25 to 31July

Buses, birds and butterflies.

Sunday 31st July 2016

After a flurry of young goldfinches last week, they suddenly disappeared.  The parents must have taken them to join the flocks which feed on the thistle seeds in the countryside.  We didn’t see one goldfinch last Sunday and I thought they might have all deserted us - without even a "thank you for all the seed" - but one adult visited the feeder on Monday and I saw two on Wednesday. Since then one has been a regular visitor.

The week started with a couple of flower photos.  A bright yellow hypericum and mauve erigeron.

We are still waiting for butterflies.  There are flowers on the butterfly bushes (buddleia) but only the bumble bees are enjoying the nectar.

We went on an excursion on Monday - all the way to Douglas on the bus.  The trip was inspired by a letter that Tim received from the TV people.  He is entitled to a free licence because of his age but we are not in the Social Security system because we only moved to the Island after Tim retired.  This results in complications and they occasionally need proof that he is still “alive and well and living near Ramsey”.  Rather than drive in with the required documents, and deal with the usual road works and traffic, we decided to use our bus passes which entitle us to free travel on the buses during non-peak hours.  So we drove into Ramsey and left the car in the Station Car Park (which now serves a supermarket because we no longer have a station).  Actually that is wrong.  I should have written “We no longer have a steam train station” . . . because we do have an electric tram station and a bus station.

Ramsey bus station.

We travelled to Douglas on one of these new Mercedes buses.

My previous bus trip was memorable because I travelled on one of the old red double deckers.  There had been a landslip on the road near Laxey and the bus was diverted down the narrow roads through Old Laxey and eventually got stuck between some parked cars.  It took some time to locate the owners and get the cars moved and then the bus started overheating.  It decided to expire at Baldrine and we had to wait for the next bus to arrive before we finally got to Douglas.  Thankfully Monday’s journey was completed without any hassles.

We had a few minutes to spare before our return journey to Ramsey so I wandered down to the river to photograph the boats.

Then I decided that the flower displays near the bridge were more interesting than the boats!

While we were walking back from the bus to our car in Ramsey, I accidentally stole a weed.  I had been admiring this weed for some time.  It looked exactly like the purple toadflax - which is seeding itself all over our garden and is very popular with the bees - but the flowers were a pretty pale pink.  I looked it up in my wild flower book and read that it is Linaria purpurea and that the flowers are bright violet, occasionally pink.  I had considered waiting until it died back and taking some seed but I thought seedlings might just revert to the purple colour.  So I decided on the spur of the moment to try to pull out a small rooted stem.  

The pink purple toadflax was growing through a stone mulch outside the filling station next to some of its purple cousins, and assorted ragwort, willowherb and dandelions.  I gave one stem a gentle tug and was horrified when the the whole plant came out.  I quickly stuffed it into my shopping bag and hoped that nobody had noticed and consoled myself with the thought that it wasn’t a particularly bad crime and the weeds would probably have eventually been sprayed with weedkiller.

The ill gotten plant is now safe in a pot of compost and I took a photo of the pink flowers to compare with the purple ones.

I have just remembered that the original purple toadflax was also stolen.  There was a patch under a tree in the park at Poyll Dooey a few years ago and when we were walking there I saw that someone had strimmed some of the plants which were spreading into a path.  So I pulled out a small piece and brought it home.  

The experiment of rooting rosemary cuttings in water has been a success.  The first little rooted cutting was planted in a pot of compost on Monday afternoon.  It was only ten days ago that I put the cuttings in water.

On Tuesday I tidied up outside the gate - trimmed the wild flowers and removed some weeds - and then caught up with the laundry.

Wednesday

It was a lovely sunny morning and I took a max zoom photo of a “juvenile robin” sunbathing on the back lawn near the senecio.  When I saw the photo on the computer I realised that the “robin” was a wren. I had never seen a wren sunbathing before.

