A Wet Weekend

Tags

azure damselfly, chaffinch, flour, guinea fowl, Pakenham Water Mill, scarlet pimpernel, Suffolk, sunset, topiary, watercress, Waveney District Council Parks and Open Spaces, white campion

This weekend marked the start of my break from driving every day to Norwich.  Hooray!!  Elinor finished her exams on Friday and we are so pleased with her and, I suspect, she is very pleased with herself.

I thought this might be a good opportunity to show you a beautiful traffic island on a roundabout on the outskirts of Halesworth. The Parks Department have been creating wonderful floral displays all over the district. This island looks like a cottage garden.

The previous weekend was very pleasant as Alice came to visit for a few days.  We went to see Elinor’s college artwork on display at a gallery in Norwich on Friday 5th June and then had a very enjoyable Italian meal before returning home.  The day had started with thunderstorms and heavy rain but the sun came out in the afternoon and we then had some gorgeous warm weather for the rest of the day.  We haven’t had much warm weather and it didn’t last.

A beautiful sunset I saw a few days ago.

We went out for another meal that Sunday for lunch to celebrate Alice gaining her PhD.  My mother came with us too – I had taken her to church that morning and we all met at the Fox and Goose restaurant in Fressingfield.  We returned home and were relaxing with some tea and coffee when my brother arrived.  He had gone over to Mum’s house expecting her to be there as he wanted to try out his new lawn-mower on her grass.  He did a little mowing and then came over to our house hoping she was with us.  She wished she had been there while he mowed, as he cut down her cowslips and bluebells that she had been carefully mowing around while they set seed and died down.  She can’t say anything to him about it as he had been so kind but she has spoken a lot on the subject to me.  If bluebell leaves are cut before they die down the bulb isn’t fed and the plant may not survive.  She quoted a part of ‘A Shropshire Lad’ to me and said she also may not have many more bluebell springs and it would be sad if hers had gone for ever.  (I will have to replace her plants if they don’t grow next year!).  My brother has recently moved into his new home in Saxmundham, not far from us.  He seems to be settling in very well.  He got a job transfer from Surrey where he used to live to Suffolk and is getting on splendidly here.  He teaches in open prisons and has already been able to put some of the men in for exams which they have passed.  It has been very nice for me to see Andrew more regularly.  There is only a year and 9 days difference in our ages and we were very close when we were young.  He left home at 17 to become a police cadet and then married at 21.  We then didn’t seem to have much in common any more and only saw each other about once a year.

A male Azure Damselfly (Coenagrion puella) I saw in my garden yesterday.

The past week was very busy with Elinor’s exams, two shopping trips for Mum and a visit to the eye clinic at Norfolk and Norwich hospital with her for a check-up and of course, my usual chores.

A Scarlet Pimpernel flower (Anagallis arvensis ssp. arvensis) in my garden yesterday.

Richard has been taking Fridays off recently, cutting his working week down to four days in preparation for his retirement at the end of August.  He came with Elinor and me when I took her in for her final exam on Friday morning and while she was in college we did a little shopping.  It was a lovely bright day and not too cold for a change.  When Elinor met us we took her to buy some converse trainers she wanted and then went to a coffee shop for a drink and a sandwich.  The afternoon was dry so I managed to get some gardening done at home.

Pakenham Water Mill with Richard walking up the lane.

Saturday was mainly rainy and cool.  Richard and I decided to go out and buy some more good flour from Pakenham Water Mill.  We have had two tours of the mill already and it was much too wet to walk in the gardens, so we settled for a cup of tea/coffee and some cake in the tea room.  The lady who runs the tea shop wasn’t expecting many people to turn up because of the foul weather, so hadn’t made any of her wonderful scones.   There were plenty of other cakes to chose from and the tea and coffee is good there.  We bought two 5kg bags of flour from the shop and took them to the car.  Before returning home we had a look at the outside of the mill and at the river on the opposite side of the lane.

