Pollution and Other Matters

03 Thu Apr 2014

Posted by Clare Pooley in Gardening, plants, Rural Diary, trees, Uncategorized, wild birds

Tags

amelanchier, belemnite, blackbird, Blue Tit, claypipe, Garden Warbler, ground-ivy, Jacob's Sheep, jonquils, Mistle Thrush, pollution, rhubarb, tulip, violets, woodpecker feather

The warmer weather that was forecast certainly arrived bringing with it hazy sky – and pollution. Everything outside was covered with a coating of fine yellow dust – from the Sahara Desert – and this was especially noticeable on our cars. Here in East Anglia our air isn’t as pure as we would like. As we live in the countryside many people think that the air is fresh and clean here; but they would be wrong. The prevailing wind from the south-west brings pollution from London and winds from the south-east bring pollution from the Continent – mainland Europe. The cleanest air is on winds from the north-east but that is also the coldest! East Anglia is a mainly agricultural area with plenty of agricultural vehicles and large trucks delivering feed, grain and other supplies on the narrow lanes. The farmers use herbicides and insecticides and the crops are sprayed at least two or three times a year. Because there is very little public transport we all have to drive everywhere that is too far to walk or cycle. R and I are fortunate to live in an area where the local farmers are trying to make the land better for wildlife. Wide strips of land are left fallow around each field with the hope that wild flowers will colonise them and animals and birds will find more food and shelter there.

Since coming to live in Suffolk twenty-six years ago I have developed asthma, hay-fever and other allergies that I didn’t have in south-east London and Kent. R also has hay-fever and E has asthma. This morning both R and I woke feeling quite unwell with headache, sore throat and other hay-fever symptoms. Fortunately we always have a stock of anti-histamine tablets in the house!

Yesterday, after getting home from taking Mum out, I had a letter to post so walked down the lane to the postbox. I was hoping to see the Jacob’s sheep in a field close to us as I had heard them arrive there on Monday. They always bleat a lot when they are in a new field but soon settle down and if I hadn’t heard them arrive I wouldn’t have known they were there. It was quite difficult to see the sheep and lambs as the hedge is high and thick but I managed a couple of photos.

Jacob ewes and lambs

Jacob lamb

I then took a few more pictures of the garden, fed the birds and watered the tubs of flowers. More and more birds are singing and the dawn chorus is getting louder and louder. Yesterday I woke to hear what I thought was a Garden Warbler, our second summer visitor, singing in a tree across the lane. As I was still sleepy I wasn’t sure whether it was a Garden Warbler or a Blackcap, the songs being quite similar, but having heard it again today I am sure it is a Garden Warbler. We do get both birds here in the summer but the song I heard yesterday and today was definitely the faster more garbled song of the Garden Warbler. The Song Thrush has been singing all day, every day for some time now and yesterday he was joined by the Mistle Thrush. We now have a wonderful chorus of birds in the garden – too many to mention without it becoming a long and boring list. Here is a photo of a male Blackbird and a Blue Tit on the peanut feeder.

Blackbird

Bluetit on the peanut feeder. A Chaffinch is in the tree at the back.

Today I took some more photos of the garden and also of some objects I have found in the garden. The belemnite I found in my herb garden on Monday. I remember finding lots of these when on holiday with A when she was little at Charmouth on the Dorset coast. They are fossils of squid-like creatures.

The feather I found a couple of weeks ago. No doubt from a Greater Spotted Woodpecker.

The broken old clay pipe I also found in my herb garden but about five years ago. I can’t bear to get rid of it!

The rest of the photos are of plants, flowers and trees.

White violets in the grass verge near my mother’s cottage.

