Cuckoo flower grows at the edge of the pond and in our closely trimmed garden hedge there are a few small clusters of blossom.
Cuckoo Flower and Hawthorn
Category: Flowers
Buttercups
Meadow buttercup, creeping buttercup and pendulous sedge in our back garden (plus one stray nettle leaf).
Garlic Mustard
Garlic mustard and bracken in the clearing at the far end of the main car park at Newmillerdam. On our return journey via Seckar and Woolley Edge we saw lots of garlic mustard on the verges alongside bluebells and dandelions, growing beneath roadside oaks.
Heuchera
A group of these plants were growing on the riverbank and on a rubbly bank at the side of the riverside path behind industrial units. It looks like a relative of water avens but doesn’t have the drooping flowerheads of that species. Most of the flowers were yellowish green but some plants had flowers midway down the stem with magenta petals. A garden escape?
Next day we spotted this plant amongst the ferns at Brodsworth Hall and Gardens. It’s a Heuchera, a member of the saxifrage family from North America, so definitely a garden escape.
Opium Poppy
This opium (not Himalayan) poppy had seeded itself on one of the veg beds, so I’ve transferred it to my plants for pollinators bed and it seems to be settling in.
This foxglove rosette will be relocated too, when we put in the runner beans and dwarf French.
Butterbur
Butterbur and kingcups are in flower in a small stream or drainage ditch between the sewage works and the end Industrial Street at Horbury Junction. A fresh-looking peacock butterfly feeds on dandelions alongside the canal.
Wood Anemones
Hoof fungus, also known as tinder bracket, Fomes fomentarius, on silver birch and wood anemones at Newmillerdam this morning. I headed via the Arboretum, through Kings Wood, down into the Lawns Dike valley and up through Bullcliff Wood to the top end of the lake.
Cowslip
We planted a single cowslip four or five years ago which bunched up into a clump, so we’ve into four plants, which are all doing well in the raised bed behind the pond.
Pulmonaria
2 p.m., 20℃, 69℉ in the sun – cloudless: I cleared a square metre of what will be a wild flower and plants for pollinators bed, discarding the creeping buttercup and chicory but keeping the knapweed, dog daisy and teasel.
Woodpecker drumming, wood pigeon cooing. Coma and peacock butterflies basking.
The pulmonaria was self-sown. It did so well under the hedge that it started to encroach on the path, so we moved it to the pollinators’ bed.
A small, 1.5 cm approx., dark bumblebee with no obvious stripes visits the pulmonaria flowers, shadowed by a smaller, 1 cm, light brown bee, watching, hovering a few inches away, in fact acting like a drone in the modern sense, It then briefly pounces on the larger bee but is rebuffed after just a second.
The larger bee checks out another pulmonaria flower and the smaller bee pauses at a nearby flower, but doesn’t continue shadowing the larger bee.
I’m guessing this is a male, a drone, following a female.
Snake’s head fritillary, planted in sunken pots for its own protection against rampant chicory.
February Flowers
Some of the flowers already showing in the garden this weekend. As Storm Eunice has just gone through and Storm Franklin is about to arrive, these were from photographs taken yesterday morning.
With the periwinkle and hellebore, I found that I started in the top left of the drawing intending to keep things fairly small but as I added detail the scale changed so when I started on the lungwort I sketched the outlines roughly in pencil, allowing enough space to add detail.
I think this speeded up the whole process because I was just able to get on with the pen, knowing that I wouldn’t have to start fiddling to fit it all in.
I didn’t pencil in the crocus and the snowdrop. They consist mainly of isolated verticals, so they can be drawn individually. The branching pattern of the first three plants that I’d drawn meant that the relationship of one part to another needed a bit more care. I look for negative shapes between the leaves and when starting a new flower or leaf I look for the angle to points on the plant that I’ve already drawn.