Tuesday’s rain has brought our back lawn back to life but, before I cut it, I thought I’d take a closer look at some of the grasses and flowers.
Back Lawn Botany
Tag: Buttercup
The Border in June
The flower border in June: buttercup seed-head, cornflower, lady’s mantle, marigold, lavender, salvia, annual meadow-grass, seed-pod (lupin?), white clover and red clover.
These are taken on my newly-repaired Olympus OM-D E-M10 II using the 60mm macro lens. Good to have it back. I could have taken very similar photographs on my iPhone but the digital SLR camera gives me more control.
Buttercups
Meadow buttercup, creeping buttercup and pendulous sedge in our back garden (plus one stray nettle leaf).
Buttercup and Clover
Barbara has taken charge of the veg beds, giving me the chance to reach those parts of the garden that don’t normally get any attention.
I’ve trimmed right down around our little meadow as far as the bench in the corner, letting more light and air in. I need to get to the hedge, not only to trim it but also to keep the bindweed in check, which given the chance would spread into the garden too.
Being on such damp rich soil, the meadow is too lush, the grasses swamping out the wildflowers that I’d like to see thriving, such as birdsfoot trefoil and yellow rattle. There’s no sign of either yet this year.
Meadow Buttercup
THIS Meadow Buttercup, Ranunculus acris, has grown to about a foot tall with flowers three-quarters of inch across in the week or two since we last mowed the lawn. Ranunculus, the Latin name for the buttercup, comes from the Latin Rana, for frog, as this genus of plants grows in damp places.
In preparation for planting our tomatoes, I’ve been spring-cleaning the greenhouse. Below the staging, behind the plastic bags of compost and grit, as I swept up the winter’s debris, I disturbed the greenhouse’s resident Common Frog, Rana temporaria, which hopped off to find a damp crevice behind the water butt.
Nearby, in crevices in the concrete footings of the greenhouse, a couple of Smooth Newts, Triturus vulgaris, hunted invertebrates (the larger had some kind of invertebrate prey in its mouth – a small spider?) in a macro-habitat of moss plants that resembled a miniaturised version of the Giant Club Moss forests that its giant amphibian ancestors had swum and slithered through right here, 300 million years ago. I say ‘right here’ but at that time our part of the Earth’s crust lay near the equator. True flowering plants, such as buttercups, had yet to evolve.