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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.