Posted in Birds, My garden, Nature, tagged birds, Nature on June 25, 2015| 12 Comments »
Juvenile great spotted woodpecker (Dendrocopos major)
In May and June there have been plenty of baby birds in the garden and I have been trying to capture them. Mostly I have been disappointed. My pictures are rubbish, really. But I felt I wanted to share them just to prove the variety of species we have breeding in our backyard.
The first spot of the year was (more…)
Posted in Nature, Street plants, Uncategorized, tagged Nature on June 21, 2015| 12 Comments »
Bumble bee (possibly Bombus hypnorum) on what I thought was wall lettuce (Lactuca muralis), June 2015 – but thank you to John Brush, who pointed out in June 2020 that this is actually common nipplewort (Lapsana communis)!
Thanks to Lucy Corrander’s street plants project I am making more of an effort to notice and identify the weedy plants I pass on the pavement every day.
Now at last I think I can name a couple more of the dandelion-like yellow-flowered plants that (more…)
Posted in Gardening, Trees, tagged Bute, Davidia involucrata, Gardening, Trees on June 17, 2015| 7 Comments »
Davidia involucrata in Bute Park, Cardiff, May 8, 2015
These three trees crept up on me during my wanderings in May. In each case I had been looking for something else, or not looking at all, when I turned my head slightly and there they were in all their green and white glory. None of them are native trees. Two of them were in Bute Park and one on the street…
First up is a species I know, although (more…)
Posted in Street plants, Uncategorized, tagged flowers, Gardening on June 13, 2015| 16 Comments »
Pink valerian (Centranthus ruber) growing on a street wall in Cardiff last week
There is red valerian in flower everywhere in Cardiff at the moment, growing from walls and flat roofs where it wasn’t planted. I always notice this stout plant, as it was one of the first I could put a name to. It grew on the lean-to shed outside the back door of the cottage where I lived as a child. I don’t remember (more…)
Posted in Cardiff, Nature, Trees, tagged Bute, Paulownia, Trees on June 7, 2015| 17 Comments »
Fresh leaves on the empress tree (Paulownia tomentosa) in Bute Park, Cardiff, on May 21, 2015
It’s already June in the tree-following year and it’s all change for the beautiful empress tree (Paulownia tomentosa, also known as the foxglove tree) in Bute park Arboretum in the middle of Cardiff.
I have visited a couple of times this month to take part in Lucy Corrander’s monthly tree-following meme on Loose and Leafy.
After enthusing so much about the tree’s beautiful purple flowers last month, I knew it couldn’t last, but I wasn’t sure how much the blooms would overlap with the expected new leaves. So I left it a couple of weeks and went back on May 21. (more…)
The Squirrelbasket 