Posted in Gardening, Street plants, Uncategorized, tagged flowers, Gardening on August 30, 2014| 21 Comments »
Glorious weed – a dark variety of Buddleia davidii growing over a fence at the back of the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff, mid July, 2014
I feel compelled to write about Buddleia, although I am not sure what can be said. This weedy garden escapee gets everywhere in our cities, seeding itself in brickwork crevices and chimneys as well as in gardens.
I have been keeping an eye on it this summer, although I first noticed Buddleia 35 years ago, when I was training (more…)
Posted in Birds, Dorset, Nature, Uncategorized, Wildfowl, tagged dorset, Nature, wildfowl on August 24, 2014| 15 Comments »
Swan parent and child – with big feet and no feathers to hide them under…
I had heard of Abbotsbury Swannery years ago but had no idea what part of the country it was in. So I was surprised to find (from various Dorset bloggers) that it was near Weymouth and within reach of my annual visit to Poole.
I had visualised the place as a little abbey with a handful of swans in a pond or moat alongside – but how wrong I was! (more…)
Posted in Gardening, Uncategorized, tagged flowers, Gardening on August 16, 2014| 4 Comments »
Daylily (Hemerocallis) in my garden
As a mini-project this summer I counted how many daylily flowers bloomed in a single pot of the herbaceous perennial plant in my garden. I have no idea what possessed me, except that I am intrigued by the fact that each flower comes and goes in a day.
I first “identified” what daylilies were when I saw them growing in the walled back garden of my in-laws’ tall, Victorian terraced red-brick house in Yorkshire. These were the very common orange or “tawny” daylilies and they were growing near the shed, so I was (more…)
Posted in Nature, Trees, Uncategorized, tagged hornbeam, Nature, Summer, Trees on August 10, 2014| 13 Comments »
The hornbeam on August 9, seen from the hedgerow…
I knew August could be a bit “boring” for the hornbeam (Carpinus betulus) I am following. But it was an assignation I had to make for the sake of Lucy Corrander’s Tree Following project, even though it was a rushed job on a Saturday morning when we had just returned from a couple of weeks away on holiday and I was in the middle of doing the laundry.
It was a rush partly because (more…)
Posted in Dorset, Nature, Uncategorized on August 3, 2014| 7 Comments »
Lestes sponsa, the brilliant emerald damselfly or common spreadwing, at the Blue Pool in late July, 2014
I’m just back from a few days in Dorset and this time I “discovered” some places that were new to me. I had often passed by the Blue Pool at Furzebrook near Wareham, dismissing it because I thought it was a children’s tourist attraction (“home of The Wareham Bears”). Luckily last year several fellow bloggers (I think it was Esther Montgomery, Finn Holding and Shaz Goodwin) put me right and said it was worth a visit as a nature trail.
The Blue Pool in late July…
We arrived at the Blue Pool just after 9am on a glorious blue-sky morning, but before the day was too hot. More importantly, (more…)
The Squirrelbasket 