We took a load of garden refuse to tip and when we got back I noticed a butterfly, which might have been a red admiral, sunbathing near the senecio.  I went out with my camera but the butterfly had disappeared.  Then I saw a lovely little holly blue feeding on the oregano.  I could only see the blue upper side of the wings when it was in flight so I had to be content with an underwing photo.

Then I spotted the red admiral up at the top of the big white buddleia and accidentally took a photo of a bumble bee in flight as well as the butterfly.

But that wasn’t the end of the butterflies.  I counted at least four meadow browns on the wildflower bank.  Then down near the house I saw a comma resting on a blackcurrant leaf.  It was rather a tatty specimen but I took some photos and then it was approached at speed by another comma and they both shot off into the next garden.

After lunch we went for a short walk to inspect the road works and when we returned home I went up onto the patio above the garage to see whether there were any butterflies on the purple buddeia - there were three small tortoiseshells!

Thursday was a wash out. It was devoted to very belated spring cleaning because it rained nearly all day.

On Friday the grass was still too wet to mow so I cut back 3 muck buckets of foxgloves and sundry other unsightly old growth.  I also spent ages watching a couple of young robins and a wren who seemed to be competing for control of the prime sunbathing territory up by the senecio.  I got a photo of a robin and the wren briefly sharing the favoured spot.

Then I saw the first peacock butterfly of the season up by summerhouse  There is a huge contrast between the very dark underwing and the brightly coloured upper side of the wings.

On Saturday I mowed the grass which was still rather damp.  When I had finished I went to check for butterflies on the purple buddleia.  There were two - a peacock and one which I didn’t recognise.  It looked rather like a dark green fritillary and I got very excited thinking it was a new butterfly in the garden.  But after checking my book and the photos on the internet, I realised that it was a dark green fritillary.  It was just a rather threadbare female.  Apparently the females are paler than the males even when they are in good condition.  

This morning I cut back another two muck buckets of foxgloves and weeds and took a photograph of a japanese anemone so that I could end the week with another flower.

Mon 11 to Sun 24 July

Everything in the garden is lovely?

Sunday 24th July 2016

Nearly two weeks ago, I optimistically dated my working notes for this post  - Mon 11 to Sun 17 July and chose the title Everything in the garden is lovely.

I had considered using that sentence as a title the previous week but decided against it because it simply isn’t true when applied to our garden.  But my philosophy, if I have one, is that everything doesn’t have to be lovely - a few lovely things amongst the mess and chaos are enough to lift the spirits. Anyway, the pursuit of perfection isn’t always worth the effort and can be disappointing.  There is a garden further down the glen which always looks like an illustration in a gardening magazine.  I should be envious but it doesn’t appeal to me because I feel that it lacks “soul”.  Maybe I am just rationalising and would love an immaculate garden.  But it does seem more sensible to be happy with one’s lot rather than to chase after rainbows.

The date was also a case of over-optimism because it is already the 24th so I have missed yet another deadline.  And I am likely to get even less efficient for the rest of the summer because I always get in a panic when we are expecting visitors - even the most welcome ones.

I haven't done anything very interesting in the garden during the past two weeks. I spent five days trimming the Leylandii hedge and mowed the grass twice.  Neither activity can be described as interesting or loaded with laughs. When I write that “I spent five days . . .”  I mean that I spent about two hours a day on five consecutive days as I will explain in the next paragraph.

Week 1 (11 to 17 July)

There is something very unlovely in the garden in midsummer - harvest mites.  I noticed the first harvest mite bites on Tuesday the 12th.  Harvest mites are an almost invisible member of the tick family and get onto my clothes from the vegetation in the garden.  There was an old wives tale about them burrowing under the skin because they are impossible to see without the aid of a magnifying glass.  The bites are really itchy and the itch can last for a few days.  The only way to cut down on bites is to come in after a couple of hours in the garden, bath or shower, and change into fresh clothes. So  I end up spending almost as much time doing laundry as gardening.  I do have a cream which helps with the bites.  I put on a dab and cover it with micropore tape which stops my clothes rubbing against the bite and aggravating the itch.

One side effect of the harvest mites is that I have been taking fewer photographs because I keep forgetting to take my camera out.  The only windows of opportunity are immediately before or after gardening - and after gardening is usually devoted to picking raspberries which are ripening fast in the hot weather.  It doesn’t seem worth while risking mite bites by wandering around the garden with my camera at random times.

On a very slightly more cheerful note, I planted some rose and lavender cuttings on Tuesday but don’t feel very optimistic about them.  They are in pots in the conservatory which gets very hot on sunny days.  It probably isn’t the best time of year to take cuttings.

I have been watching for butterflies in the garden, hoping to identify Tim’s “too orange to be a speckled wood” butterfly that he spotted down by the gate last week.  While I was mowing on Wednesday I thought I had solved the mystery when I saw a female meadow brown up near the steps by the hawthorns.  I didn’t have a camera handy but I went up to take some photos on Thursday morning when I spotted something fluttering around above the meadowsweet on the wild flower bank - another meadow brown. It wasn’t very cooperative but I got a shot of part of the underwing before it flew away over the summerhouse.

Then the same butterfly, or a similar one, returned and I got a better photo of the upper side of the wings after it settled on a red clover flower.

When I showed Tim the photos he said that the butterfly that he saw was far more orange.  So we looked at some butterfly images on the computer.  He couldn’t rule out the wall brown or the dark green fritillary but he thought the most likely candidates were the comma and the small tortoiseshell.

On Thursday afternoon we walked down to town to post a birthday card and return some tablets to the pharmacy.  The pharmacist had given us enough for one a day when only one a week had been prescribed.  They didn’t want to take the surplus back so now we have enough folic acid for the next two years.  

It was a lovely sunny summer afternoon - warm in the sun and cool in the shade with just a gentle breeze - perfect for butterflies.  But we only saw two or three meadow browns on the way down the glen road and one small tortoiseshell in the park.  It was fanning its wings.  It appeared to be in pristine condition so it may have been newly emerged and drying its wings.

We are not the only ones to notice how few butterflies are flying this summer. The next morning there was an article by Patrick Barkham in the Guardian which started - “A deadly combination of a sunless summer, cool spring and mild winter may make 2016 the worst year for butterflies since records began, experts warn.”  Here is a link to the article https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jul/15/2016-could-be-worst-year-on-record-for-british-butterflies-experts-warn

We walked through Poyll Dooey on the way to the pharmacy.  The tide was very low as you can see from this photo of the old stone bridge over the Sulby.  The road crossing this bridge is the main route from Ramsey to the north of the Island.

On Friday we did our short top of the glen walk to check on the river bank stabilisation.  All the anxiety about road closures was unnecessary.  This is the only warning sign before our group of houses.

The damage to the river bank near the Wildwood House bridge was being repaired using the same method as the Fern Glen repair which I described in the last post, and which has now been completed.  Here is the final photo from Fern Glen.

On Saturday we walked down to the Whitebridge.  When we crossed our bridge over the Auldyn River we stopped to watch a mob of ducks in the river.  They were moving slowly downstream and were all mallards apart from one duck which looked similar to the male mallards but had blotchy white patches on its wings.  We hadn’t seen a duck like that before, it may have been a hybrid.  It wanted to stay with the group but other ducks didn’t like it and one tried to peck it when it got too close.  I didn’t know that ducks had racist tendencies.  I should have taken a photograph but I was too busy watching them.

I stopped a couple of times on the way down the road to photograph some wildflowers/weeds.  First hogweed.

The hogweed has pretty flowers but it also has unpleasantly hairy stems and leaves and tough roots so I have adopted an “off with their heads” policy in the garden - in places where it is too hard to dig them out.  I used to wait and cut off the seed heads after the flowers had faded but always tended to miss a few or leave it too late so now I am cutting them down as soon as I see the flowers.

This is a far more delicate umbellifer which I think may be Upright hedge parsley Torilis japonica.  It looks very much like the cow parsley/Queen Anne’s Lace Anthriscus sylvestris - but that is usually pure white, flowered earlier, and has already died back.

