What's growing on?

The star of this week’s ‘Six on Saturday’ is this wonderful waterlily. It’s the first of the waterlilies in our pond to flower, growing from a division of a plant we bought a few years back, and it’s absolutely stunning. Next up are sweetpeas, which have very short stems, and I guess that’s a symptom of heat stress. But they still smell just as good. My lovely husband has cut back some of the…

I missed #SixOnSaturday yesterday, but I do have 21 snaps to share for Midsummers’ day. Inspired by Roy Ayres, ‘Everybody loves the sunshine’ and his lyric about ‘bees and things and flowers’ in the sunshine, here we go… 1. Nasturtiums, with the blurry bum of a white tail bumblebee just visible in the centre of the bloom. 2. The remains of the mullein flower stems were a feast for a couple of…

This week’s Six on Saturday is a bit different. I’ve made a game about British bird song, with six rounds to play. https://dawn-chorus-quest.lovable.app The disappearing dawn chorus Lately, and particularly since International Dawn Chorus day, I’ve been thinking about the “shifting baseline.” I hate the idea that we will forget how much the natural world has changed. I think I can remember…

Six on Saturday this week is a quick collection of the horsehead statue looking statuesque, the purple clematis and white rose round the front door, campanula aka bellflower, pansies grown from seed and now in flower. Also the Vanessa Bell rose, the first in the rose patch to bloom this year – as it was last year – and finally, Libertia chilensis aka the New Zealand satin flower, a perennial…

It is International Dawn Chorus Day, 3 May. It’s an opportunity to make time to listen to the birds in the morning, and share that sound with others. 🙂 The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds says “across the world, people are setting their alarms a little earlier to wake up to the dawn chorus through a cracked bedroom window, catching it on the dog walk before the school run, or stepping…

This week the first rose bloomed. It’s a wonderfully perfumed pink rose. When we arrived it was planted by the doors of a summerhouse, the summerhouse didn’t last the winter, but the rose is well established. The variety is possibly ‘Queen Elizabeth,’ which seems apt, as HRH would have been 100 this week. I don’t think she’d be a very happy queen if she were around at the moment. She often…