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.

Quiet Sunday

Tags

Bees, Cotoneaster, gardening, Great Mullein, Mullein Moth larva, purple toadflax, recording of Turtle Dove song, scabious, St Michael and St Felix Church Rumburgh, Suffolk, sunset, The Vapourer Moth larva, Turtle Dove

 

Grasses growing round the edge of the field behind our house.

I have been doing a lot of gardening recently.  Not the gentle-dead-heading, touch-of-light-weeding type of gardening but lots of digging – which always involves extracting large flint boulders from clay soil, lots of watering – carrying heavy watering cans round our large garden and lots of grass-cutting – I do most of this with shears.  We have a large area of grass which is planted up with spring bulbs.  There are a few trees planted there as well and the ground is very uneven.  I think that it was originally a spoil heap from when the house was built; it also slopes quite steeply down to the ditch at the front of the house.  We leave cutting the grass until the bulb leaves have died back which means it is left until June by which time it is looking quite unkempt.  The ground is much too uneven for the tractor mower and because of the trees it is a very difficult area for Richard to do (he is 6′ 3″ tall).  I am a foot shorter in height than he is, so I do this part of the garden.  I can’t use the strimmer as it is too heavy for me so I cut the 3′ high grass with shears.  We bought a scythe but somehow we can’t get it to sharpen.  I like using shears as I can see what I am doing and I don’t cut the wrong things down as I might if I could use the strimmer.  A strimmer makes such a mess; shears are tidy.  Once I have cut the grass to a manageable length I then rake it up into a number of enormous heaps and then transport it to the other end of the garden in a wheelbarrow and put it on the grass heap.  I then use the electric mower and cut the grass even shorter.

The field of barley behind our house.

As  a result of this work I am extremely achy and stiff but I have developed some good muscles in my arms and shoulders!  I was glad we had a little rain on Sunday so I excused myself from working outside.  I read my book, talked with my husband and daughter and generally had a relaxing day.

View across the pond to the field beyond.

We had an Evening Prayer service at St Michael and St Felix Church in Rumburgh where Richard is one of the church wardens.  We left home at 5.45 pm to make sure the church was tidy and ready for the service.  There had been a big wedding there on Saturday so the church is full of beautiful flowers.

The decorated Rood Screen. This is very pretty but it would be better if people didn’t decorate it as the screen is hundreds of years old and falling apart.

Posies on the pew ends. I think the top of the poppyhead (the carved pew end) looks like a clown with a bowler hat.

Flowers at the East Window

Flowers round the Font

Flowers in the porch

Flowers in the porch

The path has been regravelled and the fence panel at the side of the church has been repaired.

Fresh gravel and new fence panel.

The bride’s family live at the farm which surrounds the church and the church is in their back garden.  I have never walked all round my church because that would mean walking through someone else’s property.  However, it is so nice to have kind people who decorate our church and repair our fence and path because their daughter wanted to get married in the church!

Our evening service was taken by Maurice and we concentrated on the Trinity.  It was a pleasant, peaceful and thoughtful service.

I’ll use the rest of the post to show you a few more things I’ve seen on my travels and in the garden recently.

This is a Great Mullein (Verbascum thapsus) and I noticed the other day that it was looking a little ragged.

This is one of the culprits – a Mullein Moth larva (Shargacucullia verbasci). The plant was covered in the caterpillars which will probably eat most of the plant and leave a blackened stump.

I had noticed that a few of my plants and tree seedlings had been damaged and on Sunday I found a few of the caterpillars that were responsible.

This is a Vapourer Moth larva (Orgyia antiqua), and it is eating a Laburnum seedling.

The Vapourer is often found in towns and often defoliates street trees.  I’ve never seen it in our garden before – perhaps they found their way here on a plant from the garden centre in town.  Vapourers are tussock moths which are all rather hairy.  The Vapourer female moth doesn’t have functional wings and will stay close to her cocoon after hatching out.  The Vapourer larva, along with other members of the Tussock Moth family, has tufts or tussocks of often colourful hairs (the Vapourer’s are yellow).  The hairs on adults and larva are usually barbed which makes them unpleasant and painful to handle.

A bee on a scabious flower.

I am not very good at identifying bees.  I never seem to notice or photograph the key feature mentioned in the ID guide.  The bee above could be a cuckoo bee.

I try to grow as many plants as possible that are liked by bees and other insects.

Bee on Cotoneaster.

Bee on Purple Toadflax.

A rather lovely sunset I saw last week.

Lastly, I have another video to share with you but it isn’t the video that’s important just the soundtrack.  I would like you to ignore the video!  It’s rubbish!  I was taking photos in the garden next to the pond, when the Turtle Dove started singing.  I switched the camera to film so I could record the song and vaguely pointed the camera in the direction of the pond.  The video is very shaky as I didn’t have a tripod with me.  I only managed to record a very short part of the song.  It is quite a quiet purring sound and the other birds in the garden were singing very loudly!

Thanks for visiting!