Ground ivy. This is an evergreen wild plant and if the leaves are bruised they smell minty. Also known as Alehoof, the leaves used to be added to ale during brewing to clear the fermenting liquid and sharpen the flavour. Even after hops were introduced to England in the 16th century liquor flavoured with ground-ivy was still made and sold for a time. Another name for ground-ivy is gill and a drink called gill tea was made by infusing the leaves with boiling water and adding honey. This was supposed to alleviate coughs and other chest disorders and was still being sold by street vendors in London in the 19th century. Culpepper says ‘The juice dropped into the ear doth wonderfully help the noise and singing of them, and helpeth the hearing which is decayed.’

Some jonquils.

A pink tulip.

Rhubarb!

The Amelanchier is just coming into flower.

R and I discovered another goose nest in the undergrowth on the other side of the pond yesterday. Unfortunately, today the goose was no longer there and all the eggs gone. The good thing about nesting on the little island is that foxes and other predators cannot get to you so easily. The bad thing about our island is that it isn’t big enough for more than one goose nest.

Monday’s Garden

31 Mon Mar 2014

Posted by Clare Pooley in amphibians, churches, cooking, Gardening, Insects, plants, Rural Diary, trees

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

blackthorn, bullace, cowslip, daffodils, Elmer Fudd, fritillaries, greengage, jonquils, ladybird, lathyrus, Mothering Sunday, pieris, primulas, rabbits, saxifrage, simnel cake, wild cherry

I must admit to having an Elmer Fudd moment this morning. I went to have a look at the cowslip/primula plants I had transplanted last weekend and to my horror I saw that all the flowers and buds had been eaten on almost all the plants. I suspect some wascally wabbit! I will now not know until next spring which of the plants are normal cowslips to be planted at the top of the ditch and which are the different ones to be grown on elsewhere.

Very strange weather today. It was quite warm – in fact it got to 18 degrees centigrade but we only got a little sunshine at midday and then a few showers of rain during the afternoon. Quite humid all day and extremely cloudy this afternoon. I walked round the garden checking on the bird feeders and looking to see what plants had started to grow or flower since Saturday. I hadn’t been able to get into the garden at all yesterday as I had been busy cooking lunch after coming home from church and then entertaining Mum all the afternoon. We had had a good Mothering Sunday service at church and all the women had been presented with little posies of flowers. The Rector looked wonderful in his rose coloured chasuble but sneakily removed it before I could photograph him!

My eldest daughter A had sent me a card which had arrived in the post on Saturday and she telephoned me when I got back from church. E gave me a card and two stoneware pots for the garden. Mum arrived bringing with her an apple pie and a simnel cake. My mother will be 84 in a couple of weeks time and can hardly see but she still manages to bake and garden and run her house with no help at all.

Mum’s simnel cake.

The goose is still sitting on her nest on the island. She probably only has another week or so to go until her eggs hatch and then we’ll see how many goslings there are. While I walked round the pond I heard not only frogs croaking but also what I assume to be toads as well. We do get toads in the garden but I’ve never noticed them in the pond before. I also saw flower buds on the marsh marigold in the big pond that has never flowered before as well. I was really quite pleased about this as the pond has looked so awful since we had the work done to remove most of the willow scrub. What willows we have left are full of pussy willow flowers and alive with so many bees.

The wild damson or bullace tree is in flower.

The wild or bird cherry is also just coming into flower too.

Our greengage tree has its first flowers. We planted it the autumn before last and it didn’t flower at all last year but grew very well. My mother-in-law had asked us if we would grow one as she likes greengages so we got it especially for her and we call it Joyce (her name).

The blackthorn at the front of the house is now in full flower. The tree at the back of the house has finished flowering and the tree by the front gate hasn’t started to flower yet. The front of the house is colder than the back and the gate is coldest and shadiest of all.

My pieris ‘Forest Flame’ has new leaves on it.

The saxifrage has started to flower.

The new Frittilaries under the crabapple are flowering. I am pleased to see that there is a white one.

Primulas.

Cowslip.

Daffodils at the front of the house at the edge of the ditch.

