May Flowers

Tags

Astrantia, Californian lilac, Clematis, cowslip hybrid, euphorbia, flowers, garden, glaucous sedge, Goat Willow, gooseberry, Hawthorn, horse chestnut, iris, plants, Ribwort Plantain, rose, scabious, Spindle, Suffolk, thrift, Thyme-leaved Speedwell, trees, Welsh onion

Let me take you back in time…again….

A selection of photos of plants and flowers seen in May, this year.  Please click on any of these images to enlarge them.

A flowerbed on the south side of the house

The temperatures began to improve during May and the leaves on the fig tree (on the right of the photo) began to come out.  The perennial plants also put on a lot of growth and flowers appeared.

Iris

Astrantia

Astrantia have interesting flowers

Thrift

Scabious

The Montana clematis continued to produce plenty of highly scented flowers from where it grows on the trellis next to the garden shed.

‘Canary Bird’ rose

Such a lovely yellow rose!

When we had the garden room built last year I had to move many of my plants out of the way. They ended up here on the edge of one of the vegetable beds.

These are wonderful pale lilac iris. I failed to get a decent photo of them.

Another attempt to catch the beauty of this iridescent flower.

A couple of days later more iris had appeared in the bed near the house.

I might move this iris away from the purple and blue ones in the autumn. It is an interesting colour but is a little overwhelmed by its neighbours.

It was a good year for iris.

Euphorbia. This is a small perennial sub-shrub with interesting colours in its leaves and bracts.

All around our garden are hybrids, like this one, between the wild cowslip and garden polyanthas and primulas.  This plant decided to grow in a gravelly area next to a drain and one of the water butts.

Richard has a Californian Lilac in his shrubbery. It was glorious this year!  The bees loved it and I think there are a few in this photo.

Gooseberry. If you look carefully you will see many tiny gooseberries. Unfortunately we didn’t protect the bush from the birds and we got no berries at all. One day they were all there and the next they weren’t. We have never needed to cover the bush before.

The welsh onion in the herb garden went crazy this year!

As well as the plants I have in flower and vegetable beds, there are the wild ones that I love to find.

Thyme-leaved Speedwell (Veronica serpyllifolia )

This is a minute-flowered speedwell I find in the lawn and in the grass path round the pond.  It forms patches of flowers as the stems lie flat along the ground and send out roots from nodes.  The flower stems are upright.

Hawthorn

Hawthorn

Hawthorn

Hawthorn

Hawthorn

Country people think it very bad luck to bring hawthorn blossom indoors and woe betide you if you destroy a hawthorn!

Goat Willow ( Salix caprea) with its fluffy seeds.

The wood of the Goat Willow is very soft and used to be made into clothes pegs, rake teeth and hatchet handles.

Horse Chestnut ( Aesculus hippocastanum) blossom

Horse Chestnuts were introduced to Britain from the Balkans in the 16th century.  ‘Conkers’ weren’t played with the fruit of the tree until the 18th century. Before that, the game was played with cobnuts from Hazel trees or with snail shells.  The name ‘conkers’ derives from ‘conqueror’.

Sedge

I am not very good at identifying sedges, reeds, rushes and grasses but I think this might be Glaucous Sedge (Carex flacca).

Ribwort Plantain ( Plantago lanceolata)

I wonder if children still play the old games with Ribwort.  In one of the games, the stalk is held between the thumb and forefinger and the bottom of the stalk is wrapped round the flower-head in a loop.  When the loop is tugged sharply the flower-head is ‘fired’ and often travels a long way.  I read that a form of ‘conkers’ can be played with Ribwort by keeping the flowerhead on its long stem and using it to attempt to knock a rival’s flower-head off.  A couple of local names for Ribwort are ‘fighting cocks’ and ‘kemps’ from the Anglo-Saxon ‘cempa‘ meaning ‘a warrior’.

Spindle (Euonymous europaeus )

The wood of spindle is very hard and dense and pale coloured and from ancient times was used for making spindles.  The wood is also known as skewerwood and pegwood and also makes high quality charcoal.  The tree has an unpleasant smell if bruised and the fruit is an emetic.  In olden days, the leaves and seeds were powdered and this powder was dusted onto the skin of children and animals to drive away lice.

