by Ian Bushell
I took my permitted exercise at the park over lunchtime. There were just eight cars when I arrived at noon and only fifteen when I left an hour later. People were well spaced all around the park; everybody seems to be taking the new regulations seriously.
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If you are planting your flower beds and hanging baskets, keep our dwindling population of pollinators in mind and please don’t plant double flowers.
Continue reading “Double flowers”
Battered by the storms and drenched in rain, the one thousand native daffodils we planted around Village Green in 2017 are flying the flag.
Click here for a gallery of pictures
Mail from Ian Bushell:
Continue reading “A Stroll in the Park”
The Woodland Trust has given us 420 sapling trees: rowan, dogwood, silver birch, hawthorn, hazel and wild cherry.
Continue reading “Trees”
Ian Bushell has sent in a picture of Crocus vernus doing its best in heavy rain, with this message:
“. . . this is the small clump of Spring Crocus (Crocus vernus) on the edge of the copse by the pond. Naturalised as a result of escape from cultivation/or possibly introduced to SCP.”
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Somebody has stripped bark from the whole length of the trunk of tree number 5477. Why would anybody do that?
Continue reading “What happened here?”
Dog’s mercury (Mercurialis perennis) is one of those mysterious, usually nameless, plants that is hardly ever noticed. It forms dense carpets on the woodland floor and beneath old hedgerows but appears to most passers-by as just background for the bluebells and primroses.
Continue reading “Dog’s mercury”
The lesser celandines (Ficaria verna) are in flower. Celandines are the floral equivalent of the swallow, they appear around the same time and mark the coming of spring. In fact the word celandine comes from the Greek name for swallow: chelidon. One of its local names is spring messenger; others are brighteye, butter and cheese, frog’s foot, golden guineas and, less romantically, pilewort because it was once used to treat haemorrhoids.
Continue reading “Lesser Celandine”
Despite being battered by the weekend’s storm, the blackthorn is just beginning to flower; you’ll find it at the top of the hill as you leave Simpson’s Field.
These are not the daffodils we planted in the autumn of 2017; these are a rapidly spreading clump at the bottom of Kestrel Field on the edge of the copse.
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The Friends have recently planted 150 primrose plug plants in one of the wooded copses in the Village Green area.
Continue reading “Primroses”
Changing temperatures are initiating plant growth earlier and earlier every year. In the park, there are already primroses in flower.
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The snowdrops in the copse in the southern corner of Village Green are beginning to open.
Video by Neil Bromhall
Header picture taken in the park by DKG
Here’s one of last year’s posts from snowdrop time:
