June's blog party

I’ve been feeling scattered for the last week or two and busy with long To Do lists every day and had decided not to join in the blog-link party this month. Then I started to read and enjoy everyone’s contributions and decided that I wanted to do my piece after all. So here it is.

My garden

We were delighted a few weeks ago to find a wren nesting in a reel of cable in our garden shed. (I say ‘our’ but the shed is mostly taken up with Frog’s stuff which I have to keep pushing back so as to create a gardening ‘corner’.)

A wren's nest (after fledging) in a reel of cable in our garden shed

The parent/s seemed unconcerned by our presence, flying in and out past us to feed the ever-gaping, peeping, yellow mouths. I didn’t photograph these as I didn’t want to scare any of the family, old or young.

When the chicks started to fledge we left a window open as we didn’t think they’d find the crack in the top corner of the roof through which the adults squeezed (when the door was shut). We think they all got away all right.

Flowers

Here – for Trish - is one of the wildflowers listed in the previous post.

Wood sage

It’s called wood sage, and although related to the culinary sage (both of them being part of the nettle family) has no particular scent to the leaves. The gardener and writer Vita Sackville-West considered the plant fit for the garden and I agree - it's beautiful and robust, flowers for several months and doesn't take over. It’s common in the hedgerows round here and I saw this patch sticking out of a bank a few days ago.

Insect

I didn’t want to photograph this fungus, seen on a recent walk,  as it gives me the creeps but when I saw a dung fly on it I thought that it would be just the thing for the ‘insect’ section of this post. It’s called stinkhorn because of its disgusting smell (like raw meat), Latin name (for obvious reasons) Phallus impudicus. Luckily this one has fallen over. You don’t usually see it as it grows deep in woods. Here it’s in dense shade next to our nearby canal.

Stinkhorn and dung fly

Something wild

Between the canal and a small parking area on the same walk we saw these wild birds, going about their business, completely unconcerned by human presence.

A mother duck and her ducklings – I love the way the ducklings pick up their feet as they walk  . . .

. . .  and this moorhen, with swans and cygnets behind.

Are the birds always there or have they got used to having the place to themselves during Lockdown?

Sunset

We don’t see sunset (or sunrise) from our garden in the summer as there are too many leaves. I took this picture of sun-glow however late one evening around the solstice as I listened to the birds’ final songs.

Solstice sun-glow

There was a new song in the chorus and for some reason I had an inkling that it was a nightingale, which I’d never heard before. According to my bird book, the nightingale nests in ‘thick cover of brambles and nettles, in or near broad-leaved woodland or scrub’, which just about describes our overgrown garden as is it at the moment. I’ve now listened to the song on our CD of birdsong so will be prepared if I hear it again in the garden.

My choice

Having said in the previous post that we don’t do ruins in this country, we came across some more on a new cross-country walk last week.

It was a beautiful spot and reminded me of the idealised visions of rural England that you see in Victorian watercolours - such as those by Helen Allingham.

Hill Farm, Symondsbury, Dorset, by Helen Allingham (1848-1926)