Bluebells, plantains, daisies and more

These are part of a seven-metre long stretch alongside the south-east fence. There are two more large patches and an increasing number of small outliers which I hope will go forth and mutiply.


Yesterday's favourite plantain. I liked the one below too:

Ribwort plantain

Tiny daisy.

This, believe it or not, is a path.
Have to wait till the bugles have finished flowering
before mowing it.

Note: I still use the old name for English bluebells, Endymion non-scriptus, simply because I like it! I'm not sure whether the current name is Hyacinthoides non-scripta or Hyacinthoides non-scriptus. I've seen both in books.

Undefeated dandelion and a rose in an old wall

A few days ago I thought this dandelion had a defeated look (see below) but it has flowered again. Perhaps the bit of snow and rain we've had lately helped release some more nutrients from the crumbling old bricks and the mortar that it's rooted in.

26 april

Despite its tatty looks, I like this old wall. It has such a strong life spirit, or perhaps I should say plant seeds that land on and in it seem to find it a good growing environment. I trained an old rambling rose over it a few years ago which thrived so that I've had to prune it quite drastically. It seems to have put roots down at the bottom of the inside of the wall and doesn't need to be connected to its parent plant any more.

This is what it looks like in full bloom:

parent plant by the den

the white roses have pink 'highlights' and sometimes
an entirely pink bloom appears

one of the best blooms from July 2013

I hope it does as well this year. There are Hart's-tongue ferns inside the wall as well and various mosses.

Some of the bricks seem to have a dark 'cindery' matter in their middles. I think I need to do some brick research!

Layers of growth in the garden

Being on a hill means vertical gardening of a sort comes naturally at the Boggy Brae. Looking up the garden in a more or less westerly direction gives this view.

Starting at the bottom layer there is the small 'umbrella' willow, its lower leaves eaten off by roe deer; to its right a pieris and the rhododendron I've called Pale Pink Glory which, as you can see, is past its best glory– sic transit gloria mundi. Between the pieris and Pale Pink is a lemon-scented fern (Oreopteris limbosperma). In front of that – properly the first layer, I suppose – is pignut. Of course. :)

The next layer is less easy to distinguish to the unpractised eye. My eye is practised. Leftmost is some of the ancient apple tree, then an escallonia behind the pieris, and the mauve-flowered Rhodoendron ponticum whose roots are actually in our neighbour's gadren. The blue thing below it is a tarpaulin over a wood pile.

Above the apple tree is a large goat willow with a honeysuckle bedecked holly tree growing close beside it.

Right at the top, up the hill beyond our garden is a birch tree, some kind of conifer standing tall and alone, and a massive old beech tree by the burn. That tree is probably where all my beech seedlings have come from. I guess last autumn was a good one for beech mast.

Lower down, just behind the house, is the retaining wall at the back of the back terrace. The corner by the old ship's companionway steps (boat builders used to live in this house) has layers too.

At the bottom is a good bunch of Common Haircap Moss (Polytrichum commune). This is just getting back to its former glory, recovering from the depradations of a pair of geese we had some years ago. Unusually it is quite dry in the photo because we've had four dry warm days. Yesterday got back to 'normal' and it has rained all night from late afternoon.

Growing above it are ferns, mostly Lady Fern (Athyrium filix-femina), including what I believe is a naturally occurring red-stemmed variety of which there are quite a few on the Boggy Brae. To the left of the ferns, though difficult to see in this pic is a clump of roseroot. There is an even bigger clump to the left of that. Above the ferns are chives and just above the chives, just beginning to flower, some blue irises.

In among the chives is an irrepressible rose – the semi-wild kind that do so well here – which keeps trying to grow across the steps. I've been hacking it back each year but decided on a change of hack, sorry, tack this year and recently pegged back a young stem with a strong tent peg and will continue to do this as it grows in an attempt to train it the other way.

Purple layers

Up a little again, towards the shed, there is another unplanned layering of creeping buttercups, red campion, alkanet, and ox-eye daisies, with the first two African daisies just showing to the right. Above them all is the ubiquitous pignut in the grass. When the ox-eye daisies open (soon!) the alkanet will not be visible from this viewpoint as it is behind.

Finding things in the grass

I've got into the way of scrutinising the greensward of the Boggy Brae as I walk about. The other day I noticed a patch of green that differed from the rest in the field. when I went for a closer look, it turned out to be a patch of grass of a different species from that surrounding it. I'll investigate further in due course. In the meantime my self-testing guess is one of the soft grasses, Holcus species.

The other evening, in the slanting light, as I was walking up the south-east slope after abandoning the lawn-mower in a boggy bit where it had got stuck beyond my strength (Toad later rescued it and finished the mowing I had started), I noticed a different green in the grass again. closer inspection revealed it to be the leaves of Whorled Caraway (Carum verticillatum) in one of the places I had first found it growing last year.

As you can see from the photo to the left (click on it to enlarge it), Whorled Caraway leaves look quite different from grass. The first pic, above, was my attempt to show how the leaves' colour differed from that of the grasses surrounding them. It was more obvious than the photo shows.

Anyway, since I want these to flower later, I set about fencing them off marking them so that Toad doesn't mow the caraway patches by accident. Out came the canes and string – see pic below. The mower was round the corner of the bank in the left of the photo, and that is the loch you can see through the trees.

I call it the SE slope because it is on the SE side of the garden but the incline is actually north-easterly.

It's just as well we got that boggy bit mowed when we did because the heavens opened later that night and it has rained fairly steadily since.

