Happy New Year!

Tags

candlelight, carol service, Christmas, garden, greylag, midnight mass, New Year, snow, Suffolk

Taken at dawn on 12th December

We had a few days of cold and snow in mid-December but the year ended with much milder temperatures, wind and lots of rain.  All our local rivers have burst their banks and everywhere is wet and muddy.

‘Evereste’ crabapple tree in the snow

Crabapples

Once the apples had been frosted it took no time at all for the blackbirds to eat all the fruit on the tree!  The deer helped themselves to the apples on the lower branches.

Female Muntjac deer

2nd Sunday in Advent

We had a Sunday service at our church at Rumburgh on 10th December.  The day started with heavy rain but as we got the church ready for the service the rain turned first to sleet and then to snow.  The Archdeacon arrived to take our service, his cloak covered in snow.  He preached and played the organ too but sadly, not many of our mainly elderly congregation turned up.

A snowy churchyard

Our damp, but festive church porch

Snow covers a multitude of sins and our garden looked almost picturesque!

The view from our front door

Our larger pond. This was before the rain added a number of inches to its depth

We have also had all the willow saplings and brambles on the little island cut down since this photograph was taken.  The greylags should find it easier to make their nest there in the spring.

Here is a female greylag with her goslings in our garden a couple of years ago

The path round the pond

Looking across the field from our garden

After the sun had risen I took this picture from an upstairs window

We haven’t had much snow in the last couple of years and we don’t know if we will get any more this winter either.  This might be all we get!

We held a carol service at our church on 20th December.

I took this photo a while before the service began.

Our Christmas tree at church

The service was taken by Maurice our hard-working Elder who has taken on most of the admin duties for the benefice since we have been vicarless.  We heard the Christmas story in some readings from the Bible and we also listened to a few seasonal poems.  We sang lots of carols and then ate sausage rolls, cheese straws, cake and mince pies and drank sherry or fruit juice.

Kneeler at church

Kneeler at church

 

Richard, Elinor and I went to Midnight Mass at South Elmham St Peter’s church on Christmas Eve and we spent a peaceful Christmas at home, my mother visiting us for lunch and for the afternoon on Christmas Day and for an evening buffet meal on Boxing Day.

Christmas tree decorations

  Alice stayed in Sheffield for Christmas but came to visit us for a couple of days, arriving on the 28th December.  It was lovely to have her with us!

I took this photo with my phone on Boxing Day during our walk in the late afternoon

We don’t party on New Year’s Eve but stay at home quietly.  I had taken my mother to her church in the morning while Richard went to Ilketshall St John’s church in our benefice.  The roads were all awash but the rain held off for most of the day.  Richard, Elinor and I went to Southwold in the afternoon to walk by the sea.  We parked by the pier and walked along the front to the far end of the town where we bought some chips.  We walked back to the car as it got dark and came home again.  A pleasing end to the year.  No photos from Southwold as I left my camera at home.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Spring Days

Tags

cherry-plum, daffodil, Emmaus, garden improvements, greylag, heron, ladybird, Mallard, new furniture, primrose, rook, rook's nest, spring flowers, sweet violet, wild birds

There isn’t much of interest to report – we have been busy and we are all very tired but there isn’t much to show for it all.

We have had a new suite of furniture delivered for our living room and the old sofas and reclining chair have been donated to Emmaus a charity that helps and supports the homeless.  They have a second-hand retail shop at Ditchingham, a village a few miles to the north of us which is where our furniture was taken.  The new furniture is very different but extremely comfortable.  It is also less bulky than our old furniture so our living room seems a little bigger.

Our old shed has been demolished and we have had a concrete pad laid next to the tool shed where we will put a new potting shed.  Getting rid of the old shed, which really was an eyesore, has opened up the garden at the north side of the house.  Richard has dug over the soil which was underneath the shed and will add organic matter to it to help rejuvenate it.  Eventually, he would like to plant flowering shrubs there.  He has also added compost to and dug over the soil in the vegetable beds.  The potatoes are ready for planting and Richard will begin sowing pea and bean seeds in pots soon.  The weather has been much too cold recently for anything to be planted outside and as we have an unheated greenhouse we daren’t sow seeds there just yet either.

Last week we saw quite a lot of sunshine and even though the wind was from the north-east and very cold everything seemed very spring-like.  This week there has been increasing amounts of cloud and a lot of drizzly rain so with the cold wind it feels like a return of winter.  The daytime temperature has stayed between 5 and 6 degrees C all the week.

