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.

x

Garden 7

Days of bees and roses . . . and baby birds . . . and mad bikers.

 

Saturday 7th June, 2014.

 

During TT fortnight, the Sunday between practice week and race week is known as Mad Sunday. There is no practice or race session scheduled and not much local traffic on the roads, so the fans take over the course to show off their impressive motorcycles.   According to the aficionados it is now a pale imitation of its former self in the hell-raising glory days of the 1970's.  But I wasn't taking any chances so I was out early to get the Sunday papers and back in the glen while the majority of the fans were still nursing  their hangovers. Although I managed to avoid the mad bikers, I was held up on my way home by a couple of mad pheasants . . . having a fight in the middle of the glen road near the bridge. 

 

The Mad Sunday bikers were probably in a more sober mood than usual this year because a popular road racing star, Simon Andrews, died in a racing accident in Northern Ireland earlier in May.  The bikers gathered in Douglas and rode around the course in a memorial lap.   It was estimated that the convoy stretched for fifteen miles and that five thousand bikers took part in the memorial lap.  Sgt Andy Kneen was on duty in Parliament Square and said "It took 40 minutes to come through town. An elderly gent on the Square told me that he noted 1900 motorcycles, before he gave up counting." 

On Sunday morning I caught my first glimpse of the baby great tits.  There were two in the kowhai tree near the birdfeeder and one of the parents was feeding them with bits of peanut.  I opened the dining room window and tried to get a photo but they kept moving and it was difficult to focus on them amongst the branches.  Then they flew away so I gave up.  Later I went back to close the window and one baby was back . . . and in a better position.

 

 

Rough winds should no longer be shaking the darling buds of May - because it is June and summer is officially here.  But the weather demonstrated its contempt for the calendar.  After a pleasant day the clouds gathered and it turned wet, windy and foggy by the time our son's flight from London landed at Ronaldsway on the first night of June.  But island weather is nothing if not changeable and after a cloudy start the sun was back the next morning.  The racing was postponed for a couple of hours to let the fog disperse and the road dry out but I walked to the Hairpin Bend with our son in the afternoon to watch the first lap of the Supersport race.  We can reach the Hairpin on foot from the glen road - along a path behind the golf course and then across a few fields and along a track above Claughbane.  It is the slowest corner of the course and the easiest place to get a photo which is not just a blur (or an empty road because the bike had passed before I clicked the shutter).  This is Conor Cummins, our local hero - a Ramsey lad (if you can call a six foot four inch 28 year old a lad).

 

 

It turned out to be the only race on Monday because the second one was delayed until Tuesday after the Clerk of the Course announced  "The weather is closing in."  Tuesday is also Ramsey Sprint Day and there is usually a display by the Red Arrows.  They performed again this year.  We didn't go the Mooragh to watch but stood out in the sun on our patio and watched from a safe distance.  I have mixed feelings about these displays - awe at their precision flying but a sense of unease about anything resembling war games or the glorification of war.

 

 

In the glen it has been a week of early morning shopping trips, cooking and pottering around, taking endless blurred photographs of birds . . .  and then spending hours deleting them.  Trying to photograph the birds through an open window wasn't the best idea because the midges are starting to bite - so I had to clean the kitchen window and take photos through the glass - not ideal.  The birds didn't cooperate.  They kept sitting with their backs towards the camera, fidgeting around or taking off just when I was ready to click the shutter.  Other hazards are the twiggy bits of tree that blow around and interfere with the focus - resulting in blurred birds and perfectly sharp but unwanted images of kowhai leaves.  Half of the problem was my fault because I was using the zoom and didn't hold the camera steady enough.  Using a tripod helped with that difficulty but then it took longer to get the birds in the frame.  Oh well, I am getting plenty of practice and they say that practice makes perfect.  I was happy with this late afternoon shot of a baby great tit . . .

 

 

. . . and this one of the first baby coal tit that we have seen this year.  It was still being fed by a parent and was begging for food.

