Saturday 5th July 2014
There will be a gap of a few weeks until the next post on the blog. The inevitable has happened. I am running out of subjects for garden photos.
The spring and early summer flowers are long gone - or just looking tired - and it will be a while before the later summer blooms are trying to cheer up the garden.
Very few butterflies have visited us yet. I noticed the first flowers opening on the white buddleia this morning. It is often called the butterfly bush, but the butterflies don't usually appear in any numbers until the end of the month - almost too late to take advantage of the buddleia nectar.
And the "generation 2014" birds are growing up - so no more cute baby bird photos until next spring.
I am still watching the bird antics in the back garden whenever I am doing the washing up. This morning there was a serious squabble on the ground under the bird feeder. Too many chaffinches were competing for the sunflower seeds falling from the hanging feeder. Bird feeding is a serious hobby here. The days when one put out a few crumbs and bits of bacon rind for the birds in winter are long gone. It is a multi-million pound industry now. We used to just put out peanuts for the tits which live up in the plantation but last year we extended the menu and added shelled sunflower seeds. Word soon got out and now we have daily visits from the siskins and goldfinches as well. I have heard that niger seed is even more popular with finches but ours seem to be happy with their sunflower seeds. Incidentally, I was amused to read that the "word police" are trying to change the spelling from niger to nyger - in case someone accidentally mispronounces it.
I did some internet research the other day to try to find out whether it is possible to distinguish between male and female goldfinches. The most common advice was that the red patch on the head extends behind the eye on the male but not on the female. In that case this could be a male . . . but nothing is ever simple and a breeder of gold finches said that it isn't a fool-proof method.
A contrast to the goldfinch, the most colourful of our visitors, is this humble brown and grey dunnock. They usually scurry about on the ground under the feeder although at least one is brave enough to fly up to the mesh bowl for the occasional sunflower seed. They used to be called hedge sparrows but the aforementioned word police no longer approve of that name because they are not a type of sparrow.
Ages ago, Tim read a novel set in the past in rural England and was interested in a comment about the dunnocks and ruddocks that ate the grain spilt by the roadsides after harvest. I looked up ruddock and found that it was an early name for the robin . . . and also discovered that the name Dunnock comes from the Ancient British dunnakos, meaning little brown one. Very appropriate.
The chaffinches weren't the only quarrelsome birds this morning. I saw the male blackbird defending his favourite spot up near the wild flower bank from a brown one - perhaps a female but more likely a juvenile. It has crossed my mind that ardent feminists might be irritated by the naming of the blackbird. Only the adult male is black. Someone else writing on the internet was interested in a different aspect of the name and wondered why this particular bird has the common name of blackbird when there are much more impressive black birds like ravens, rooks, crows and jackdaws. Apparently the answer is that in the distant past, when birds acquired their common names, only small birds were called birds. Large birds were called fowl - hence "Behold the fowl of the air . . .".
Back in the garden, I did finally relent and used the sprinkler on the back lawn at the beginning of the week after mowing. But it was a case of too little too late and now the grass is a patchwork of mottled green and beige. It isn't really a lawn. I don't think it was ever planted with proper lawn grass. It is really just the remnant of an old sloping field which has been mowed for years . . . a mixture of grasses, some of which survive the hot weather better than others. The lawn in front of the house is not a problem. It was obviously levelled when the house was built sometime around 1970 but the back hasn't been changed much structurally since the days when it was a field belonging to Sunnyside Cottage. The narrow terrace running across the top of the property (where the summerhouse was erected) used to be a farm track from the cottage to a water tank in the larger field on the south side of our garden.
We did get some good rain yesterday (10mm) but the week started hot and dry. Even this young great tit was examining the thermometer and wondering when it would cool down!
On Tuesday Tim went with me to the Garden Centre in Waterloo Road (or perhaps that should be Albert Road . . . Ramsey roads have a habit of changing their names as they go along). A kind friend gave me two vouchers in spring and I spent the first in April and bought a lovely white clematis and a white rose. The clematis looked like this when we brought it home.
The rose has just flowered. The first blossoms are slightly damaged at the edges of the petals - probably due to some froghoppers which had spread their froth over the buds. I removed the offending bugs before they damaged the next lot of buds.
I got a new weeder on Tuesday and we chose three perennial plants. Only one has a flower - a monarda didyma which I have been wanting for ages. You will understand why if you know the common name . . . bee balm. It is also supposed to be popular with butterflies. I am going to plant it in the garden today. I have been waiting for the rain to give the garden a good watering first. I took this photo yesterday in the conservatory - it was too wet outside.
The other two plants which we chose are a white perennial geranium (Kashmir white) which will look good next to my deep violet blue geraniums and a rose coloured Hellebore.
There were a few new flowers to photograph this week. First a shrub, a pink spiraea - probably S. billardii "Triumphans" - growing up by the summerhouse with the meadowsweet on the bank in the background.
Then these bright cousins of the common Montbretia - Crocosmia Lucifer.
I am not sure whether to classify this Feverfew Tanacetum parthenium as a wild flower or a herb. It is rather invasive so I suppose it could even be called a weed - but there is no denying that it is pretty.
This little plant is definitely a wild flower although most gardeners would call it an invasive a weed. It spreads so fast that I have to weed out vast quantities even though it is dearly loved by the bees. It is Lotus corniculatus or bird's foot trefoil aka crow's toes or bacon and eggs or Lady's shoes and stockings or God Almighty's thumb and finger or hen and chickens or Granny's toenails!
And finally . . . some mystery bugs! My planned daily "exercise walks" up Skyhill fizzled out very quickly because I decided that I needed to clear the jungly path from the top of our garden up to the forestry track before continuing to use it. When I was walking back to the house after a brief path-clearing stint, I noticed that something had been eating the leaves on our small birch tree. Then I noticed the culprits. I quickly removed them from the tree before they could do any more damage and then regretted that I hadn't taken a photo. So I retrieved a leaf and took this snap and then headed for the computer to identify them.
Well, they are birch sawfly larvae! Tim wondered why the birds hadn't eaten them and the reason is that they have a strange defence behaviour of arching their tails when anything casts a shadow on them which probably scared our little birds. During my research I found a photo in the Telegraph with a description that called them "dancing caterpillars". The person who sent in the photo was delighted because he had very few butterflies in his garden. Unfortunately they are not caterpillars and I think he must have been very disappointed when they ended up turning into flies.
No comments:
Post a Comment