I walked round the garden last week and took a few photographs in the sunshine.

A Mallard swimming on the big pond

Mallard drake

Primroses in one of the ditches round the garden

Daffodils flowering on the bank of the big pond

A Rook’s nest being built in the Ash tree.

Greylag pair on the pond

Greylags on the pond

Greylags on the pond

I have seen the heron in the garden a few times.

I tried to sneak up on the heron as it stood at the side of the pond but it saw me and flew into the field behind our house. This is a poor photo that has been severely cropped.

I found a half-eaten fish on the path round the pond which could have been left there by the heron or by the otter which is causing owners of ponds in our area to wish the otter was living many miles away!

Ladybird

Ladybird

Ladybird

Mallards in the front ditch

Mallards in the front ditch

Mallards in the front ditch

Mallards in the front ditch

Sweet violet

Cherry-plum

 

Cherry-plum

Cherry-plum

My choice of music for this post is Emmanuel Chabrier’s ‘Suite Pastorale’.  As soon as I hear it I think of spring days in the countryside – cool breezes, sparkling streams, flowers and singing birds.  I hope you like the music as much as I do.

Thanks for visiting!

 

May Day

Tags

baby birds, blackbird, ducklings, dunnock, garden, goslings, greylag, Mallard, Suffolk

This is a post of photographs taken yesterday.  They need no explaining!

Two Dunnock adults (Prunella modularis)

Blackbird hen (nearest) and chick (Turdus merula)

Blackbird hen and chick

Blackbird hen and chick

Blackbird hen and chick

Blackbird hen and two chicks

Blackbird hen and two chicks

Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) duck and ducklings

Mallard duck and ducklings

Greylag (Anser anser) goose (in front), gander (rear) and goslings

Greylags

Greylags

Greylags

Greylags

Greylags

Greylags

Thank-you for visiting!

Yet More Things!

Tags

amelanchier, Ash, ash keys, bristly ox-tongue, clematis montana, crabapple 'Harry Baker', euonymus, garden, greylag, pasque flower, pieris, red-legged partridge, rosemary, saxifrage, spring, Suffolk, tulip, viburnum bodnantense, white dead-nettle, wild cherry

I was surprised to see two Red-legged Partridges (Alectoris rufa) in my garden one morning as I opened the kitchen blinds.

This one had obviously had a bad night.

Please ignore the weedy flowerbed – I have since tidied it up.

Shortly after I took this photo they both flew away.

The variagated Euonymus is looking bright with new leaves.

The Pieris ‘Forest Fire’ has tiny new pink leaves

The Clematis montana ‘Rubens’ I cut back a few weeks ago is showing me that it won’t be beaten.

The Rosemary is still flowering beautifully

The Ash trees (Fraxinus excelsior) are flowering.

The flowers are very small and a warm purple colour. Ash trees have separate male and female flowers, mainly on separate trees but there are a few trees that have both male and female flowers but on separate branches! The trees around us are all females and produce thousands of Ash ‘keys’, winged seeds that hang from the trees in bunches in the autumn. My mother has plenty of Ash trees near her house but all hers are males – so no ‘keys’.

A reflective Greylag!

A bumblebee on White Dead-nettle (Lamium album)

A very over-grown corner of our garden. This ditch doesn’t belong to us but is part of the common land between our garden and the road. I expect that no-one will take responsibility for looking after this but if there is a problem with it in the future we will no doubt be asked to deal with it!

The Amelanchier is blossoming.

The Viburnum bodnantense produces dark pink flowers in the spring and pale pink or white flowers during the winter

Wild Cherry blossom (Prunus avium)

Wild Cherry

Pasque Flower (Pulsatilla vulgaris)

Red Saxifrage

A soft pink Tulip

It looks so different depending on the angle from which I photograph it

Tulips

The new leaves of Bristly Ox-tongue (Picris echioides).  Another member of the Daisy family.

Crabapple ‘Harry Baker’ flower buds

I had an on-line conversation with a member of the WordPress team a week or so ago and asked about my missing posts.  The person who dealt with my enquiry was extremely helpful but was unable to retrieve them.  He would have been able to retrieve three old posts I had deleted on purpose but was unable to find the ones that had disappeared!  Fortunately, a very dear friend who is an e-mail follower has been saving my posts and has sent all the missing ones to me.  When I have the time I may post a page with them on for anyones information.

