Spring Odds and Ends – April

Tags

amelanchier, blackthorn, bullace, cuckooflower, Damson, garden, garden plants, ground-ivy, horse chestnut, Lady's Smock, lesser celandine, lichen, Mallard, marsh marigold, mining bees, montana clematis, pasque flower, Pear, pond, Suffolk, trees, wild cherry, wild flowers

Blackthorn ( Prunus spinosa) in flower

This was the view from our front door on the 1st of April.  The rather untidy Blackthorn trees growing on the verge on the other side of our hedge looked like they were snow-covered; the blossom was so plentiful.

A mining bee nest-tunnel

Just over a week after I took the photo of the Blackthorn I was finding bee nests all over the garden.  Some were plain ones like the photo above….

Mining bee Nest -burrows

…and these ones.

Mining bee nest-burrow

But this one (the burrow is in the shadow of one of the seed-pods) has been decorated with twigs, bits of wood, stone and seed-pods! I wonder if this is just by chance or if not, were these to make it easier to find or, is the bee just more of an individual, more artistic than most other bees?  I have found other nest-burrows seemingly marked with twigs and stones.

Wild Cherry ( Prunus avium)

This is one of our wild cherry trees just coming into blossom in the middle of April.  The house on the left of the photo is that of our next-door neighbours and this long thin strip of land, in-between their garden and our leylandii hedge on the right, belongs to us and is where the former owners of our house used to park their combine harvester, so we are told.  We have planted a few trees on this strip of land; you can see a couple of hollies and another cherry has decided to grow here too.

Wild cherry blossom from one of our other cherry trees.

The first Pasque Flower

The same plant a week or so later

The flowerbed on the south side of the house. As you can see, it is very stony.

Amelanchier in flower

Marsh Marigold or King-cup ( Caltha palustris) next to the pond

The same plant a week later

I have posted photos of this lichen-covered tree-trunk before

A closer look at the different lichens

Abandoned goose nest on the island

For the first time since we have lived here we had no nesting geese on the island on our pond.  They built a nest and I am sure they began laying an egg each day prior to incubation but something happened and the nest was abandoned.  The water level in the pond was very low and it would have been easy for a fox to cross the water and get to the nest.  There has always been danger from mink and otters but up til now the geese have coped with them.  A fox is different and much bigger.  This is only a guess – there may have been other reasons; I don’t know.

Cuckooflower/Lady’s Smock (Cardamine pratensis ) next to the pond

New Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum ) leaves and flower buds

We have a couple of spindly Damson or Bullace (Prunus domestica ssp. insititia ) trees growing in the scrubby area near our pond. This is a photo of the blossom and new leaves.

Pear blossom. We recently pruned and topped our pear tree as it was getting enormous. We should still get quite a lot of fruit this year, if all goes well.

Lesser Celandine ( Ficaria verna) and Ground-ivy ( Glechoma hederacea)

The Montana clematis flowered at the end of the month

A drake Mallard swimming on the pond.

I have a few more April photos I would like to share but I will save them for a separate post.

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!

A Few Things I’ve Seen in my Garden.

Tags

bird's nest, birds, Common Frog, cowslip, daffodils, ducks, fish, flowers, frogspawn, garden, Great Tit, ground-ivy, hazel, Hazel bud-gall, horse chestnut, lichen, Mallard, marsh marigold, moss, pond, primrose, primula, spring, Suffolk, sweet violet, tadpoles, trees, Water Mint

Two very handsome Mallard drakes (Anas platyrhynchos).

Ground-ivy (Glechoma hederacea). Many of the newer leaves are purple and the plant has a slightly unpleasant minty scent.

As I have mentioned before, when we moved to this house there were no Primroses (Primula vulgaris) in the garden at all. We now have a few plants here and there on the banks of our ditches.

The Cowslips (Primula veris) are beginning to bloom. We have always had plenty of these!

A primula hybrid that arrived unbidden about three years ago. I rather like it.

The house next door to us is the former village school.  I am not sure when it closed but a friend of ours from church used to attend it during the 1940’s.  Where our house and garden is now, there was a meadow full of wild flowers and our friend walked across it every day to collect the milk for the school from the farm next door.  These wild flowers we have in our garden are all that’s left of the hundreds that used to be here up to about 50 or 60 years ago.  I hope that we can hang on to these few and perhaps, by not using chemicals, encourage them to spread.

Sweet Violet (Viola odorata)

This is our parcels and newspaper box at the end of our drive. We noticed during the winter that it was starting to rot and needed replacing. It appears that we weren’t the only ones to notice the state the box was in. I opened it the other day to find something had made a hole in the back of it ( you can see where the light is shining through just below my thumb as I lift the lid). The next day I found this straw and moss had been put in there. Richard saw a Great Tit (Parus major) flying away from the box so I suspect this is a Great Tit’s nest. I carefully peeped into it a day or so later and found the whole box stuffed full of moss and we can also see lots of straw sticking out from where the box sides are coming away from the base. We have tied up the box and put a ‘not in use’ sign on it and we now await the happy arrival of baby Great Tits.

I knew that Tits nested in holes and I also was aware that Willow Tits excavated their own holes but I hadn’t realised that Great Tits also excavated holes to nest in.

