Chalet Pruche from Birch Alley After three months being officially closed the arboretum is gradually opening up again, starting with members only. This morning we made our first visit for three moths or so under bright blue skies and pretty well had the place to ourselves. It was glorious. Of [...]
Great Crested Flycatcher A garden resident this summer where we have several tall trees from which it can sally forth any after passing flying food. It's been around and calling for a couple of weeks but only now did it pose for its portrait. Great Crested Flycatchers are sit-and-wait predators, sallying from high [...]
A while ago I started experimenting with a website (blipfoto.com) that encourages people to post a single daily photo as a sort of visual journal. I found that I could manage the discipline of doing this ... but I think it's better to share the daily pictures somewhere that I can fully control [...]
Thyme-leaved Speedwell (Veronica serpyllifolia) Working in the Fritz Garden (where the community grows vegetables for food banks) a few days ago, and preparing to plant tomato seedlings I was caught by this tiny gem of a wildflower looking appealingly at me and pleading not to be “weeded”. What could I do but [...]
There is a famous phrase from a chidrens’ poem written in the 1760s by Isaac Watts that asks: “How doth the little busy bee improve each shining hour?” ... and the answer in our case is by industrious labouring in our Socially Distant Garden. What, you will be wondering, loyal reader, has [...]
After over a week of unseasonably cold northerly winds that held spring bird migration back things changed overnight and we are in a south-westerly air flow that's a bit warmer. Quite a change and we have spent half the day glued to the windows watching the garden, especially the waterfall, as bird [...]
Common Experience 2020 A couple of days ago, a friend in England posted this short piece on her Facebook page. She got it from a friend who had it from a friend and we have no idea who composed it. But it is so clever, and so apposite, I felt it was [...]
May-Day turned out to be a very birdy day in the (locked-down) garden starting with ten or a dozen White-throated Sparrows who stuck around all day and were busy singing to the accompaniment of more of their kind in gardens up and down the road. You can never have too many Sparrows. [...]
A Hermit Thrush briefly showed this morning and posed nicely for these photographs as he went about his business looking for food on the rough grass. I managed to grab a short video as well - there were ten seconds of camera shake in the middle where the camera lens caught the [...]
In the town where I live there is a small wooded copse adjacent to the Fritz Farm Community Centre that for most of the year is nothing very special but just now is carpeted by a rather glorious collection of blue flowers. A few days ago, seeking interesting mosses (I do stuff like [...]