Near the Sulby River we noticed a couple of white butterflies spiralling.  I had also seen the same behaviour displayed recently by meadow browns in back garden.  I am not sure whether it is flirtatious or aggressive behaviour.  Eventually one settled and I got a photo but the edges of his wings were shredded and he was too battle-scarred to identify.  

On the way back we looked for seedpods on the perennial sweetpea plant near the bridge but couldn’t find any.

I stopped on the glen road near Milntown to photograph the stonecrop growing on the wall between the road and the river.

I had always assumed that it was English Stonecrop Sedum anglicum but when I checked my wildflower book I discovered that it is White Stonecrop Sedum album.  It is so easy to misidentify wild flowers.  I hate to think that I may be spreading misinformation in this blog but at least my mistakes are genuine mistakes unlike so many forwarded messages and “tweets” which are full of “facts” and opinions that are at best carefully selected factoids* and at worst deliberate lies.

*definition of “factoid” - an assumption or speculation that is reported and repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact.

On Saturday I started trimming the Leylandii hedge.  It is an unnecessary hedge but we keep it because it screens the leafmould bin at the bottom of the garden.  I also picked some rosemary  to experiment with rooting cuttings in water as advised by a blog called “Grow a Good Life”.  I have always planted rosemary cuttings in the ground before but it is interesting to try new methods.

Sunday was hot.  Before I did my session of hedge trimming, I took some photos of a Blackbird “anting” on an ant nest in the back lawn.

Then I saw the first baby goldfinches of the year.  They were begging for food in the tree above the bird feeders but I couldn’t get a photo because the camera wanted to focus on the foliage.

Week 2 (18 to 24 July)

Monday was even hotter and Tuesday was the hottest day of the year and was followed by thunderstorms during the night.  The power went off early on Wednesday morning but Tim discovered that the trip switch had tripped and managed to restore the power which was a huge relief.  I was saved from another fridge drama.

On Wednesday morning I was writing an email to a friend in Tasmania when we heard a bird crash into the living room window.  It was such a loud impact that we thought it must be a fairly large bird like a young blackbird but when we looked out of the window we saw a tiny female or juvenile siskin - flat on its back on the steps.  I went out to retrieve the body and was amazed to find that it was still alive.  I brought it inside to keep it warm even though I wasn't too confident about its chances.  It seemed to be weak on one side but it kept on breathing and could move its head.  

After holding it for a while I tried putting it outside but it just crouched there looking stunned.   So I brought it back inside and asked Tim to hold it while I got some bottles of hot water to keep it warm.  

After spending about half an hour sitting on the hot water bottles, it seemed much stronger and I put it up in the old mesh bowl on the bird feeder.   It perched on the edge for a few minutes, ignoring the food in the bowl, and then flew away across the back garden.

In the afternoon I finally finished the Leylandii hedge.

On Thursday I did two sessions of gardening.  First I mowed the grass and then I trimmed the edges of about half the back lawn.

I saw the baby goldfinches again and managed to get some photos of one but they were either slightly out of focus or the bird was partly hidden.

Then I had a change of routine on Friday.  Instead of working in the garden I replaced the toilet seat in the bathroom.  The main problem was removing the old one because the bolts were rusty and it was hard to get at the nuts with the spanner because there was so little space between the toilet bowl and the wall.  I removed one nut and managed to loosen the other before Tim came to help.  It took him some time but was just as well that he helped because I would probably still be battling if I had tried to finish the job on my own. Fitting the new seat couldn’t have been easier.

Yesterday I cleared up some old dead twiggy bits that blew off the beech trees last winter and had been left under the shrubs and a pile of old Leylandii prunings from last year.  I wanted to accumulate a full load of garden refuse to take out to the tip next week.

Then I took some photos of the best bits of the back garden.  

The crocosmia providing its usual bright splash of colour.

The meadowsweet on the wildflower bank

And the hypericum which has been enjoying the hot weather.