Some writing of Toadlet's from ten years ago

I bought this Year Book on a visit to Sulgrave Manor in 1991

I've used the notebook to record sightings, often first sightings of the year, of birds, butterflies and flowers. Yesterday, when I entered my first sighting of a peacock butterfly and hawthorn budburst at the Boggy Brae ("Brsd" in the notebook. The other places mentioned, "Lottie", which was my allotment, "WH", and "309W", are all places in Oxfordshire), I noticed an entry by Toadlet. I think it was actually 2005 but the numerals 5 and 3 are easily mixed up when you're four and a half, as she would have been in March 2005 and when she also would have been able to write about poppies. She made some other entries that year too. Birthdays were clearly important!

The Ruth whose birthday that was wrote to her granny about my "bfdy" at a similar age.

I think the reference to crocuses is my favourite. There is one about Daiys (daisies) in 2004, on reading which I decided Toadlet was just making the dates up all along!

Still, the entries probably were from 2005. We've never had any red crocuses.

Spring things

Near the pond and carpeting the ground in the copse is the spring gold of Opposite-leaved Golden Saxifrage (Chrysosplenium oppositifolia).

Daisy

Near the drive where I was clearing some dead fern and pulling dead wood out of a rhododendron bush, I found a toad frog. I apologised for disturbing him and re-covered him with his moss blanket.

<< Now you see him;

now you don't.

Bullfinches come quite regularly to eat the buds of the wild plum tree and today I saw the first Boggy Brae butterfly of the year.

Peacock butterfly

A young hawthorn tree in the hedge has burst its buds and I took the picture below just for the colours.

Rhododendron ponticum
flower shoot

Winter garden

Pic taken 4 August 2014

I'm working my way through the green pile at the back. The logs have been split and stored in a woodshed. I'm shredding the green stuff and piling the long branches up against the stone wall you might be able to make out beyond the piles.

So... I did today's stint of that, wearing a dust mask over my mouth and nose because if I breathe in too much of the sappy wood fumes I get a headache.

Then I went for a garden wander to see where things were at.

 The first few daffodil and snowdrop shoots are poking through

but it is really the mosses and liverworts that brighten up a winter garden, like this Variable-leaved Crestwort (Lophocolea heterophylla) on an old spruce stump

and this Neat Feather Moss (Pseudoscleropodium purum) which covers large areas of our north-east and north-west facing banks. Below is a small area under a downy birch tree.

Most of the ferns have 'gone over' for the winter, though new little ones are appearing everywhere. I like the way our large Hard Fern shows the deciduous fertile fronds in brown and the evergreen sterile ones at the same time.

Then I started looking at mosses on the dry stone wall at the top of the bank. In the middle is Rusty Swan-neck Moss (Campylopus flexuosus). More about its rustiness in another post. Behind it and in front of it is Cypress-leaved Plait-moss (Hypnum cupressiforme), and either side of the Rusty Swan-neck moss are shoots of the succulent Reflexed Stonecrop.

Alligator teeth and hares' feet

On my jobs list today was tighten alligator teeth and oil its jaws. This alligator:

Then I made some more sawdust cutting these lengths of old rhododendron branches

and swept the sawdust onto this bit

to encourage more Hare's-foot Inkcaps to appear there. I hadn't seen any of the actual hare's-foot stage yet, but I did today. However, that comes later in the story.

When I'd angled them against a rock and stamped on the thinner branches to break them and had chopped the thicker ones that stamping didn't work on, I stood on the eucalyptus bench to view the spider webs in the still uncut bit of lawn. From there I began an anticlockwise circumnavigation of the upper garden just observing what is new and how things are and what I need to do next.

Behind the shrub and fern in the top right corner of that pic is a new patch of yarrow flowering away between yet more branches of rhododendron and buddleia that I haven't got round to yet. There's a lot of yarrow leaf all over the upper lawn but it hasn't flowered before so I'm going to leave this pile until after the flowers have set seed.

Up from the yarrow was a new crop of small toadstools. I shal go and collect one or two to have a closer look at later.

Across the top and under the falling down cypress tree there is an outcrop of what I think is the same fungus that was growing around the trunks of what I call the halfway trees–a clump of wild cherry, rowan, holly and flowering currant plus, recently, a self-seeded downy birch. I should say another self-seeded downy birch; there are dozens; I just have to decide which, if any, to let grow.

Still haven't managed to identify this species of fungus (nor several others, come to that!)

Down a step or two from that recumbent branch is the old rowan beset with what looks like the Root Rot fungus (the cypress has it too, which is probably why it's falling over).

Glistening Inkcaps have started to reappear on the rowan as well. The trunk was half covered with these last year.

Down a little from the old rowan is a flowering currant bush. I stuck a pruned branch of it in the ground eight years ago and it is now at least two metres tall with a similar diameter. It has a lot of fruit this year. Bird food.

Now comes the surprise! Down again from the flowering currant is an old compost heap which I'm leaving alone because five little plants have appeared. Last year there were dahlias. Could this be them again?

Also on that compost heap, the biggest Hare's-foot Inkcap yet! The pink bits are Himalayan Balsam flowers falling over the fence from the field. My circumnavigations also have the purpose of hoiking out HBs that are growing within the garden. The bees can have the ones in the field.

And, after I gently pushed away that bit of grass at the bottom of the inkcap stem, a little "hare's-foot" appeared.

Grintastic! Below you can see the furriness inside the 'cup' of the curled open inkcap.

Making my way back across to the shed, I enjoyed this seed head of Common Cat's-ear,

the only remaining African daisy

and a tiny fungus of which we get quite a few but whose name I still know not! For scale, that is a Self-heal seedhead behind it. It has a delicacy similar to the Hare's-foot but on a smaller scale.

By which time I had wet feet and soggy socks. Should 'a worn me wellies.