Thank-you for visiting!

Wild Flowers? or Weeds?

Tags

bumble bees, chickweed, dog violet, flints, greylag, marsh marigold, narcissus, red dead-nettle, sunset, sweet violet, weeds, white dead-nettle, wildflower

Our garden is too large for us to keep every part of it neat and well manicured and I wouldn’t like it half so well if it was.  I love gardening – digging, weeding, tending plants, but there is always risk, responsibility and pressure to do things properly and at the right time.  The wild, untamed, untidy parts of the garden are just pure pleasure to me.  I have no yearning to tidy them though I realise that some management is necessary which is why we had the work done to the big pond a few weeks ago.  The ‘weeds’ I assiduously pull out of my flower beds I love to look at in the wild garden.  Flowers at this time of the year are a wonderful source of nectar for insects, especially bumble bees, just out of hibernation.

The red dead-nettle, Lamium, a member of the mint family, grows all over our garden and is a very common plant in Britain and flowers for most of the year.  Both it and the white dead-nettle were boiled and used as pot-herbs and as pig-swill in the past.  They had many medicinal uses, most notably against the ‘King’s Evil’ – scrofula, a type of tuberculosis that caused skin eruptions.  Culpepper says ‘The herb bruised and with salt and vinegar and hog’s-grease laid upon a hard tumour or swelling, or that vulgarly called the king’s-evil, do help to dissolve or discuss them’.  It also ‘makes the heart merry, drives away melancholy, quickens the spirits’.  If you look at the photo below carefully you will be able to see the dark anthers under the hooded upper lip and the darker purple markings on the lower notched lip.

 

The white dead-nettle’s flowers are bigger than the red’s.  It relies on bumble bees to pollinate it’s flowers and they (the flowers) are custom made for bees.  The lower lip is a landing stage for the bee and has two small lateral lobes and a notched middle lobe.  The anthers are black and are under the hooded upper lip.  As the bee enters the flower seeking the nectar the top of it’s abdomen brushes the stamens and gets covered in pollen which is then transferred to the style of the next flower it visits.

 

We don’t have as much chickweed in this garden as in other gardens we have had probably because we get so many ducks, geese and chickens passing through.  They love the plant, which can also be eaten by humans as a salad vegetable.  The flowers are so small that most people hardly notice them but looked at closely they are quite lovely.  The botanical name is Stellaria, little star, and the name is quite apt.  The styles are white and the stamens are such a pretty pink.  Chickweed is a member of the pink family.  It has a single line of hairs which run the whole length of the stem and if a drop of dew lands on the plant it runs down the stem by way of the hairs until it gets to a pair of leaves.  Here some of the water is absorbed by the hairs and the rest carries on down the stem to the next pair of leaves and so on.  This water is reserved in the plant in case of drought.  It flowers almost all year round and is widespread and prolific, which is why most gardeners hate it!

 

This marsh-marigold plant is in our small pond and is the only decent plant in there.  It flowers and flowers and looks so bright and cheerful.  We have another plant in the big pond but I have never seen any flowers on that.  I also discovered a very small plant in the ditch by the big pond with much smaller flowers.  I posted a photo of it a few days ago.  Another name for marsh-marigold is Kingcup and according to one of my flower books this is derived from the Old English ‘cop’ meaning button or stud such as kings once wore.  Apparently, farmers in many parts of the British Isles, used to hang marsh-marigolds over the byres of their cattle on May Day to protect them from the evil doings of fairies and witches.

 

We not only have dog violet in our garden but also sweet violet which is the only violet flower to be scented.  In olden times they were strewn on the floor to sweeten the air.  Their scent is lost almost as soon as it is noticed and this is because the flower produces a substance called ionine as well as the scent.  Ionine dulls the sense of smell so that not only does the violet’s scent disappear but any other odours too.  Clever!  In the verge near to my mother’s cottage are many white violets which are very pretty.

 

Our garden is full of flints and some of them are enormous.  Trying to make new flowerbeds has taken so much time and energy as these great stones have to be levered out all the time and more and more keep appearing.  I quite understand the old folk thinking that stones grew in the soil.  This is our Lindt flint as we think it looks like a Lindt chocolate rabbit.

 

A pretty narcissus has just flowered.

 

The dear goose sleeping on her nest.

 

And lastly a few pictures of last night’s sunset.