Garden 10

Another week in the garden.

Saturday 28th June, 2014.

Our "drought" continued on Monday and Tuesday.  The roses were been happy.  Their delicate petals suffer in the wet and the wind. 

This male blackbird also seemed to be enjoying the weather . . . taking a break from family duties and soaking up the sun in the back garden.

I have been watching for juvenile blackbirds but haven't got a good photo yet.  The adult male returned later and was joined by a young bird which followed him around and appeared to irritate him but after a while the sun was too tempting and he spread out his feathers again.  It was amusing to see the young bird copy his Dad.

We were promised some rain on Wednesday but I wasn't very hopeful because the forecasters predicted:

Wednesday, 25 June 2014

Weather: Cloudy, dry for much of the time but a little patchy and mostly light rain possible.

Rainfall (mm): 0-1

I dislike watering the garden because sprinklers seem so wasteful and at this time of year a person standing around with a hose is bound to be attacked by midges.  Some patches of grass in the driest parts of the slope behind the house had started to wilt and I was thinking seriously about watering . . . so it was a wonderful surprise to wake up on Wednesday and find that there had been drenching rain during the early hours of the morning.  It continued on and off for hours - even the ground under the trees got a really good soaking.  The government weather site described the current weather at the airport with a big yellow sun symbol - so perhaps the rain didn't extend down to the south of the Island.  It was almost a mini-miracle.  As soon as the rain stopped I took a photo of the blissfully wet back garden.

I saw the young blackbird again - but only in the distance.  It was hunting right up by the edge of the wild flower bank and managed to catch a large slug.  It knew the correct routine and spent some time wiping the slug on the grass trying to get the sticky slime off its lunch.

On Thursday I had planned to clear the meadow vetchling which had spread from the wild flower bank into the daffodil bed under the hawthorns but then I saw how much the bumble bees were enjoying the flowers and changed my mind.  I decided that the garden was still too damp and midgy for any serious work and that I would let the bees enjoy the flowers for a few more weeks.

Some other wild flowers up by the hawthorns, which are also popular with the smaller bees, are the attractive spikes of tiny hedge woundwort (Stachys sylvatica).   According to an old herbal:  ‘a distilled water of the flowers makes the heart merry, to make a good colour in the face, and to make the vitall spirits more fresh and lively’.  No wonder the bees are buzzing.

Instead of a session in the garden, I decided it was time to stop just thinking about getting fitter and start acting.  A short walk up to the top of the plantation seemed to be the best plan.

The robins are no longer feeding their young and are spending more time behind the kitchen supervising the area around the bird feeder and plotting to annex it into their territory during autumn and winter.  This chap perched on the table and watched me putting on my boots.  He lost interest when he realised that we hadn't come out bearing gifts of sunflower seeds.

The walk is short but reasonably steep and takes just over half an hour.  It mostly zig-zags through conifer plantation where nothing much grows under the trees because of the dense shade.  The only novelty I came across was this fungus - probably an earth ball - growing on the path.

Further up the hill the path crosses two little streams, barely a trickle, running down little valleys worn into the side of the glen.  No conifers have been planted on the steep banks of the streams so they are flanked by native trees, mainly ash and holly.  Enough sun gets through for bluebells to flower here in spring and I passed a patch of an unidentified weed which migrated into our garden a few years back.  It probably hitched a ride on one of the dogs because the seeds have little kinky hooks which are useful for grabbing hold of passing fur.

I wasn't sure about the name of the plant.  I knew it had small yellow flowers and thought I spotted some of the flowers - but on closer examination they turned out to be rather miserable creeping buttercups growing under the plants.  I checked my wild flower books when I got home and discovered that the plant is called Wood Avens or Herb Bennet  (Geum urbanum).  I was intrigued by the name and did a bit of Googling.  I found this explanation "It was called 'the Blessed Herb' (Herba benedicta), of which a common name still extant - Herb Bennet - is a corruption, because in former times it was believed that it had the power to ward off evil spirits and venomous beasts."  So perhaps I made a mistake when I weeded out the plants that I found in our garden but it has rather tough roots, is invasive, and will probably be back.

The view up the glen is always a pleasant reward after the effort of climbing to the top.  Our house is only a few feet above the level of the river running though the glen.  According to the contour map we must climb about four hundred feet to the top of the track.

Another wild flower/weed which has just started flowering and that I may regret having in the garden is the more spectacular  Fox-and-cubs or Orange Hawkweed  (Pilosella aurantiaca).  It is native to central and southern Europe.  I remember seeing a plant in the small cottage garden across the road, then I saw some outside our hedge and now it has migrated into the bottom of the garden under the trees near the gate.  I left it because not much grows in the hard earth and dry shade there - and it is pretty.  But it spreads by roots and seed and could become a problem if I let it get into other parts of the garden.

When I returned from a shopping trip to Ramsey early yesterday afternoon, I saw a flash of Red Admiral wing as I drove up to the garage and when I walked down to close the gate I saw that the hummingbird hawk moth was back in the garden.  It was feeding on the red centranthus at the side of the drive.  I rushed inside to get my camera.  The moth was still there when I returned but shot off as soon as I approached.  I think it has an aversion to papparazzi.  

