the patter of rain on the fabric reminds me of when I occasionally camped out in my one-man tent but any fresh smell of summer rain is cancelled out from the strong smell of mice from the hemlock.

Hogweed

hogweed

Hogweed is now in full flower alongside the car park at Newmillerdam.
When I first got into botany, hogweed and cow parsley were in the Umbelliferae along with their garden relatives, carrot, celery and parsley. The preferred family name today is Apiaceae, after Apium, the name that Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder used for celery-like plants.

scanning my artwork
Scanning from my sketchbook: I tried the built in ‘Restore colors’ filter in my scanner program, Vue Scan. The filter makes the background of the page white, which is what I’m after, but it makes the greens too vivid, adding yellow.

WordPress tells me that today I’ve posted 365 days in a row, and suggests that I should keep up the good work.

Down in the Meadow

meadow

My small patch of plants for pollinators now looks a bit more like my idea of a wild flower meadow since we cut back the grasses and chicory and dug out their creeping rhizomes.

The chicory used to swamp everything else but now we’ve got creeping buttercup and dog daisy plus a few flowerheads of red clove, with teasel, foxglove and marjoram yet to come into flower. False oat and cocksfoot grass are so far the tallest plants but they’ll soon be overtaken by the teasels.