Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
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.
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.
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 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.
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
Plant Life
4 hour-long foraging flight for an adult bumblebee
1 adult bumblebees to fly for a day
Nettle drawn at Newmillerdam yesterday. The rolled leaf reminded me of the Naturalists’ Handbook, Insects on Nettles. I might take a closer look.
Sessile oak, dandelion, timothy grass, plantain, yellow flag, hawthorn blossom and seeding willow catkins at Wintersett Reservoir this morning.
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.
Cuckoo flower grows at the edge of the pond and in our closely trimmed garden hedge there are a few small clusters of blossom.
Meadow buttercup, creeping buttercup and pendulous sedge in our back garden (plus one stray nettle leaf).
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.