Category: Garden

The Nectar Thief

bumblebee on salvia

At Cannon Hall garden centre, this bumblebee was busy visiting the flowers of a salvia but instead of entering the flower in the usual way it was using the back entrance, checking out those holes nibbled in the back of the flower and bypassing the stamens and stigmas. It occasionally paused, apparently to do a bit of nibbling itself, perhaps to enlarge an existing hole or start another.

Grapevine

grapevine

At Hilary’s Village Store in Cawthorne we sit under a vine laden with bunches of small green grapes. We’re told that this vine is a cutting from a desert grape grown in a large south-facing greenhouse in Scotland. There the grapes were edible – although they were best eaten outside in the garden so that you could spit out the seeds – but here, outside and north-facing, they’re not going to ripen enough.

scone

However we didn’t come here for the grapes, in a village tea garden it had to be cream scones with our lattes.

Link

Hilary’s @ Cawthorne

The Nature of Lawns

My sketchbook spread of found objects picked up on a lawn has an autumnal feel. We’re not quite there but on a dull August day there’s a feeling that the end of summer is looming.

Fine rain this morning picked out orb webs with glistening droplets.

sketches of lime leaf, snail shell and feathers

I started this page at a family get-together yesterday afternoon in West Melton, near Rotherham, in a garden with several lime trees, planted in Victorian times. There were hundreds, probably thousands, of the limes’ helicopter seeds strewn over the lawn but so far not many leaves. This green heart-shaped leaf may have been torn off the tree in recent high winds but, because of the prominent damage, I wonder if the tree deliberately jettisoned it in an attempt to rid itself of whatever herbivore was starting to nibble holes in it.

Sketches of bluebell seedpods, dandelion seedhead, apple leaf and snail.

The robust bluebell stem with upward-facing seedpods is probably Spanish bluebell, which was often planted in gardens but which has naturalised and in some places threatens to oust our native species.

Wood pigeon feather

Sweet Peas

sweet peas
sweet peas

As the lockdown eased at the beginning of February, I couldn’t resist buying a packet of Spencer Mixed sweet pea seeds to sow indoors on my desk in the studio. I set them off in toilet roll tubes but as I was using garden soil from the greenhouse they had a bit of competition from seedlings of chickweed and sowthistle growing up amongst them.

iPhone sketches
Drawing of house in Adobe Fresco

The sweet peas were drawn with an Apple Pencil on my iPad in Clip Studio Paint, using the ‘Wet Blotting Ink’ brush for adding the colour. The brothers above (one morphing in a Pokemon character) were drawn in the iPhone version of Fresco, using a Bamboo stylus, as, so far, you can’t used the Apple Pencil on an iPhone screen.

The house across the road is another iPhone Fresco drawing, this time using Fresco’s appropriately named ‘Grungy Inker’ pen. I wonder if a matt-surfaced screen protector would make drawing with a stylus on an iPhone more controllable.

The Foxes’ Ball

anxious fox
cartoon fox

They brought us:

  • one pink-and-yellow cricket practice ball (which I must return to our neighbours’ spaniel, Rogue, two doors up the road)
  • three tennis ball in varying degrees of fluffiness and squishiness
  • two dead rats

In the veg beds they’ve flattened our seedling Musselburgh leeks, broken into the netting over our dwarf French beans and dug a series of small neat holes.

The fun and games didn’t stop with stolen tennis balls: they also dug up several of our ball-sized Sturton onions and stashed most of them at the bottom of the hedge but one was taken over to the middle of the path by the shed at the other side of the garden.

A single broad bean pod was neatly nipped off and left in the middle of the now flattened leek bed.

cartoon fox

Zeiss Victory 8×32

Trying out some Zeiss Victory 8×32 binoculars and they’re impressive for looking at the sparrows, goldfinches and tits on the feeders but if it’s cool enough tomorrow I look forward to taking them out on location on an RSPB reserve.

It looks like being a clear night, so I’ll turn them on the night sky, with a waxing moon and the ‘Summer Triangle’ of the bright stars Deneb, Vega and Altair over the wood, so we’ll be looking towards the Milky Way. The the ratio of magnification to the size of the objective lenses, 8×32, gives them good light-gathering powers, better than the same binoculars in the more powerful 10×32 version.

They’re equally impressive for close-ups: at 6ft 4inches tall, I can’t quite focus on my feet, but if there was a dragonfly on the ground just three feet in front of me I could easily focus on that.

Every Flower Counts #2

I didn’t have a ball to throw over my shoulder to select my random square metre for last month’s survey but since then a fox has deposited this cricket practice ball in our back garden. I must return it to Rogue, the springer spaniel two doors along from us.
The flowerheads of ribwort plantain and catsear fell just outside my square metre.

It’s the last day to take part in Plantlife’s ‘Every Flower Counts’ follow-up survey, in my case to see how our front lawn has progressed since its last mowing at the end of ‘No-mow May’.

In my randomly chosen square metre there are just 9 white clover flowerheads, most of them already partially going to seed, so my nectar score is a little disappointing:

But it is a lot better than my ‘No Mow May’ score because a handful white clover flowerheads can produce more nectar than the 75 germander speedwell flowers that I counted last month so the lawn is producing 10 milligrams of nectar per square metre, an improvement on the 1.7 at the end of May, and the whole lawn can potentially support 13 bees, up from 2 in the last survey.

Horseshoe Geranium

pelargonium

The horseshoe geranium, more accurately known as the zonal pelargonium, is a hybrid species whose wild ancestors grew in Mediterranean climate zones. Because it wasn’t suited to surviving our winters, gardeners used to keep it going through the winter as stem cuttings. This can mean the expense of heating a greenhouse and there is the possibility of plants being susceptible to virus, so it’s more usual these days to grow it from seed.

Our neighbour has grown some this year and gave us this plant as a small seedling. It wasn’t too happy growing on our kitchen windowsill and its leaves turned red. We’ve discovered this was probably because it was getting too cold at night. It’s thriving now though in its small pot. Apparently if you give them too large a pot, they put their efforts into vegetative growth instead of flowering.

pelargonium flowerhead

The flowers have no scent but the leaves have a pungency that reminds me of dustiness. This probably dates back to my childhood experience of geraniums, which were often leggy plants growing on dusty windowsills in primary schools.

flowers from the garden

The cold hasn’t just affected our indoor geranium: the sweet peas have been very slow to start flowering and the three stems in this bottle are the first we’ve picked.

basil
Basil: we did grow some from seed earlier in the year, but this is a plant from the garden centre that we’re growing on.

Wentworth Castle

Meadow vetchling, heath bedstraw and cocksfoot grass in the Deer Park at Wentworth Castle, artichoke, a grass-head, a multi-stemmed cypress trunk and a dead hedge in the gardens around the house.

Taken using the macro lens on my Olympus OM10-D E-10 MarkII DSLR except for the cypress, taken on my iPhone 11, as I couldn’t get the angle that I was after with the macro.

Astrantia

small tortoiseshell

At first glance you might not suspect that Astrantia was a member of the cow parsley family, Apiaceae, but the little umbel of the flowerheads and the rosette of bracts are a clue. It’s popular with pollinators – such as this small tortoiseshell at Wentworth Castle this morning – and long-lasting, so we think that we could find a space for it in our flower border.

Diana’s Sheds

Catching up with our friend Diana is hot work this morning, sitting in her conservatory overlooking the back garden, in contrast to midsummer’s day when there were a few patches of frost in the Dales and our thermostat switched on the central heating for the first time in months.