Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Our visit to the walled garden at Temple Newsam brought back memories of working on the Readers’ Digest Guide to Creative Gardening, published in 1984. Rue and goldenrod, two of the plants that I needed to draw, are still growing there and I might have drawn a stately-looking Thalictrum here too, but I didn’t spot that on our visit.
Yesterday, 4.30 pm: The Ice Plant, formerly know as Sedum spectabile (will I ever remember that it’s now Hylotelephium?), sits in the last patch of sunlight on an early autumn afternoon as the house casts its shadow further down the back lawn. Its candy pink flower heads are constantly being visited by small bees and occasional bumblebee.
The small bees are gingery light brown with 5 or 66 dark horizontal stripes on the abdomen, so they look like our regular honey bees.
A buzzard circles over the wood and meadow, against a sky latticed with vapour trails alongside diaphanous swirls of cirrus.
I’m eyed warily by a bird in the hawthorn hedge. I get a brief impression of an eye stripe, so a dunnock, a wren or perhaps even an autumn migrant warbler dropping in.
The blue tit and a long-tailed tit seem to have decided that I’m harmless and they’re coming to the sunflower heart feeders just a few feet away from me.
A comfortable 20℃, 69℉, here in the shade with a hint of breeze to keep it fresh.
Back down a rather overgrown bark chip path to my ‘Rough Patch’ in our back garden. The birds have finished nesting and it’s time to cut back.
This is my first attempt at composing a backing track in Garageband and also my first experiment with a dji Osmo gimbal mount for my iPhone.
It looks as if it’s going to be our best year yet for our cordon apples, especially the Howgate Wonder which I recently had to tie in because of the weight of fruit and leafy growth. Summer pruning seems to suit them best, encouraging fruiting spurs to form.
The weight of apples and leafy summer growth proved too much of our Howgate Wonder double cordon and one of the main branches collapsed forwards on the patio. It wasn’t broken so we tied it back in, pruned back the majority of this year’s leafy growth and picked up the eight or so apples that fell off during the process. They’re not ripe but we can stew them with a bit of brown sugar and water.
There’s just time for one last sowing for late summer vegetables. Going through the packets of seeds that we’ve already got in, there are eight that I can try but there’s only a 4 by almost 8 foot section of raised bed that I can fit them into, so I’ve gone for 2 foot squares instead of rows to get more in.
| Calendula | Carrot | Kohl Rabi | Spring Onion |
| Salad leaves | French bean | Perpetual Spinach | Pea |
Some of the crops, such as salad leaves, will stay where I’ve sown them but as we clear the potatoes and other crops over the next few weeks I’ll be able to plant some on, such as the French beans and perpetual spinach.
Our first attempt at the Great Yorkshire Creature Count got off to a good start with four elephant hawkmoths in the moth trap this morning, along with peppered moth, flame and heart and dart. I left the box wedged right up against the hedge under the crab apple so that they don’t get picked off by the birds.
I set up the trail cam on the bird table this morning but caught only the regular visitors.
Smooth newts are on the list of creatures that the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust would like us to count, so I did a bit of pond dipping. While I was at it, I skimmed off the duckweed and started taking out the slimy algae that has built up and sunk down into the pond, but this was where most of the newts were hunkered down, so I’ll leave that for another day.
Woodpigeon, dunnock, starling, bullfinch, chaffinch, magpie, greenfinch
Butterfly: Large skipper
Moths (UV trap): peppered moth, common swift, elephant hawkmoth, the flame, heart and dart
I know a lot of the species that the YWT Creature Count is asking use monitor are present but they didn’t show up on the day and I didn’t go digging about to find them.
I tried an overnight trail cam but whatever triggered it once in the middle of the night didn’t show up in the video clip.
A swarm of several hundred honey bees arrived late afternoon yesterday and found a cavity by the bathroom sink waste pipe. A few found their way into the bathroom.
We phoned a beekeeper who offered to come and remove them, using a one-way trap that would lead them out into a hive where eventually the queen would follow them, always the last one out. If we covered every bee-sized hole in the bathroom, we’d be safe using it. As honey bees can squeeze through a 6mm hole that involved a lot of masking tapes, scrunched up newspaper and one strip of cardboard under the sink.
Today though they’ve moved on. There was a bit of activity at breakfast time but nothing like when they arrived and we saw nothing all day. In the afternoon I kept watch for a full fifteen minutes, just to check we hadn’t missed them.
The beekeeper advised us to fill the cavity as soon as possible, using steel wool or aluminium foil and also to block any alternative holes they might use. Our group might have been the scouts and the main swarm might arrive later. It’s amazing how many drilled holes for aerial cables and former pipe fittings we spotted.
Yorkshire fog and cat’s ear growing around the pond.
Barbara spotted the remains of a kill by the hedge amongst the border plants: the remains of a juvenile goldfinch, only the wings and legs and a scattering of breast feathers remained. A brown long-haired cat that visits our garden and sits in wait by the bird table is the number one suspect as we haven’t spotted sparrowhawks swooping into the garden for a few months.
When I’m gardening I keep my Olympus Tough in my pocket, with LED macro diffuser fitted. These were drawn from some recent photographs.