 

There were plenty of adult birds too - some grabbing a quick snack and others bringing their brood along for a "happy meal".  We even had a visiting gold finch.

 

There aren't many new flowers in the garden this week but some are starting to open on one of my favourite shrubs - the philadelphus or mock orange.

There are also a few new varieties of weeds are starting coming into flower.  There is the red clover which brings joy to the bees and has pretty markings on its leaves too.

 

 

The bees also love the purple toadflax Linaria purpurea - not a local weed as it originated in Italy.  I stole a root from a clump growing at the base of a tree in the little park at Pooyldooey a few years ago.  I didn't feel too guilty because the small bit that I took had been strimmed or mowed so I assumed the Ramsey commissioners wouldn't mind parting with it.  It is happily seeding itself in various parts of the back garden now.  The smaller types of bumble bee can almost fit into the tiny flowers.

 

 

 

And the bees are still enjoying the sage flowers.

 

 

 

The purple honesty flowers are long gone but the pods remain.  They are still green with a purple flush on one side but will fade to near white by the end of autumn.

 

 

 

June should be the month for roses and Cécile Brunner is looking lovely - sprawling over the summerhouse roof.

 

 

But there are very few flowers on my other roses yet.  I don't have many rose plants - just a few hardy varieties.  Some years ago a small branch blew off my Cornelia.  I stuck it into the side of a handy plant pot and was rather surprised when it decided to grow.  The poor thing is still in the pot and I must remember to plant it in a suitable place.  It is flowering although none of the buds on the parent plant has opened yet.  Cornelia dates back to 1924, has sprays of small flowers with a delicious scent.

 

 

It was one of those TT race weeks when the weather caused postponements - so the roads were closed every day.  But it ended on a high note.  The weather on Friday was glorious.  There were no life-threatening accidents in the Senior TT.   And Conor Cummins finished second behind the invincible Michael Dunlop, who won his fourth race of TT 2014 bringing his total number of TT wins to eleven.  So that is the end of TT2014 - no more young and not so young men risking their lives by riding round our twisty roads at speeds of up to 200mph - until next year.  James, who looks after the trollies at the local supermarket - and thinks I am incapable of taking my shopping back to the car without his help - says that he doesn't know whether the TT racers are incredibly brave or just plain mad.  I suggested that they may be both.  Philip McCallen, another TT hero, should know.  So I will let him have the last word . . . "I keep hearing it from people who should know better: Michael Dunlop is a madman. Michael Dunlop is a lunatic. . . . . . Let me tell you what Michael Dunlop is: a genius."

Now it is Saturday morning and the week is ending as it began - wind and heavy rain, with a soupçon of  thunder and lightning mixed in.  The back lawn was littered with larger petals than usual this morning and I realised that the wild roses, which grow up through the hawthorns, were starting to flower.

 

Garden 6

Last day of the merry month of May.

Saturday 31st May, 2014

Last Monday morning I watched the great tit parents flying to and fro - frantically delivering small caterpillars to their brood in the nest box.  Then I settled down at the far end of the living room to write about the week's events in the garden for the blog.

After finishing the post and clicking on "publish", I went to the window to check on them again and all the frenzied feeding had ceased.  The birds had all gone.  It was rather ironic that I was busy writing about how I hoped to see the babies launch themselves into the big wide world - at the exact time that they were busy leaving. It was disappointing to miss the excitement yet again, but I am glad that we no longer have to worry about predatory cats.

Tim took the box down and removed the old nest. He will clean it and put it up again at the end of autumn. Sometimes the small birds use nest boxes for shelter during the cold winter nights. I took a photo of the discarded bedding . . . 

 . . . and then left the nest outside the kitchen under the bird feeder. I didn't want to bring it into the house. Years ago Tim brought in some old nest boxes which needed to be repaired and we found they were infested with fleas. 