A seven-spot ladybird on a daffodil. A lot of our daffodils suffered in the hail and rain we had last Wednesday and they also have to put up with all sorts of wild fowl trampling over them.

An orange-red cowslip.

Jonquils.

Lathyrus vernus ‘Spring Beauty’. This is an ornamental vetch – a member of the pea family.

A Walk Across the Fields.

29 Sat Mar 2014

Posted by Clare Pooley in churches, Gardening, Rural Diary, walking

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

All Saints church, bird scarer, gargoyle, gravestones, rookery, round towers, stained glass, verges, wood carving

Last Sunday afternoon R and I decided to go for a short walk across the fields and take in All Saints Church on the way. All Saints was a member of our benefice until the 1970s when it was deemed redundant and is now looked after by The Churches Conservation Trust which is a charity which helps to protect historic churches at risk. The churches remain consecrated but no longer have regular worship in them. I think we have a couple of services a year in this church, notably a Songs of Praise service in midsummer in which we sing a lot of favourite hymns or perhaps a collection of hymns with a common theme. If people wish to hold a funeral there for example, special permission has to be sought before it can take place. Many locals were upset when the church was closed and some would love it if it were in use again. This would not be practicable unfortunately. Our poor Rector has eleven churches to look after virtually on his own as it is, and bringing All Saints back into the benefice would not be a viable proposition.

The lichen and moss on top of our gate post.

The view of our garden from the gate,

and the view from the gate of the verge on the other side of the hedge. This is common land but we try to keep it as tidy as we can. Looking at the blackthorn suckers round the telegraph pole we really ought to do something about those quite soon.

We walked a little way down our lane and saw the church across a field of oil-seed rape.

We turned down another little lane off ours and noted someone mowing their verge. Some people make their verges so neat and tidy they look like little lawns, with not a weed in sight. They must get very disappointed when a tractor drives all over it. We don’t mow our verge mainly because it is such a large area and also because the ground is so uneven and slopes down to our deep ditch. R strims it every now and then and we try to keep the tree seedlings to a minimum.

We then walked through a yard and then through a gate into a field with a footpath at the side.

The view across the fields from the path.

Our rookery at St, Nicholas.

The strange looking bird to the left of the photo isn’t a bird but a bird-scarer kite.

A couple of cloud photos.

All Saints church.

A gargoyle waterspout. This one looks like a lion.

A stained glass window. Holes in the window have been patched with fragments of other stained glass.

Carved bench ends. I’m afraid the third one is very blurred but I had to include it as it is the only one I have of the horse.

A beautifully carved door.

The font.

The altar.

Etched glass in the porch.

A gravestone with a very worn death’s head at the top left.

A view of the graveyard from a comfortable bench in the sun.

Tiny lancet windows in the tower. Round towers are usually Saxon towers and East Anglia has more round towers than any other part of the country.

We then had a chat with friends who live in a farm house next to the church and who keep the church tidy and clean.

We had a lovely day today (29th March) and I was able to spend a little time in the garden this afternoon. I won’t have time tomorrow as we have church, then I will be cooking lunch for us and my mother and then spending time with her during the afternoon.

Being Thankful for Small (and Great) Mercies.

29 Sat Mar 2014

Posted by Clare Pooley in churches, cooking, Rural Diary, trees, Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Mothering Sunday, simnel cake, Thankfulness, The Woodland Trust magazine

I have a lot to be thankful for. Today especially, I am grateful for

R’s safe return from a five day working trip away from home.
The fact that E has started to look forward with hope instead of with fear.
Mum having a lift to her church this Sunday so that I can go to mine with R.

