Category: Flowers

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.

Dock and Hogweed

I happen to like fjords, I think they give a lovely baroque feel to a continent.

Slartibartfast, a venerable Magrathean planetary designer in Douglas Adams’ ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’, 1978

I feel the same way as Slartibartfast about the crinkled leaf edges and the swashbuckling flamboyance of unfurling leaf-buds of curled dock. They give this common weed an air of baroque bravado.

Meanwhile back at the Hogweed

hogweed

I’ve been following the progress of this hogweed from the emerging bud two weeks ago to the first umbels last week.

Three weeks ago, on the 9th of May I could step across the herbage at the edge of the car park to draw the unfurling bracken and garlic mustard. They’ve now been overtaken by dock, nettle and hogweed, what you might call rank vegetation except that today, after a short shower of rain (during which I continued drawing under the shelter of a large umbrella) there was deliciously fresh smell of spring vegetation.

Bee Orchid, Date Palm

Bee orchid, date palm and the laburnum arch at Brodsworth Hall this morning.

Thanks to the English Heritage garden staff for pointing out the bee orchid which were growing on a south-facing grassy bank, left un-mown, alongside the formal beds and lawns.

The date palm grows in the shelter of the sunken gardens, at the sunnier end.

Every Flower Counts

In this year’s ‘Every Flower Counts’ survey at the end of ‘No Mow May’ I’ve got double the amount of germander speedwell flowers that I counted last year.

During the time it took to count the 167 speedwell flowers, I saw one pollinator, a common summer migrant hoverfly, Eupeodes corollae. This is looks like the male.

Plant Life informs me:

Your nectar sugar could support…

14 honeybee workers for a day
4 hour-long foraging flight for an adult bumblebee
1 adult bumblebees to fly for a day

Plant Life

Nettle

nettle

Nettle drawn at Newmillerdam yesterday. The rolled leaf reminded me of the Naturalists’ Handbook, Insects on Nettles. I might take a closer look.

Nettle books
Dandelions on our front lawn

Curled Dock

curled dock

Curled dock, Rumex crispus, growing at the edge of the car park at Newmillerdam, is a common weed of rough ground, farmland and the sea shore.

Nearby another weed of rough ground, hogweed, Heracleum sphondylium, was starting to unfurl its leaves from large, hairy sheathes.