Later we drove out to the Balladoole civic amenity site with garden refuse for recycling.  The "green waste" is taken away and turned into compost - so I don't have to feel guilty about being too lazy to make my own compost.  I was amused when we got home and I saw a little blue tit doing her own recycling. She was pulling carefully selected bits out of the old nest and flew off with her beak full of building supplies. It seems rather late for her to be starting on nest building. I wonder whether she is planning to have a second brood.

On damp mornings I have been wandering around the garden with a pair of sharp scissors hunting massive slugs.  It is rather pointless because there must be another hundred lurking in the undergrowth for every one that I murder - but I am still in a bad mood about the red hot poker buds that are being destroyed before the flowers even have a chance to open.  I admit that I am a hypocrite.  I should treat all fauna with equal respect - not favour the cute furry and feathery things - but I will never be able to force myself to love slugs.  I don't like to use poisons so I am following the advice (or rather the orders) of the Queen of Hearts and wandering around muttering "Off with their heads!" 

While I was checking that quote I came across a couple of other amusing quotes from Lewis Carroll which are rather apt for my approach to gardening. “She generally gave herself very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it)” and “My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that.” I don't think I will ever "run" fast enough to catch up with everything that needs to be done in the garden. (Disclaimer: As they are taken from the internet those quotes may be a disneyfied version and not from the original text. Apologies may be due.) 

The hawthorn flowers have already lost their sparkle and are fading fast - appropriate really because it is the end of May.  Hawthorn is sometimes called the May tree and I have read that it is the only British plant to be named after the month in which it flowers.  I took a larger than life size photo of some of the first flowers to open in the garden on the 15th of May. 

I find the scent of the hawthorn flowers rather oppressive. It seems to appeal to some people more than others.  A neighbour told me that she likes the scent because it reminds her of her childhood when it signalled the approach of summer and the long school holidays.  Apparently the scent is a mixture of sweet perfume to attract bees and an underlying odour similar to decaying flesh which attracts flies. The trees certainly are successful in attracting pollinators because they produce good crops of berries for the blackbirds. 

The wild flowers of high summer - the foxgloves - are just starting to open.  Tim thinks we have too many foxgloves he is right. They do self-seed wildly.  Their seeds are tiny and there are vast numbers of them in seed cases all the way up the stem.  By the time the last flowers at the top of the spike have opened - the seeds at the bottom have already ripened.  The bumble-bees love them and I hate cutting back flowers while they are still being visited by the bees - so I usually leave them too long and end up spilling seed when I cut back the old flower spikes.  They come up all over the garden.  I deliberately left a lot of seedlings in the bed in front of the hawthorns after Tim built a low wooden retaining wall behind the bed a couple of years ago.  That area dries out fast in summer and I needed something tough there.  Foxgloves are biennials and those plants will all flower this summer.  When they finish flowering, I will pull them out and replace them with something else that enjoys well-drained soil. 

Another summer flower is the ox-eye daisy.  I was given a few plants by a neighbour when we were living in a rented house in Ramsey and I brought them with me to the glen.  They have been coming up in various parts of the garden ever since but are not as invasive as some of the other self-seeders.  They are fairly tall and tend to flop over.  Before mowing last Monday, I cut back a stem which had fallen across the lawn, rescued a flower and a bud, and put them in a small vase on the kitchen windowsill.  They have lasted well and would make good cut flowers - but I prefer to see flowers in the garden. 

For years I had a rather miserable sage plant in the shady front garden because I avoided planting culinary herbs in the back garden where the Schipperkes ran free and the boys lifted their legs against every convenient plant.  Eventually the old plant blew over and I took cuttings from the remains and stuck them in the sunnier raised bed behind the kitchen.  They were delighted and have grown so enthusiastically that they will have to be cut back - but I am waiting until the flowers fade. 