Mum got a phone call the other day from a friend at church who asked if she was going to provide a Simnel Cake as usual on Mothering Sunday. A Simnel Cake can be made either for Easter or Mothering Sunday (which is this Sunday coming). It is a fruit cake with not only a marzipan top but a layer of marzipan baked in the middle. The top is decorated with eleven marzipan balls representing the eleven faithful apostles. Mum said she would be providing it if she could have a lift to church and, of course, she will be getting her lift. Hooray! I am very grateful for this as I wanted to invite Mum to lunch and if I had to take her to church I would not have the time to cook lunch for her as well. I am doubly grateful for this as not only will Mum’s church be holding the Mothering Sunday service but there will be a Baptism and a First Communion too! I am mighty glad to get out of that! I can now go to a service in my own benefice and see all my friends, be a wife and mother and sideline the daughter bit for an hour or two and get home in time to cook a decent lunch for the family.

I belong to The Woodland Trust – a charitable organisation which is trying to conserve our rapidly depleting woodland. It also works to educate people about trees and woodland and among other things, is trying to find ways of combatting all the diseases attacking our native trees. I received its quarterly magazine today and was looking through it while R and I were drinking a cup of tea when he got home. I was disappointed to see that, like most organisations, it has decided to ‘dumb down’ its magazine. It is now aimed at the weekend environmentalist – the better-off, liberal, middle-class urban dweller wanting something to do on holiday. Lots of pictures and lots of bite-size snippets of information instead of informed articles written by and for reasonably intelligent people.

There was an article about a writer and environmentalist who has spent a whole year climbing trees across Europe. He has tried to climb one tree a day and often persuaded other people, often complete strangers to join him. There was a short interview with Elton John who has planted many trees on his estate near Windsor. There was an article about geocaching – ‘a global phenomenon’ that The Woodland Trust has decided to join in with. It’s a game of hide and seek using GPS technology where items are hidden in remote spots and people scamper about moors, mountains and woodlands trying to find little prizes in cache boxes. I read out the instructions to R and we had a laugh when we found we had to ‘winkle out the trove’ from among roots and branches. R said it sounded like a cue for a Rambling Sid Rumpole song. People of a certain age from Britain will probably remember Rambling Sid and his ‘folk songs’ and if you don’t, Radio 4 Extra repeats all the ‘Round the Horne’ programmes regularly which featured him.

I will end my post with a photo of the misty sunset yesterday evening.

The line under the sun is an electricity cable and the sun appears to be balanced on it.

Quote

Lent

28 Fri Mar 2014

Posted by Clare Pooley in Uncategorized

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Lent, Poetry

I wish to share with you a poem I was introduced to recently. It is called ‘A Lenten Psalm of Awakening’ and is by Edward Hays.

Come O Life-giving Creator,

and rattle the door latch

of my slumbering heart.

Awaken me as you breathe upon

a winter-wrapped earth,

gently calling to life virgin Spring.

Awaken in these fortified days

of Lenten prayer and discipline

my youthful dream of holiness.

Call me forth from the prison camp

of my numerous past defeats

and my narrow patterns of being

to make my ordinary life extra-ordinarily alive,

through the passion of my love.

Show to me during these Lenten days

how to take the daily things of life

and by submerging them in the sacred,

to infuse them with a great love

for you, O God, and for others.

Guide me to perform simple acts of love and prayer,

the real works of reform and renewal

of this overture to the spring of the Spirit.

O Father of Jesus, Mother of Christ,

help me not to waste

these precious Lenten days

of my soul’s spiritual springtime.

The Weather

27 Thu Mar 2014

Posted by Clare Pooley in Gardening, plants, Rural Diary, Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

blackberry, clouds, cowslips, gardening, primroses, rhubarb, snow, weather

The weather is a topic we British never tire of talking about. This is because it is forever changing and unpredictable. The temperature can rise or fall by as much as ten degrees centigrade in just a few hours at any time of the day; we can have warm days in winter and cold days in summer and a rain cloud is usually just about to appear over the horizon. Our lives are all affected by the weather to a lesser or greater extent. The North Atlantic Drift around our shores protects us from the bitter cold winters that other countries this far north have to endure. We are a maritime nation.