A wider view of the mill showing the millers house where the tea shop is situated.

This is the river on the opposite side of the lane to the mill. You see the water that has just been through the mill powering the wheel, flowing into the river.

I think this may be Watercress (Rorippa nasturtium-aquaticum). I haven’t been this close to Watercress that’s still growing before so I may be mistaken. I used to see it quite often when we lived in Somerset but I couldn’t get this close to it. This is wild Watercress and not cultivated.

This is a close-up of the flowers.

We saw this monstrous beauty in the field on the other side of the river.

Topiary crocodiles. We discovered that a business specialising in topiary had created all sorts of creatures and put them along the river bank.

More topiary.

And more. This is the Pied Piper of Hamelin .

A wet Chaffinch (Fringilla coelebs) singing from the top of an electricity pole.

A pair of Guinea Fowl walking quickly through the field.

A wet White Campion (Silene latifolia) next to the gate.

These were the things we saw before we went back home.

Sunday morning was a very gloomy and chilly one.  We went to Morning Prayer at St James’ church.  We had rain at midday but the afternoon gradually became dryer until at last, the sun came out at tea time.

This is an un-tarmacked lane that goes past St James church.

Thank-you for visiting!

Some More Visitors to my Garden : Birds

Tags

birds, blackbird, chaffinch, coal tit, Garden birds, Great Tit, greater spotted woodpecker, greenfinch, house sparrow, moorhen, Muscovy duck, pheasant, pied wagtail, Robin, rook, Suffolk, wren

During this summer and early autumn I managed to photograph a number of animals, birds, insects and other creatures in my garden.  Some of these photos are of very poor quality but I will include them as a record of what I saw.  This post will be of the birds I’ve seen in my garden.

This Great Tit has an insect in its beak and was fluttering its wings very quickly (hence the blurring). It was waiting for me to go away so that it could feed its chicks in a nest box we have in the garden.

I quickly took another photograph and then walked away

Here is one of the pair of Great Tits using that same nest box nearly two weeks later. I am fascinated to see how carefully they hold the insects in their beaks so as not to crush them.

This is a Greenfinch. There are always plenty of these in the garden. The feeder pole is always leaning and covered in mud because of the squirrels and rooks that use the feeder too.

I didn’t quite get all of this cock Pheasant’s tail.

Cock Pheasant

Cock Pheasant

A female Blackbird collecting insects for her chicks.

Another female Blackbird searching for food.

And again.

My daughter came running to me one day saying that there was a strange bird in our garden.  She described it as being half duck, half chicken.  I had to have a look and discovered that one of our neighbour’s Muscovy Ducks was visiting us.  If you have ever seen a Muscovy Duck walking you will know that they move their head and neck back and forth while walking just like a chicken does.

Female Muscovy Duck

Walking like a chicken

I thought I would post this photo of a Wren again as I was quite pleased to get it.  Wrens are quite shy birds and fairly small (3.75″) but have very loud voices.

Wren

I’ve posted this photo of a Robin before too

Female Greater Spotted Woodpecker

Male Chaffinch

Pied Wagtail

Rook

Rook.

Coal Tit. These birds are very slightly smaller than Blue Tits at about 4.5″. You can see the mud on the feeder that the Rooks put there with their dirty feet and beaks!

Male House Sparrow

The usual rear view of a Moorhen as it runs off down the garden

A male Blackbird at dusk

 

 

 

A Hotch Potch.

Tags

Allium, Alpine Pasque Flower, Ant hill, aquilegia, Balm of Gilead, Bee, blackberry, Bramley Apple blossom, Cacti, Cedar of Lebanon, chaffinch, Christmas Cactus, Clematis, Common Sedge, Common Vetch, Cotoneaster, Damson, GERANIUM, Goat Willow seeds, Great Tit, hare, Hawthorn, Holly, House Spider, Japanese Maple, Jay, Knautica, moon, Muntjac, pheasant, Shrub rose Canary Bird, Spindle, stock dove, sunset, thrift, Thyme-leaved Speedwell, Tufted Duck, vegetable garden, Viburnum, White-Shouldered House Moth, winter-flowering honeysuckle, Zebra Spider

 

Last evening while I was admiring the pink sunset…..

