A Red deadnettle, Lamium purpureum, has sprung up in a pot of soil taken from the greenhouse, growing more luxuriantly than the sweet peppers that I’d sown. It’s one of the first garden weeds to emerge at the start of the season.
Red Deadnettle
Category: Flowers
Kingcups
A greenbottle settled on my sketchbook as I drew the first of the kingcups at the edge of the pond. Its blue-green metallic armour wouldn’t be out of place on a CGI robot but the it makes a living in the down-to-earth business of recycling: its maggot stage feeds on carrion.
The adult will also feast on carrion but is also attracted to flowers . . . and dung.
My macro photograph of a kingcup flower shows a cluster of stamens. The carpel, the female part of the plant, is almost hidden amongst them at the centre. The female carpels standing in the centre appear to be slightly notched on top, rather than rounded like the stamens and they’re very slightly greener.
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.
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
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.
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.
We’re on coal measures rocks, so mainly shales and sandstones, which usually weather into slightly acid soils.
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 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
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
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, 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.
Dishevelled 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
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.
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 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.