I live in north Suffolk at a latitude of about 52.5 degrees north which is further north than Winnipeg and at about the same latitude as Berlin, Warsaw and Irkutsk. We are buffeted by the strong, wet, warm Westerlies from the Atlantic but also get winds straight from the Arctic or from Siberia and, if the weather forecast is correct for this weekend, we also get nice warm winds from the south-east; from the Mediterranean. Lovely!

Yesterday began with a frost. The temperature had gone down to minus 2 degrees centigrade overnight but at dawn the sky was starting to cloud over and the frost soon disappeared. We then had a day of ‘April’ weather – lots of showers of hail, sleet and rain – and also some sunshine. Not a good day for gardening! I spent most of it with my mother taking her shopping and then to church with her for Stations of the Cross and then a Mass.

March and April can be so beautiful but the gardener must be forever vigilant and protect vulnerable plants from frost, ice and also the strengthening sun. I looked at my diaries for last winter the other day and made a note of the amount of snow we had had. The first lot of snow was on the 5th of December 2012 and temperatures didn’t get much above freezing for some days after that. A thaw on 14th December. Snow again on 13th January 2013 and snow showers continuing most days without a thaw until 26th January. A thaw on 27th January. Snow again on 2nd February and snow showers most days until a thaw on 14th February. Snow flurries from 21st to 24th February and then heavy snow from 9th to 13th March which took ages to disappear. A day of snow on 4th April. And this winter not one flake of snow here at all! Yet! The thaws and consequent ice are the real problems I find during a cold winter. This is what kills the plants and damages roads and buildings.

R and I are weather watchers and we have such a wonderful view of the wide East Anglian sky from the back of our house. I took a couple of photos of the edge of a cold front going over last Friday. The thick grey cloud overhead with a sharp edge to it to the west and clear blue sky beyond approaching on a stiff south-westerly breeze.

The following day was Saturday and a good gardening day. I had weeded round our rhubarb plant during last week, which, by the way is now ready for pulling, and I had tidied the blackberry canes next to it as well. The blackberry wanted to grow where the rhubarb is and I had a bit of a fight with it, removing unwanted canes and cutting down others. It is now nice and tidy with most of the new canes tied up and well away from the rhubarb. I also had to dig up some cowslip plants from where they wanted to grow in the lawn and put them where R and I want them to grow, on the edge of the ditch at the front of the house. R finds it difficult to mow round the flowers when they are in the lawn and even though I think they look lovely there it will make R’s job quicker and easier now they are elsewhere. We have a few different coloured cowslips in our garden and some new plants which are neither primroses nor cowslips. The bees do a good job of fertilizing all our flowers and the resultant mongrel plants are very interesting and varied. Next to the rhubarb on the opposite side to the blackberry I found a wonderful collection of different types of primula. I have dug these up and put them in a seed bed area to see how they develop.

I then spent a little time looking at and photographing the clouds. Caravans and convoys of clouds travelling across the sky. To use a well-worn simile they really are like fleets of sailing ships on the ocean. R likes to look at clouds and see pictures and objects in them: I see islands and mountain ranges in the sky.

Later that afternoon the sky darkened and even though we stayed dry there were rain clouds all around us.

Better Late Than Never

26 Wed Mar 2014

Posted by Clare Pooley in Uncategorized

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Tags

aubretia, birch catkins, bluetit, Bungay, daffodils, Eye, Lent course, narcissus, pheasant, raw milk, roadworks, women drivers, woodpigeon

I don’t seem to have had the time to write a post for days and have got all behind. So, instead of trying to catch up I will start with today and if I have the time will add in some of the things I have done/noticed during the past week at a later date.