 

….E was admiring the rising of the moon.  She called to me to come and see it as it was so large and orange.  I joined her at her bedroom window and we watched it slowly slide up the sky behind the trees.  I went into my room hoping to see it more clearly from there and saw below me on the drive, the hare again!  Typically, I had the wrong camera with me, it was too dark and the hare wouldn’t stay and be photographed.

This is the only photo I managed to get.

I went outside into the twilight with little bats flying about the garden and crossed the road and looked at the moon through the hedge.  It wasn’t orange any more but it was still beautiful.

The visit from the hare and the rising moon reminded me that hares are supposed to be magical and people today still take care not to hurt a hare.  One of Mum’s neighbours was new to the area a few years ago and asked another neighbour how he could get rid of the rabbits and hares which were damaging the trees and plants in his garden.  He was told that the rabbits could be shot but ‘we don’t shoot hares in Suffolk’.  In Anglo Saxon mythology, Ostara the goddess of the moon, fertility and Spring was often depicted with hare’s ears or a hare’s head.  Eostre (where we get the word Easter from) was the Celtic version of Ostara and was the goddess associated with the moon, death, redemption and resurrection during the turning of Winter into Spring.  Eostre was a shape-shifter too and took the shape of a hare at each full moon.  Well, well, well!  (I looked all that up using Google!).

Yesterday was a busy one with my usual shopping with Mum and then going to Halesworth to hand in my prescription at the surgery and post a couple of letters.  I got home just after 2.00pm and had some lunch.  The afternoon was spent dusting, vacuuming and doing more mending.  R got home just as I was finishing.  He had had a fraught day at work so after we had had our cup of tea he went into the garden and planted out his peas and beans.  A soothing task which took him over an hour and was all done except the watering-in by the time I had cooked the evening meal.

This morning I went out to admire his handiwork.

Putting the anti-rabbit/deer/hare/pigeon etc barriers up had taken most of the time yesterday.  We hope they work!  You can see the potatoes coming up in the bed behind the peas and beans.  While I was down at the vegetable patch I had a look at the pond and saw a strange looking duck.  I tried taking its photo with my small camera but wasn’t able to get a clear picture.  I fetched our newer, better camera and tried again.

 

 

I think this is a female tufted duck who visited to sample the fish in our pond.  I had to crop the photos as I still couldn’t get near enough to the duck.  The pond, as you see, is covered in the fluffy seeds of Goat Willow.  The seeds aren’t only on the pond but are everywhere, floating in the air, covering the grass, coming into the house.

This is a spider’s web I noticed yesterday on the outside of one of our windows.  It is covered with fluffy willow seeds.  Despite my brushing the web away very often the spider insists on making its web just there all the time.

The rest of this post will be a strange selection of photos that I took today and some others that I haven’t been able to put in any of my recent posts.

This is a late entry in the apple blossom awards.  We thought the Bramley Apple wasn’t going to flower this year, but we were wrong!

The Cedar of Lebanon has new leaves growing that look like old-fashioned shaving brushes.

All the hollies have new leaves too.

The Japanese Maple has the most beautiful cherry-red seeds.

It has beautiful leaves too that glow in the sunshine.

I got home yesterday and saw a Jay in the garden.  I had great difficulty taking these photos from inside the car.

This is one of my Christmas Cacti and it is flowering again for the third time in six months.  It first flowered in November, then in February and now in May.  I think it is very confused!

R’s cacti are all coming in to flower too.

Mammalaria

Mammalaria flower

 

 

Peanut cactus flower.

