Category: Habitats

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.

The View from the Boathouse

Newmillerdam
Drawn with my new Lamy nexx with the EF nib, in brown De Atramentis ink, watercolour added later, as Barbara rang me to say that she and her brother had had to abandon their usual circuit of the lake.
swallow

The best place for me to draw at Newmillerdam on this rainy morning is the Boathouse Cafe, sitting looking out of the 200-year old gothic mullioned window with a mug of latte.

geese

Swallows swoop and glide low over the glowering grey surface of the lake. Thirty pink-footed geese – probably two or three families combined – progress sedately across the placid waters, making surprisingly little noise, considering how excitable geese can be.

coot family

There’s a family of coots with three youngsters, now almost adult size but in charcoal-and-white penguin-style livery, instead of the jet-black of the adults

On the coots’ nest by the outlet of the lake, an adult is sitting tight. This is a popular little nesting platform, now with it’s own mini-garden of herbage, and I think several families of coots must have been raised here over the last few months.

duck

In the shallow film of water cascading over the top course of masonry of the outlet, mallards are dabbling. The lake has its backwaters, opaque and eau-de-nile today, but here there’s always a flow, so always the chance of some invertebrate or seed being washed down.

Two ducklings are swimming nearby. I’ve seen smaller ducklings stuck below the horse-shoe cataract of the outlet, unable to make the leap back up again, but these two seem just about old enough to escape the dangers.

duckling

Dandelions and Double Yellows

Oxford ragwort

Helen Thomas’s paintings at the opening of her Dandelions and Double Yellows show at Wakefield Cathedral celebrate street flowers, such as the willowherb, sow thistle and Oxford ragwort that I spotted at Bank House on Burton Street.

Professor Mike Collier introduces Helen Thomas’s ‘Dandelions and Double Yellows’.

We were on our way to the Museum at Wakefield One to take a look at another inspiring exhibition, also opening this weekend, which brings to life the letters of Charles Waterton in a suitably Victorian combination of paper craft and magic lantern show, with narration and readings by Sir David Attenborough, Sir Michael Palin, Chris Packham, Liz Bonnin and Waterton Discovery Centre countryside ranger, Dave Mee.

Helen Thomas
Helen Thomas

Boxed In

mock-up of phone box display

This morning we took a look at a gardening display in the old telephone box at Horbury Bridge, which included a small selection of items – a tomato plant, a pair of gardening gloves and a trowel – to tell its story. It made me realise that the simpler and bolder my display for the Redbox Gallery, the better.

My main characters were always going to be Joby and his dad from Stan Barstow’s novel and I realise that including historical characters, such as railway and canal engineers, will overload the display.

Watching the closing scene of Yorkshire Television’s 1975 production of Joby on YouTube, I’ve found a perfect exchange of dialogue which will work as the keynote for my show. I’d been thinking of phrases to sum up Addingford such as ‘just ten minutes walk from this phone box’ and ‘Horbury’s unofficial nature park’, which would be fine but I don’t want too many text boxes. People often skip reading labels but dialogue is more compelling.

As we’re trying to get people to stop briefly and peer into the box, we need something eye-catching – like the pocket cartoon amongst the articles in a newspaper – to hook passers by.

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.

Puffins

It was too windy to safely draw on the cliff top on our day trip to Flamborough on Tuesday, so these are puffins from our last month’s visit. A few were sitting together on a steep grassy slope in an inlet overlooking North Landing. When we visited on Tuesday there was just one, sitting tightly on a rocky ledge nearby.

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.