With apologies for the length of this post.

Dunwich Beach and Dingle Marshes

Tags

beach, birds, buck's-horn plantain, common scurvygrass, Dingle Marshes, Dunwich beach, gorse, little egret, plants, reeds, sea campion, seashore, sheep's sorrel, shingle, Suffolk, wader

On May Bank Holiday, the first Monday after May Day, Rumburgh village always holds a fair and Rumburgh church always has the cake stall – a money-earner, though not as good as the tea tent.  This year, I had made a honey and ginger cake which Richard and I delivered to the stall along with a quantity of our rhubarb, which usually sells well.  We didn’t stay long as we had a few chores to do at home and we had planned to go to the seaside in the afternoon.

The day was cool and breezy and rain was forecast for late in the afternoon so Elinor, Richard and I set off as soon as we had had our lunch.

We found ‘Thelma’ hauled far up on the shingle.

We looked inside her and what did we find?

A dried-up dogfish tail.

The wind was cold and strong on the beach and the spray from the waves was being blown about.

Looking north up the beach….

…and southwards.

Inland, behind the shingle bank, is Dingle Marshes Nature Reserve, looked after by the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) and The Suffolk Wildlife Trust.

Richard contemplating the view. It was good to be out of the wind!

Plenty of Sea Campion (Silene uniflora) were in flower.

A Little Egret ( Egretta garzetta) was wading through the marsh

Here it is again, marching purposefully on!

Another view of the marshes with a bright yellow ribbon of Gorse (Ulex europaeus)

Common Scurvygrass (Cochlearia officinalis)

A plant of saltmarshes and increasingly, along the sides of roads that have been salted during the winter.  (Danish Scurvygrass (Cochlearia danica) however, is seen more regularly than Common Scurvygrass on roadsides).  Common Scurveygrass has almost circular fleshy leaves with a few blunt teeth along the edges.  The seedpods are spherical and a few can be seen on a flower-cluster close to the centre-right edge of this photo.  In that same cluster of flowers and seedpods is a tiny yellow-beige 16 spot ladybird which fees on pollen, fungi and nectar.

In the past, scurvy was a very common disease, often fatal, in those who spent much of their time at sea.  Their diet was restricted to salt pork and dried biscuit and they had no fresh fruit or vegetables.  Many on land also had restricted diets so it was a happy day when herbalists discovered that scurvygrass, with its high vitamin C content, was one of the foods that prevented the disease. It became the fashion in 17th century England to take a glass of scurvygrass water every morning. The leaves were made into a beer called scurvygrass ale.

The gorse was so bright and cheerful.

Gorse is also known as furze or whin and grows on the acidic soil of heathland and close to the sea.  It is an excellent fuel and burns quickly and fiercely in dry weather causing heath fires to spread.  It was grown near houses so that washing could be lain out to dry on it and the prickles would prevent the clothes from blowing away.

There was plenty of Sheep’s Sorrel (Rumex acetosella ) with its red flower-spikes.

Sheep’s Sorrel is more sprawling than Common Sorrel and is usually found on very poor sandy soil.  The leaves contain the chemical calcium oxalate which tastes acid; the name ‘sorrel’ comes from the old French word for ‘sour’ (‘surele’).

Lovely rosettes of the leaves of Buck’s-horn Plantain ( Plantago coronopus)

The seeds of this plantain exude a large amount of mucilage when they get wet.  This gummy stuff was used in France to stiffen muslins and other woven fabrics.

There were paths through the reeds.

And an approaching rain shower.

A small wader

Here it is again. Apologies for the poor quality of my picture.

This is the same bird in both photos but I am unable, through ignorance, to identify it.  It may be a sandpiper of some sort.  I am sure someone will be able to suggest a name.  It moved about very quickly.

An information board.

Please click on any of my photos to enlarge them.

Another information board.

We soon left for home before the rain arrived and had a warming cup of tea.