I don’t know what this one is called.

The little white Alliums in the garden are very popular with the bees.  They are under the laburnum trees which are also full of bees and the noise they make is astounding.  I think they sound like cars in a grand prix race – the pitch is almost exactly the same – it’s like listening to a race about a mile away.

The new shoots on the Viburnum Bodnantense are crimson.

Tiny damsons.

Willow seeds.

Bee on the cotoneaster horizontalis.

Geranium Phaeum in R’s flowerbed.

Flowers on the Spindle tree.

The Hawthorn hedge at the bottom of the garden near the old summerhouse.

A White-shouldered House Moth

R took these photos of a muntjac deer.

A chaffinch

One of my herbs – cedronella canariensis (Balm of Gilead).

Alpine Pasque Flower

A Great Tit

A Stock Dove.

A female Pheasant.

A Zebra Spider.  These spiders are only about 4mm long.  They are jumping spiders and can leap a distance of about 4cm.

A baby House Spider.

The tiny flowers of Thyme-Leaved Speedwell.

Aquilegia flower

Thrift flower

The wonderfully scented Clematis Montana ‘Rubens’

Shrub rose ‘Canary Bird’

Blackberry flowers

Knautica Macedonica

Aquilegia flower

Reflections in the pond

Common sedge

Common Vetch

An ant hill

 

 

Male Holly flower buds.  We don’t have any female holly bushes so no berries!

Heart-shaped berries of the Winter-flowering Honeysuckle

These lovely berries don’t last long as the blackbirds find them irresistible.

 

 

 

Wednesday 12th to Sunday 16th March

Tags

alder, ambulances, brimstone butterfly, chaffinch, church, cowslip, daffodils, dog violet, Eye, fields, figs, greylags, Harleston, hazel, heartsease, Lent, mallards, moon, moorhen, nesting, pond, prayer, pussy willow, quiz night, rooks, Rumburgh, silverlace primula, sunset, tortoiseshell butterfly, trees, Wissett

Wednesday began with frost and mist.  This soon cleared and the weather was then lovely for the rest of the day.  I did my usual shopping trip with my mother with a detour to a free-range chicken farm at Eye where Mum buys her eggs.  I had a little shopping to do for myself, so called in at Harleston on my way home.  I arrived home just after 2pm for a late lunch and had time for a few household chores and a quick walk round the garden to feed the birds, tidy up a couple of things and take some photos before R came home.

A moorhen and a chaffinch at the front of the house.

 

The moorhen again.

 

A couple of photos of the daffodils that have come up round the big pond.

Some violet leaves that have struggled up through the dried mud round the pond.

 

And some cowslip leaves too!

 

Reflection of trees and cloud in the pond.

 

Afternoon moon.

 

I had decided what we should have for an evening meal and was about to start it when R offered to cook and I gladly accepted his offer.  I didn’t have time to eat anything as I had to go out at 6.45pm to collect Mum and take her to Eye to attend a Lent course.  The course in her area is a deanery course.  A deanery is a collection of benefices and a benefice is a collection of parishes.  In rural areas to have benefice and or deanery meetings or courses means that there will be more people attending and any speakers kind enough to visit will have a good audience.  The only downside is that the distances to be travelled by many parishioners is very great.  This year’s course is on prayer and Wednesday’s talk was on ‘Prayer with Words’.  The speaker was the Precentor from the Cathedral at Bury St Edmund’s; a really pleasant man who gave an interesting talk.  He introduced us to poets and poems that were new to us as well as reading from old favourites.  My journey home was very difficult because of thick fog.