This morning was mainly taken up with housework – boring but necessary. The weather here, unlike the rest of the country it seems, was lovely. Bright, hazy sunshine and light winds which dried my washing very nicely. The wind was a little chilly as it came from the east but nothing to complain about. I had to go to Bungay in the early afternoon to do some shopping and post a couple of letters. The improvements to the town’s pavements and road system are coming along nicely and I was able to drive into the centre for the first time in weeks. When the work is finished there will be fewer traffic jams (I hope!) and the absence of kerbs will mean that those with prams and pushchairs or in wheelchairs or mobility scooters will be able to get about more easily. The town will look very different and in some ways that is a little sad. Bungay will have lost it’s timeless look; it will no longer look quaint and old-fashioned but like all other towns with the regulation one-way streets and easy-access shops.

On my way home I nearly collided with another car. All the lanes are mainly single track with a few passing places. The lanes are also windy so it is always best not to go too fast. The driver of the other car came shooting round a corner towards me and had to swerve to avoid me. She was on the phone. I am very sorry to say that a lot of the really bad driving I see these days is done by women. Women used to be reliable, sensible drivers but not any more it seems. The worst ones are the young girls who appear to be unable to drive at less than 50mph. They are also the ones using phones: twice in recent weeks I have been stuck in a queue at a junction behind young women who thought it would be a good moment to sent a text or instant message. One girl had stopped a couple of yards from the junction to message someone and had opened the driver’s door and was hanging her leg out! She may have broken down but it didn’t look like it. Many women don’t know how to reverse and won’t pull into a passing place and to be followed by a woman on the school run in the morning is a terrifying experience! They are always late and have cars full of children.

My route home was along the road from Bungay to Flixton which has water-meadows on one side of it. It has been pleasing to see the cows out on the meadows again after their winter stay in the cattle sheds. The farmer here is one of the few remaining dairy farmers around. He has recently started selling raw (unpasteurized/unhomogenized) milk from a little stall in the farmyard and this has been exceedingly popular. Every time I drive past there is always someone there in the little shop.

I took a few photos this afternoon. This first one (which I actually took this morning) is from an upstairs window and is of a couple of woodpigeons feasting on leaf and flower buds on the top of our hedge. What is not obvious is that they weren’t the only pigeons on the hedge at that moment and they spent most of the day there too!

Birch catkins and new leaves. Our horrible, tumbledown summerhouse is in the background!

A bluetit in the birch tree.

Scented narcissus

Aubretia

Scented daffodils. These have come out extremely early and have rather thick petals, almost as if fashioned out of wax.

A male pheasant. I took this photo through the kitchen window which accounts for the vague haziness.

I drove to Mum’s house this evening at 6.45pm and there was still a lot of light in the sky. We attended her Lent course lecture in Eye, the subject being Prayer for Healing and Wholeness and given by the Sub-Dean and Canon Pastor from the cathedral at Bury St Edmunds. A very interesting talk indeed.

A starry drive home with the temperature just above freezing at 1 degree centigrade.

Aside

Are You Passionate? Or Are You Just Good at Your Job?

21 Fri Mar 2014

Posted by Clare Pooley in Uncategorized

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enthusiasm, passion, vocabulary

I have a bugbear! My bugbear is the over-use of the word ‘passionate’. Everyone has to be passionate about something or other. It seems that unless you are ‘passionate’ about your job the implication is that you won’t be interested enough in it, that you don’t care, that you won’t produce the goods.

In today’s post was a horticultural supplies catalogue with an introduction written by the owner/director in which she talked about her team of ‘passionate garden product designers’. This conjures up to me a rather amusing image of all sorts of extra-curricular activities going on in the drawing office! I am old fashioned I expect, but to me, to be passionate means that one let’s one’s heart rule one’s head, that things aren’t thought out properly because one has rushed into something without thinking. I don’t want passion when ordering bathroom supplies or buying furniture, I want to talk to someone who knows their job and will understand my needs. Enthusiasm, yes, I can deal with that, as long as I can be helped efficiently. I am quite happy to be advised by a miserable old sod predicting doom and gloom as long as I get the right advice.