Near the sage is a small clump of Snow-in-summer Cerastium tomentosum. It grows wild in SE Europe and is a popular rockery plant. I also have some growing at the side of the garage but it doesn't get enough sun to flower well.  It likes to grow "in dry, sunny areas with poor soil" - so it might be a suitable replacement for some of the foxgloves. 

I am rather embarrassed to admit that there is one more rhododendron in the garden - Rhododendron ponticum.  This variety is frowned upon because it is one of the foreign plants that has escaped into the wild and become a pest. I don't think it is a problem on the Island although there are some old bushes next to the lower paths in the older section of Skyhill plantation. I haven't seen any seedlings amongst the trees near our garden - so I don't think our single plant behind the hawthorns poses a threat to the local environment. When we moved here, there was a huge specimen, the size of a small tree in the garden. Tim dug it out (with difficulty) when he built terraces at the south end of the house. Later I noticed the seedling and decided to keep it. Perhaps I made a mistake. 

On Friday morning, after writing the previous paragraph, I did a bit of scary research on the internet and was nearly intimidated into going straight out into the garden to cut down the offending plant. But I decided to do the shopping in Ramsey first. I stopped on the glen road near Milntown (a local sort-of-stately home) to take a photo of the lovely laburnum. 

Through the slats of the fence I could see a variety of different coloured azaleas and rhododendrons - and some of them looked exactly like my despised R. ponticum. Then I saw more specimens in every second garden as I drove down Lezayre Road. Driving back up the glen on my way home I could even glimpse the patches of mauve flowers along the edge of Skyhill plantation. They seemed to be more or less equally spaced, so I think they must have been deliberately planted. I calmed down and decided that my little plant, which was just one of many in the area, was unlikely to have any significant ecological impact.  So it got a reprieve. We walked up the forestry path behind the house after I had unpacked the shopping and I took a photo across the Ballagarrow fields to the lower slopes of Skyhill. 

I haven't seen the baby great tits yet but we have heard them - up in the trees in the next door garden. They chase their unfortunate parents around for a few weeks after leaving the nest - demanding food with continuous high-pitched shrieks.

The butterflies are still few and far between. The only ones prepared to pose for photographs are the little green veined whites. 

Usually the birds distribute seed from our own shrubs and trees into various parts of the garden but occasionally they bring me a gift from a neighbouring garden. Some are not welcome - like the Himalayan honeysuckle (aka Pheasant berry) Leycesteria Formosa which is pretty but rather invasive. But I was very happy when I discovered a Japanese wineberry seedling (Rubus phoenicolasius) some years ago. A bird must have "deposited" a seed from a garden across the road. It is an attractive plant and is promising to get a small amount of fruit this summer. 

While prowling around with the camera looking for an interesting flower to photograph, I found this white iris. I bought the rhizomes years ago and they haven't flourished - but every time that I think they have all died up pops a beautiful flower. 

The oriental poppies have done well this year.  Every time they are knocked around by the wind or weighed down by rain and look as though they are going to disintegrate into piles of soggy crepe paper . . . another batch of buds open!

I drove to Ramsey early this morning because the TT races start today and the roads close at ten o'clock. I stopped on the glen road to take another photo. Not the laburnum this time, just some "weeds". There was a pretty patch of cow parsley (aka Queen Anne's lace) Anthriscus sylvestris growing by the road. I have had a few plants coming up amongst the poppies and various wild flowers under the beech tree in previous years but haven't seen any in the garden this summer. 

Ramsey has changed its character since yesterday. It is usually very quiet before nine in the morning but today there were queues at all the tills in the supermarket and at least half of the shoppers were wearing leathers. There were almost as many motorbikes as cars in the parking areas. I was hoping to get a photo of the crowds gathering in Parliament Square to watch the races but it was two hours before the first race was due to start and the fans were still riding around the circuit. I took this photo of a group of fans on their bikes turning into Parliament Square from Lezayre Road. 

PS Parliament Square is not square and there has never been a parliament in Ramsey - but it is near the town hall. Perhaps that counts as a parliament.