Thursday.  I was woken just before 6.00am by the rooks!  I had remembered to bring in the sunflower seed feeder but the rooks were trying to get the remains of yesterday’s seed off the bird-table and were tapping loudly on it with their enormous beaks.  I have a cage round the bird-table which is supposed to prevent large birds from getting on it. However, it doesn’t stop the birds from clinging on to the edge of the table with their claws, flapping their wings for balance and pecking food through the mesh!  Another lovely day.  Went in to Halesworth for a haircut and to get yet more shopping (I always manage to forget something each time I go!)  My usual hairdresser is on maternity leave so her Mum did my hair and we chatted about babies.  Both her daughters are having their first babies in the next two weeks and they are getting a little apprehensive.  On the way home I saw a tortoiseshell butterfly and an enormous brimstone butterfly.

I spent the afternoon gardening as well as having a short (for us!) conversation with my sister who was planning to visit Mum at the weekend.  The geese have been very argumentative this week.  The gander of the pair who have claimed the island has been spending most of his time swimming in the pond and seeing off any other goose/gander who dares to come anywhere near the pond bank.  He must be exhausted as he doesn’t seem to have eaten anything either.

A couple of photos of the mallards in our front ditch.

Miniature daffodils in the grass.

 

Goat or Pussy Willow.  Salix caprea.

 

When R got home he wanted to go out for a short walk across the fields.  The wind had got up a little and it had got cloudy but R managed to take some decent photos while we were out.

Alder catkins and cone-like fruits from last year.

 

Hazel catkins.

 

More fog overnight.

Friday.  A cooler, cloudier, breezier day.  I did some more gardening and lots of ironing.  The geese seemed to have resolved their differences.  The resident pair came to sit near me while I gardened and whenever I looked up they gave gentle honks.  I knew they were asking for food so when I had got to the end of my weeding I fetched some special goose and duck feed I have for just such an occasion (to quote Foghorn Leghorn) and cast it on the grass near by them.  Of course, the gander then hissed at me while the goose ate the food.  He is a very protective mate and even though I have provided the food he has to warn me off and so I do keep my distance!

Saturday.  A quiet morning and another beautiful one.  Still very breezy but much brighter than yesterday.  Did some housework and spoke to A on the phone.  We drove to Mum’s in the afternoon to see my sister F who was visiting with her eldest son and her dog Ben.   We had a lovely couple of chatty hours and we then had to leave to get our evening meal before going to yet another quiz night.  This one was in aid of Rumburgh village hall.  I think it was the noisiest event I had been too since going to dances when I was young.  The hall had just been insulated and redecorated but there were no curtains or blinds at the windows yet and I think this was the reason it was so noisy.  The two farmers on our team were both a little deaf (caused by driving noisy farm machinery) and they were finding it really difficult to hear anything above the hubbub of loud chatter.  Our local Member of Parliament was taking part too.  He lives in Wissett, the next village along on the way to Halesworth, and is very good about taking part in local events and is a truely supportive MP.  He had been out all day on the ambulances as there has been an enquiry about the time it takes for ambulances to get to emergencies.  He was talking to R and one of our farmer friends and said he was very sympathetic towards the ambulance crews, as he had seen for himself the great distances they had to travel and also how many wasted journeys they had to make.  R told him about my sister’s job as a paramedic in Kent and some of the problems she has to put up with too.  Unfortunately we came ninth today but R won a picture of a tree in the raffle.

Sunday.  There was a Morning Prayer service at Rumburgh today but I couldn’t attend as I took Mum to her church.  She hasn’t got anyone to give her a lift at the moment and as she doesn’t usually see anyone at all during the week except me, and all her friends are at her church, I think it only right that I take her there.  I got back home at 1.00pm and had lunch before doing some chores, putting a loaf on to bake and then back out into the garden.  I fed the birds which took nearly an hour – all the feeders were empty, I have a number of them scattered about the garden and the garden is well over an acre in size.  I had noticed this morning when I looked out of the window that the goose has started sitting on her nest on the island.

 

A dog violet in flower.

 

A silverlace primula.

 

A heartsease flower.

 

Figs are starting to swell on the tree.

 

Lots of pictures of this evening’s sunset.

The rookery in the sunset.