Category: Flowers

Skunk Cabbage

skunk cabbage

So far this month, there’s been an air frost somewhere in the UK every night. It’s also been one of the driest Aprils on record, so it’s not surprising that, compared with last year, things are a bit behind. For instance, the kingcups by our pond have only just put out their first flowers today.

woodland

Harlow Carr RHS Gardens was originally the trial grounds for the Northern Horticultural Society, who chose a site on the edge of the Dales to ensure that any plant that could survive here would do well anywhere in the in the North.

Harlow Carr is the furthest that we’ve travelled since mid-autumn. We feel that it’s time for us to get out to different places again.

The yellow hooded spadix flower heads of skunk cabbage are bursting into life on the banks of the beck that flows through the gardens.

Spurge and Foxglove

spurge

As we continue under high pressure, it’s been cold – sometimes down to below freezing on a night – and very dry. That hasn’t been a problem for the spurge, growing in my wild flower patch at the bottom of the garden. I guess that the milky, corrosive sap must work well as an anti-freeze and is perhaps one of the reasons that spurges do well in dry habitats, for instance in the dry, sometimes dusty, soil in the raised bed in our greenhouse.

spurge and insects

It isn’t the most popular of plants with pollinators: during the hour or so that I’m drawing I notice only two insect visitors, both small flies, one a species of hoverfly. The small bumble bee in my sketch was working its way around the flowerhead of a dandelion.

sandstone

We’re on coal measures rocks, so mainly shales and sandstones, which usually weather into slightly acid soils.

foxglove

The foxglove is typical of dry acid soils and it self-seeds and thrives amongst our flower borders and veg beds so, as a change from trying to establish a patch of traditional English meadow on my wild flower patch, I’m going with the flow and planting out the foxglove seedlings transplanted from where they’ve sprung up to create a woodland edge habitat.

Skelton Lake Flowers

flowers

Flowers by Skelton Lakes motorway services, near Leeds. The chamomile and sowthistle may officially be weeds but they work well alongside the prairie-style planting. The gorse at the edge of the woodland is full bloom.

Autumn Colour

  • Sunflower
  • Pot marigold
  • Carnation
  • Golden Hornet crab apples
  • Coneflower, Echinacea
  • Rose Jude the Obscure
  • Rose Jude the Obscure
  • Lady’s mantle
  • Nasturtium
  • Penstemon
  • Poppy
  • Raspberry, Joan Jay
  • Hylotelephium (Sedum) spectabile
  • Sweet Pea
  • Verbena bonariensis

There’s still some mid-autumn colour in our flower but it’s not quite as punchy as my photographs suggest: today I’ve had the Art Filter on my Olympus E-M10 II set to Pop Art. All taken with the macro lens. I’m especially pleased with the detail on fly; as it was quite a cool day, the fly allowed me to push the lens towards it without buzzing off.

The Flora of Bilberry Wood

Victorian OS Map
Adapted from Ordnance Survey, Yorkshire LXXXI.SE, Revised: 1907, Published: 1910
OS Ref: SD857 821, 54° 14′ 04″ N 2° 13′ 15″ W
Copyright Openstreetmap

Bilberry Wood was planted in the mid-Victorian period, at about the same time as Nethergill was built as a lodge.

Heather

Heather

Heather, also known as ling, Calluna vulgaris, grows in the drier parts of the wood, including on tussocks raised about the boggy areas and, here, from a crevice on a fallen pine trunk. Heather is an indicator of dry acid soils. The abundant heather and bilberry here are a sign that the wood has been only lightly or moderately grazed.

Lightly-grazed pinewood with tall heather is classified as National Vegetation Classification community W18.

Continue reading The Flora of Bilberry Wood

Dishevelled Sunflower

sunflower

A suitably dishevelled end-of-the-season sunflower which has grown from a spilt sunflower heart from the nearby feeders and which we’re now leaving to go to seed for the birds.

The feeders attract the local sparrowhawks and yesterday fluffy breast feathers were scattered across the lawn and the pond, probably marking a kill, the victim of one of our regular wood pigeons, which often peck around beneath the feeders.

A blue dragonfly whizzes past and makes a quick search by the cordon apples then returns and heads over the hedge into next door’s garden. From its predominantly blue appearance, I’m guessing that this was a migrant hawker.

Foxgloves

foxglove
Original drawing 6 cm, 2.4 inches across.

Our first visitor since March: Barbara’s sister Susan joins us for a socially-distanced coffee and bran loaf in our back garden. This group of foxgloves were self-sown but they’ve positioned themselves perfectly in the border. Thanks to lockdown, we’re more ahead in the garden than ever before and yesterday we made a trip to the garden centre to buy enough pollinator-friendly plants to fill the last gaps in the border.

bag and chair
wine glass

During the last three months we haven’t set foot in anyone else’s house, with the exception of Barbara’s brother John, who needed our assistance on a couple of occasions.

I’ve been putting my enforced spare time to good use by giving myself a refresher course in illustration and getting a bit more familiar with the work of illustrators, photographers and designers through the daily podcasts from Adobe, but I could soon get back into my usual sketchbook habit. I feel that what I’ve learnt over the past few months feeds into my regular observational drawing, even if that’s something as familiar as drawing a foxglove in the back garden.

Fox-and-Cubs

fox and cubs

Fox-and-cubs grows from between the stones by the bridge at Smithy Brook. Some years ago a few rosettes of it popped up at the top end of our lawn at the edge of the patio. Much as I like the flowers, we made efforts to weed them out because they can spread by stolons (creeping stems on the surface) and rhizomes (under ground storage stems) into turf where they are near-impossible to eradicate.

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Categorized as Flowers

Wayside Flowers

flowers

As today would have been the first of our Wakefield Naturalists’ Society outdoor meetings, Richard and I decided we would spend our one hour walk to Smithy Brook recording the species we saw.
After all the glorious sunny weather over the last six weeks, today was disappointingly overcast, breezy and quite cool, however it actually made it easier to stop and identify the plants as no-one else seemed inclined to be out and about.
We counted 59 plant species but only eight birds, as the cooler weather seemed to have dampened their spirits: we usually get skylark, sparrows and various finches and tits along the lane but today we heard chiff-chaff and yellow hammer and watched a buzzard soaring over the fields.
Because of the cooler weather we didn’t see a single butterfly. We would normally see speckled wood along the sunken lane, then peacock, small tortoiseshell and orange tips along the more open stretch.

valley
Smithy Brook Valley.

When we looked closer at the wild flowers, we spotted common vetch alongside the more conspicuous bush vetch and we almost missed a patch of ground ivy, nestling among the grass and herbage on the sunken lane. Over the last few weeks we have watched the countryside changing as the hawthorn hedges turn from fresh green leaf to frothy white blossom, giving off that wonderful musky sweet smell of spring.
Bluebells, white and red campion and Herb Robert were just a few of the species along the lane with wild garlic, white comfrey and yellow flag alongside Smithy Brook. A field dotted with meadow buttercups and the bright yellow of a patch of birdsfoot trefoil add a little brightness to the morning.

Thank you to Barbara for writing this today.

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Categorized as Flowers

Foxgloves

foxgloves

Instead of weeding out these foxglove seedlings, I’m saving them for my meadow area.

Chicory tends to take over from most of the wild flowers that I try to introduce but foxgloves stand a fighting chance as they colonise open woodland and burnt areas and they prefer dry or moist acid soils. I’m not going to be able to establish the kind of wild flower meadow that you’d find on chalk downland but I should have more success in creating a woodland edge habitat.