I walked along a path in the direction that the moth had taken and came across some flies buzzing around.  I wondered what had attracted them and then I saw that the euonymous in the bed above the wall was flowering.  The plants have been in the garden ever since we moved here and this is the first time I have noticed any flowers.   I assumed they were just foliage plants.

 

Further along the path below the wall, the first flowers were opening on the dark red penstemon - an impulse item purchase.   I spotted the plant on the pavement outside a flower shop in Ramsey.  I love the colour.  They suffer a bit in the wind but grow so easily from cuttings that the damaged twigs can just be stuck in the ground and nearly always root.

After putting the shopping away, I returned to my favourite pastime of staring out of the kitchen window and saw that the Red Admiral that I had glimpsed earlier was sipping nectar from the centranthus in the bed behind the house.

While I was watching, an aggressive Meadow Brown arrived on the scene and chased the much larger and more colourful butterfly for a while before settling on the sage flowers.

After a second skirmish the red admiral decided to rest in the sun on the window frame.

Every time I start worrying about coming to the end of new flowers to photograph I find something else coming into bloom. While I was chasing butterflies I noticed the first flowers on the erigeron.

Garden 9

The longest day

21st June, 2014

It is midsummer's day and for once it really feels like midsummer.  We have enjoyed nearly two weeks of warm, dry, sunshiny days - with the promise of at least four more to come.  Everyone is happy apart from the grass behind the house which doesn't look as green as it was a week ago and would prefer a nice heavy shower.

It should have been be a good opportunity to relax and contemplate John Lubbock's wise words - "Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under the trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time”.  But I seem to have spent half the week annoying bumblebees in a vain attempt to teach myself how to identify the various species which visit our garden. 

I hoped it would be easy because there are only six common species.  Most of them have three stripes, one on the thorax and two on the abdomen.  The common names of three varieties refer to the colour of the hairs at the tips of their abdomens  - Red-tailed Bombus lapidarius, Buff-tailed Bombus terrestris and White-tailed Bombus lucorum.  The other three are the Common Carder Bombus pascuorum, the Garden bumblebee Bombus hortorum and the Early Bombus pratorum.  But, each species comes in different sizes - queens, males and workers - and, just to complicate matters even further, the Buff-tailed and White-tailed workers all have white tails.

I haven't seen a Red-tailed yet and I don't know whether I have seen an Early, as they have the most colour variation.  The Carders are easy to identify.  They are small and ginger.  There is a photo of one in my post dated 7th June.  And the bee on the grass in the 19th May post looks rather like a White-tailed queen. I managed to get a few photos of a Buff-tailed queen this morning.  She was on the path behind the house in the shade and looked rather groggy so I moved her up into the sun on the wall.  Here are rear and front views.

This little bee could be a Garden worker.  It has a long head, a distinguishing feature of the species, and pollen sacs.  

On my way back to the house after a frustrating session of bumblebee photography, I noticed a small insignificant fly on some pink spiraea blossom (Little princess I think - an original inhabitant) and took a quick snap.  A happy impulse because it looks quite amazing when it is magnified.

We may have seen a young blackbird in the front garden this morning. They are brown like their mothers but with a speckled breast. It was too far away to be certain but its body language indicated that it was a young one.  The young siskins are also hard to differentiate from the females.  They are said to have a streakier breast.  This is a female . . . 

. . .  and this may or may not be a juvenile.  It could be because it is very unusual to see adult siskins feeding on the ground.

A couple of easy to distinguish male siskins sharing the sunflower seed feeder.

No butterflies yet, apart from the few whites which have been around for weeks now.  But we did have an unusual visitor on Tuesday evening - a hummingbird hawk moth.  It wasn't easy to photograph because the light was bad and I didn't want to get too close and frighten it way - so I was using a slow shutter speed and a lot of zoom.  It is fascinating watching them feed because they hover above a flower and then dart off to the next source of nectar.  The larger photo is slightly clearer but the smaller one gives a better impression of the immense length of the moth's proboscis.

But it is still June and I mustn't ignore the flower of the month - the rose.  It is only a week since the first buds showed colour on Gentle Hermione.

Now the petals are already falling off those first flowers and she is showing off her perfect fat pink blooms.

A totally different rose, which came up by itself from seed up near the summerhouse, is rosa glauca (a wild rose from central and southern Europe) with its delicate flowers and attractive blue/green foliage.

Our wild rose growing through the hawthorn is busy shedding petals on the lawn in front of my foxglove bed.

Most of the flowers are too high to photograph easily - but there was one perfect rose on a lower twig with some minute beetles feasting on the pollen.

More shrubs are coming into flower.  This hypericum is another of the original inhabitants in the garden - probably H. Hidcote.

One of my favourites is the Deutzia.  I came across this shrub for the first time when I was trimming the ivy on the wall and saw it in our neighbour's garden.  She gave me a cutting but it didn't take.  When I saw a plant for sale outside the flower shop in Ramsey I couldn't resist buying it.  It turned out to be a slightly different type, which flowers later in the year, but is very pretty with its pink buds and frothy white flowers.