The top of the brick gate-post at the end of our drive is covered in moss and lichen but because we haven’t had much rain recently, it isn’t looking as good as usual. Birds have been collecting the moss for their nests too.

This is a close-up of one of the lichens.

The Marsh-marigold or King Cup (Caltha palustris) is flowering in the pond.

I love its shiny yellow petals.

I took this photo of the daffodils round the pond over a week ago and I am glad I did. On Tuesday and Wednesday of last week we had very warm weather (24 degrees C on Wednesday!) and the daffodils that had come out earliest began to wilt.

Earlier this year I posted pictures of these Hazel (Corylus avellana) bud galls. I went to look at them again last week and noticed tiny flies sitting on all of the galls. I wonder if these flies had hatched out of the galls.

New Hazel leaves

Water Mint (Mentha aquatica). The new shoots are growing round and in the big pond.

Horse-chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum). This photo was taken about a week ago.

This photo of our Horse-chestnut tree was taken on the same day. These leaves are higher and get more sunlight. I was pleased to see that the flower panicles (candles) were growing nicely.

I saw the frogs spawning but unfortunately didn’t have my camera with me. I took this photo of the spawn later in the day. This is the first time I have found frogspawn in our pond and was surprised at how late in the year it was. We have a windswept, exposed garden which may account for it.

There were lots of eggs and I was glad that the fish that live in the pond hadn’t come out of hibernation yet.

I took this picture a week later as the tadpoles were hatching out. The fish still hadn’t woken up!

Two days after this the tadpoles had dispersed but I had also seen the fish swimming in the pond and leaping to catch flies.  They were probably feasting on tadpoles too.

I found a dead fish on the path round the pond again – I found one last year that had been caught by the Heron who had been disturbed by one of us.  I don’t know what had caught this year’s fish as there was no stab mark on it.  It is interesting to see the workings of the food-chain.  We are part of it as we get bitten by the flies that the fish eat!

Thank-you for visiting!

Peak District Holiday 1st to 9th July. Day 4 Part 1.

Tags

Bakewell, Bakewell Bridge, Bakewell Pudding, Bakewell Pudding Shop, Black-headed Seagull, Canada Goose, Coot, Mallard, moorhen, Peak District National Park, River Wye, Trout, Tufted Duck

After our long walk the day before we decided to do a little gentle sight-seeing on our fourth day, revisiting a couple of favourite places and then going on to somewhere new.  Our first port of call was the town of Bakewell in Derbyshire which is very attractive but always very crowded.  We surprised ourselves by finding somewhere to park quite quickly and walked to the Bakewell Pudding Shop.

The Old Original Bakewell Pudding Shop

Bakewell is the only market town in the whole of the Peak District National Park.  As with many places in the Peak District, mineral springs are found there and it nearly became a spa town.  The name ‘Bakewell’ comes from ‘Badeca’s Well’ and is nothing to do with baking.  A Bath House was built by the Duke of Rutland in 1697 and it still has the 16′ x 33′ bath in the cellar.  The reason it wasn’t a success as a spa was the temperature of the water which is only 11 degrees Centigrade/52 degrees Fahrenheit – a little chilly!  This is less than half the temperature of the Buxton waters.

R and I wanted to buy a pudding as we love them and hadn’t had one for a couple of years.  We also purchased some bread and a teacloth with the recipe of the pudding printed on it and then went through to their coffee shop and had a pleasant drink while sitting in a sheltered courtyard.

Rather an unprepossessing looking pudding but really very tasty.  It can be eaten hot or cold and with or without cream or custard.  It is made with puff pastry, then a layer of jam (usually raspberry) and then covered with a mixture made of ground almonds, sugar, butter, eggs and almond essence.  This is then baked until the mixture sets.  This confection was made by mistake.  During the 19th century a cook at the Rutland Arms was baking a jam tart but somehow misunderstood the recipe and the result was this pudding.  It was an instant success, though I don’t know how anyone let alone a cook can make a mistake when making a jam tart!

We then walked a little through the town and ended up at our favourite place – the riverside.  There is a wide promenade next to the River Wye and benches to sit on at intervals.  There is a very attractive bridge over the river which flows at a good pace.

Bakewell Bridge

The river is full of trout and has a couple of little weirs.  There are lots of water-birds to admire and also lots of Black-headed Seagulls too.

A beautiful speckled trout

Tufted Ducks

Canada Goose

Canada Goose

Coot and Moorhen with chicks

I was fascinated by the behaviour of both the moorhen and the coot.  These birds are not often seen together although very closely related.  I find their chicks indistinguishable and am not sure if these chicks belonged to the coot or moorhen.  Coots have a pure white forehead and bill and are usually found on open water like lakes and moorhens with red bills that have a yellow tip are found on streams and ponds.  Both birds obviously felt threatened by each other and though it isn’t clear in the photo above the coot had lowered its head and had fluffed up all its feathers until it looked enormous.  It was moving very slowly too.

A Coot nest

Mallards, Tufted Duck and a Black-headed Seagull which decided it wanted to be photographed too

After sitting by the river for a while, R and I decided we would go on to Haddon Hall which is just a few miles from Bakewell.  I will talk about that in my next post.