When E started at nursery school, her teacher came to visit us to talk about E’s needs and the facilities provided at the school. My heart sank when the woman told us that she was passionate about teaching and the children she cared for. E, even more than me, cares not a jot about passion in ordinary life. She needed and still needs plain speaking, calm and authoritative but kindly people around her. E’s teacher got very upset when E didn’t really take to her. E only settled into school when she moved up to the Reception class run by a very sensible woman who was considered strict by some. Her classroom was quiet, busy and well run and E thrived.

I am not saying there isn’t a place for passion. The world would be a very dull place without it and I get passionate myself about certain things – art, nature, music, beautiful objects, certain ideals I have, the need for conservation etc. It is the word ‘passionate’ being misapplied that I object to. People think that they are expected to over-enthuse about their job when it is just a job they are good at. Unless you say in an interview that you are passionate about dealing with the public when you are going for a tele-sales job for example, you probably don’t stand a chance of getting it.

Please let us get rid of this ‘passion’ and just get on with doing our jobs properly!

Wild Flowers? or Weeds?

20 Thu Mar 2014

Posted by Clare Pooley in Gardening, Insects, plants, Rural Diary, Uncategorized, wild birds

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bumble bees, chickweed, dog violet, flints, greylag, marsh marigold, narcissus, red dead-nettle, sunset, sweet violet, weeds, white dead-nettle, wildflower

Our garden is too large for us to keep every part of it neat and well manicured and I wouldn’t like it half so well if it was. I love gardening – digging, weeding, tending plants, but there is always risk, responsibility and pressure to do things properly and at the right time. The wild, untamed, untidy parts of the garden are just pure pleasure to me. I have no yearning to tidy them though I realise that some management is necessary which is why we had the work done to the big pond a few weeks ago. The ‘weeds’ I assiduously pull out of my flower beds I love to look at in the wild garden. Flowers at this time of the year are a wonderful source of nectar for insects, especially bumble bees, just out of hibernation.

The red dead-nettle, Lamium, a member of the mint family, grows all over our garden and is a very common plant in Britain and flowers for most of the year. Both it and the white dead-nettle were boiled and used as pot-herbs and as pig-swill in the past. They had many medicinal uses, most notably against the ‘King’s Evil’ – scrofula, a type of tuberculosis that caused skin eruptions. Culpepper says ‘The herb bruised and with salt and vinegar and hog’s-grease laid upon a hard tumour or swelling, or that vulgarly called the king’s-evil, do help to dissolve or discuss them’. It also ‘makes the heart merry, drives away melancholy, quickens the spirits’. If you look at the photo below carefully you will be able to see the dark anthers under the hooded upper lip and the darker purple markings on the lower notched lip.

The white dead-nettle’s flowers are bigger than the red’s. It relies on bumble bees to pollinate it’s flowers and they (the flowers) are custom made for bees. The lower lip is a landing stage for the bee and has two small lateral lobes and a notched middle lobe. The anthers are black and are under the hooded upper lip. As the bee enters the flower seeking the nectar the top of it’s abdomen brushes the stamens and gets covered in pollen which is then transferred to the style of the next flower it visits.

We don’t have as much chickweed in this garden as in other gardens we have had probably because we get so many ducks, geese and chickens passing through. They love the plant, which can also be eaten by humans as a salad vegetable. The flowers are so small that most people hardly notice them but looked at closely they are quite lovely. The botanical name is Stellaria, little star, and the name is quite apt. The styles are white and the stamens are such a pretty pink. Chickweed is a member of the pink family. It has a single line of hairs which run the whole length of the stem and if a drop of dew lands on the plant it runs down the stem by way of the hairs until it gets to a pair of leaves. Here some of the water is absorbed by the hairs and the rest carries on down the stem to the next pair of leaves and so on. This water is reserved in the plant in case of drought. It flowers almost all year round and is widespread and prolific, which is why most gardeners hate it!

