Moving!

No, I'm not moving house but I am moving blog.

I have decided to discontinue this blog for the time being and post photos of flowers and animals in my Pensby garden on my Rambles from My Chair blog.  I hope I shall see you hanging around there.

Or at least popping in occasionally.

I promise you'll be handled with care.

The Last week of April

There are lots of garden photos to post from March and the first three weeks of April but I am afraid that if I try posting them first I'll never catch up with myself so here are some from this last week.

 Aubretia in the wall of the former fishpond (now a water garden) on the patio.

 Our new Broom.  May it sweep clean.

The best smelling pot in the garden - lavender, sage and rosemary.  Will someone tell that  baby hedgehog he shouldn't sit in his food.  Sadly, we haven't seen our real hedgehogs at all this year.  I wonder if they have gone elsewhere?

 

Lesser Celandine - a cultivated form with brown / purplish leaves. 

 The tiny Mossy Saxifrage.

 Arabis in a pot on the patio.

 The ground in the front garden is now littered with fallen cherry petals.

 The Beech in my hedge of native plants still retains last year's leaves.

 

But the Field Maple is showing it's new growth.

 

As is the Hazel.

 A tiny Geranium leaf.

 

Hostas emerging.

 

Japanese Maple.

 The White Lilac has survived my fairly drastic pruning last year and is flowering well.  It's a pity it isn't the lilac lilac!

 The Marsh Marigolds from Helen's are flowering in the marsh.

 And we have Violets and Pansies of every shade imaginable on the patio.

 Even though the front lawn is covered in petals there is still plenty of blossom on the Cherry.

And by contrastv with the fifteen foot high cherry we have the two inch high Spring Squill.  If only we had more of them.  Perhaps one year I shall buy a load and plant them around the base of one of the trees.

March 2012

It's been a marvellous March this year - so mild and sunny and dry.  I was working in the garden virtually all month.  Not that I did anything energetic but it was lovely to be out in the Spring-like weather.

On 1st March we still had Snowdrops;

and the first Daffodils were just coming out.

Frogs were emerging from their hiding places;

and so were the insects like Ladybirds.

But by the end of the month the hanging baskets were planted;

The pots on the patio were looking colourful;

 

there was frogspawn in the ponds;

 baby newts had four legs;

and the cherry was in full flower.

 

What a month!

Fern

I have a number of ferns in the garden, most of which originated at the caravan where they grew wild in the garden. Unfortunately, despite having a number of fern identification books, I have difficulty identifying them.

This fern which can be found half way up the ‘waterfall’ on my top pond (sounds grand but the waterfall is a pump-driven trickle and the pond about 6 square feet) has very leathery and shiny fronds and meets some of the description of Hard Shield Fern (Polystichum aculeatum) but the frond shape is wrong.

I would love to have a fern expert come and identify them for me though he would find the exercsie fairly unexciting as I'm sure they are all very common species..

Pollen Beetle

The Goatsbeard is covered in pollen beetles, each about 2.5mm (one tenth of an inch) long..

This one fell onto my hand while I was taking photos and I was fortunate enough to capture it as it opened its elytra and showed its wings.

An unidentified millipede

The Chrysalis Snail

 

I had a look at some of the mini-species lurking in the undergrowth of the back garden.  This is the Chrysalis Snail (Lauria cylindracea) - a common snail of woods, hedges and walls.  It's only 3mm or 4mm long compared to the common Garden snail which is 35mm to 40mm high.

Goatsbeard

Goatsbeard (Aruncus dioicus) is one of the native plants I have in the garden. It has taken over a spot by the pond and doesn't seem to mind how much I cut it back to keep it in its place without overflowing too far. It's a very accommodating plant.