I don't have room in my garden for a proper wild flower meadow, so I make do with my sunny wild flower bank in the back garden where the meadowsweet is just starting to flower  . . .   

. . . and my woodland glade down on the bottom level near the road where the Welsh poppies and ragged robin flourish in the dappled shade amongst the shrubs.

One of the inhabitants of the glade, with unusual pale green flowers, is this "stinking hellebore", a native of the mountainous regions of Europe.

And finally, proof that the skies over the Island are not permanently grey . . . dazzling blue skies over Skyhill on Tuesday.

Garden 8

More baby birds and roses.

Saturday 14th June 2014

Peace reigns.  All is quiet in the glen - apart from the busy lawnmowers and the builders who are renovating an old house across the road.  The locals like to complain about the disruption to their lives but there is always a vague feeling of anti-climax after TT.

So, no more racing bikes screaming around the Island roads.   The noise of their engines doesn't disturb us when we are at home.  We just hear a distant buzz - like a swarm of angry wasps.  Now there is just the gentle hum of the bees in the garden . . . and the constant twittering of baby birds. 

We do have occasional visits from wildlife other than birds and bees.  I saw this little wood mouse  on Monday evening.

 

But the baby birds are still the big news of the week.  The first baby blue tit was spotted outside the kitchen on Tuesday.  

Two arrived together.  I didn't see the parents feeding them.  Blue tit babies seem to be more efficient and capable of looking after themselves than the other juvenile tits.  The only difference between the babies and the adults is that the young birds have a grey cap on the top of their heads instead of blue, and yellow on the cheeks.  

The tits seem to be our only customers at the bird feeder that use their feet to grasp pieces of food when they are eating.

We have had some other baby birds as well.  One little speckled juvenile robin has been fossicking for food under the feeders.  It kept bouncing around and then diving under the raspberries and disappearing but I managed to get a photo eventually.  They only get their red breasts after the autumn moult.

There have been chaffinch babies too.  They are not so interesting because they look very much like the adult females.  The only way I can be sure they are juveniles is if I see a parent bird feeding them.  All my "feeding" photos are blurred because the birds are moving and the light hasn't been good enough to use a fast shutter speed - but this is a baby chaffinch with its father's blurred rear end disappearing off the left edge of the photo.

On Thursday we drove out to the Point of Ayre.  We were met by the usual pair of ringed plovers.  They seem to be walking around in the sparse vegetation near the old fog horn every time we visit the area - but are always just too far away for a really good photo.

Parts of the shingle shore were fenced off because the arctic terns are nesting.  We stayed off the beach but the birds took exception to us walking along the grassy path above the beach and flew over us in a threatening way, making harsh grating squawks.  I didn't get a photo of the terns in flight but managed to focus on one landing on the beach.  I don't know whether the assortment of old seaweed and rubbish is a nest - or just happened to be there.

We had a good walk in the sunshine and on the way back to the car I noticed that the burnet roses are flowering.

Which reminded me that we have a mystery rose in the garden.  It was here when we bought the property and is growing in about the worst possible place - behind the poppies, right next to the wall in front of the house, under the overhanging wistera and clematis.  I left it there because I thought it would be impossible to move it to a better place; too difficult to dig out with all the competing roots in the area.  But against all the odds it has survived and even produces an occasional flower.  I have never taken much notice of the rose . . . until this year when I have been wandering round the garden with a camera, searching for something interesting to photograph.  I thought I would try to identify it but had no success so I wrote to a couple of more knowledgeable friends.  I suspect that it may be Peace - but I remember Peace as being paler.

The buds start out yellow with red stripes . . .

. . . and the first day the flowers appear to be yellow . . . 

. . . but the next day the petals start turning pink . . .

. . . and the flower "fades" to a deeper and deeper shade of pink before the petals fall.

I think I will try taking cuttings and if they grow, I will risk trying to move the plant in autumn.

The "Manx palms" are flowering with gay abandon this year.  Everything is doing well after the mild winter.  I like using the local name because it is so absurd.  They are not Manx and are not even palms.  They were brought here from New Zealand and are also known as cabbage trees (Cordyline australis).  We have two and they were given to us by our neighbour from across the road when they were just babies and looked like tufts of coarse grass.  We didn't know what they were and had no idea that they would grow into trees.  The flowers grow in huge bunches and remind me of clusters of white starfish.  The bees love them and the birds enjoy the small white berries.

The front garden is looking subdued now we have come to the end of the poppies.  The last stragglers are flowering in front of the skimmia in front of the house.  One of our Manx palms is in the background - on the right hand side.

There are a few new flowers and weeds this week.  First the weeds.  The ragged robin is spreading on the lower terrace.  It likes damp shady places.  This is a magnified image of the flowers.

These campanula do not need magnification.  I bought a packet of seed more years ago than I can remember.  The flowers in the picture on the seed packet were blue but just one of the seeds produced white blossom.  Both colours have been coming up in various parts of the garden ever since.

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