This marsh-marigold plant is in our small pond and is the only decent plant in there. It flowers and flowers and looks so bright and cheerful. We have another plant in the big pond but I have never seen any flowers on that. I also discovered a very small plant in the ditch by the big pond with much smaller flowers. I posted a photo of it a few days ago. Another name for marsh-marigold is Kingcup and according to one of my flower books this is derived from the Old English ‘cop’ meaning button or stud such as kings once wore. Apparently, farmers in many parts of the British Isles, used to hang marsh-marigolds over the byres of their cattle on May Day to protect them from the evil doings of fairies and witches.

We not only have dog violet in our garden but also sweet violet which is the only violet flower to be scented. In olden times they were strewn on the floor to sweeten the air. Their scent is lost almost as soon as it is noticed and this is because the flower produces a substance called ionine as well as the scent. Ionine dulls the sense of smell so that not only does the violet’s scent disappear but any other odours too. Clever! In the verge near to my mother’s cottage are many white violets which are very pretty.

Our garden is full of flints and some of them are enormous. Trying to make new flowerbeds has taken so much time and energy as these great stones have to be levered out all the time and more and more keep appearing. I quite understand the old folk thinking that stones grew in the soil. This is our Lindt flint as we think it looks like a Lindt chocolate rabbit.

A pretty narcissus has just flowered.

The dear goose sleeping on her nest.

And lastly a few pictures of last night’s sunset.

Unphotographable

19 Wed Mar 2014

Posted by Clare Pooley in domestic animals, plants, Rural Diary, Uncategorized, wild animals, wild birds

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

chiff-chaff, clouds, hare, house sparrow, nesting, phalaenopsis orchid, ploughing, skylark, spring, sunset, terrier, woodpecker, yellowhammer

Spring is definitely progressing quite nicely. We have had some really glorious weather recently – blue, shining days and mild, moonlit nights. Today we had some very heavy showers – the first real rain for some time. In fact, the mud on the roads has been drying out and cars have been causing dust clouds as they travel along our lanes. Most of the recent signs of Spring and many of the things I have seen in the past few days I have not been able to photograph. Either they are unphotographable like birdsong, or my camera is unable to take a decent picture of them – birds in the garden (can’t zoom in far enough) and the moon – or I am driving somewhere and can’t stop.

More and more different types of birds are singing each day and I have noticed more pairs of birds in the garden instead of either solitary birds or flocks of birds. The house sparrows have started building their nests under the eaves of our house. They sound as if they are wearing hob-nailed boots as they busily sort out the old nesting sites under the roof tiles and they clatter about in the gutter chattering and arguing. R and I look forward (I don’t think!) to the mornings when we are awoken by the sound of a happy sparrow singing at dawn -( ‘cheep!’ (two, three) ‘cheep!’ (two, three) ‘cheep!’ (two, three) ‘cheep!…..). When R and I went out for our walk last Thursday evening we listened to many birds singing including a yellowhammer. These birds are getting quite scarce now and this makes me sad. The woodpeckers are starting to drum. I heard a chiff-chaff warbler yesterday – our first summer visitor – and above my head a skylark was singing.

On Sunday evening at dusk I looked out of the kitchen window to see a large hare run along the road to the end of our drive and stop there for a minute. It then raced across our grass at the front of the house then out of sight in the direction of the big pond. On the way to Mum’s house on Sunday morning I had to slow down as a very small terrier dog was running up the lane keeping pace with a tractor ploughing the field next to the road. The little dog belonged to the ploughman who waved an apology to me as I drove very carefully and slowly past. This evening, on my way to Mum’s house again, the sky looked quite dramatic -a thick black cloud-covering which had rents in it with the pale blue evening sky showing through like silk beneath the slashes in Elizabethan clothes.

I will end this post with, first of all, some photos of my Phalaenopsis orchid which I won in a church coffee morning raffle on 5th October last year and which has been in continuous flower since then. (Apologies to friends on Facebook who have seen this already today). I will then add some photos of today’s sunset.