The foxgloves are nearly over and are reaching that stage where I dither about cutting them back.  I don’t like to remove the last flowers while they are still being visited by the bumblebees but if I leave it too late I will have an epidemic  of seedlings next year because the seed cases at the bottom of the stem are ready to drop seed while the last flowers at the top of the stem are still opening.

And finally, the young goldfinches returned.  I saw at least four of them.  First I got this photo of an older juvenile which was already feeding itself and being cheeky to the other birds on the niger feeder . . . typical teenager.

Then I got my favourite photo of the week.  A younger juvenile not long out of the nest and still begging for food.

June/July

The last week of June and the first week of July

Sunday 10th July 2016

The last week of June was one of those weeks that are best forgotten - or at least filed away in the deepest. darkest  recesses of one’s mind.  On Monday there was a totally unexpected power failure.  Then, sometime between Monday afternoon and Wednesday morning, our old fridge developed a terminal illness.  I thought the fridge was warmer than usual but didn’t realise what was happening until I discovered that the frozen chicken breasts, that I intended thawing for supper on Wednesday, had already started thawing.  Luckily most of the bulkier items in the freezer compartment were still frozen solid so I assumed it would be safe to transfer them to the chest freezer in the basement.

Then I went through my usual panic about whether I should phone for a repairman or just buy a new appliance.  Judging by the symptoms and advice on the internet, it appeared that the compressor was faulty - possibly a problem with the bearings which were causing the compressor to overheat and switch off.  It sounded too expensive a repair for an aging fridge.  The next snag was that no one on the Island appeared to stock a fridge the same size as our old one which fitted in the kitchen nicely and was the absolute minimum size for our requirements.  So we had to order a slightly bigger fridge - and then cope without a fridge for two days because the new one couldn’t be delivered until Friday.

I managed to keep the essentials cool enough by using the old fridge as a cold box and putting bottles of frozen water in with the food to keep it cool.  We also had a large picnic coldbox which was useful.  But all this was time consuming and the garden was forgotten.  

On Thursday things got worse.  To distract myself from fridge problems, I decided to clean behind the computer desk.  After vacuuming up years of accumulated dust and cobwebs, I plugged everything in again - but the monitor wouldn’t come on.  It was absolutely dead - even the little pilot light was off.  I unplugged everything, plugged it all in again, checked the fuses - nothing helped.  I wondered whether the adaptor cable had been damaged when I moved the desk and took it to Ramsey to see whether I could get a replacement.  

The young man in the first shop couldn’t help so I tried a little computer repair shop in Parliament street and a very nice young man there checked the adaptor cable for me and said it was working OK.  There must be some other problem.  So I went home and checked everything again without success.  Finally I wondered whether the computer had stopped “talking to” the monitor for some obscure reason and that the monitor needed resetting manually.  I found an on/off button below the screen that I had forgotten about because I always leave the monitor on standby.  I pressed the button and the screen lit up like magic.  I suspect that I must have accidentally depressed the button when I was dusting or moving the monitor.  Thank goodness I didn’t get someone around to “fix it”.  I can just imagine the scene.  The stupid old woman being politely told that monitors usually work better if they are not switched off!  It would have been so embarrassing.

But the week wasn’t over yet.  Friday happened to be our 55th wedding anniversary.  Birthdays and anniversaries are always an uncomfortable reminder of the passing years and the fact that I am older than I feel. The new fridge arrived as promised.  But after the delivery men left I started worrying that it wasn’t cooling down enough.  I had a little fridge and freezer thermometer and it kept reading about 15 degrees C.  Eventually I tried an old but reliable thermometer that we have in the living room and discovered that the fridge was fine . . . the fridge/freezer thermometer was faulty.  Another panic over but I couldn’t relax in the kitchen for a few days - partly because it seemed to have shrunk (the new fridge took up more space) and partly because the new fridge smelt different so I was reminded of its presence every time I walked in the door!

I did no work in the garden all week - apart from mowing the grass on Sunday.  Even my camera was largely ignored.  By the end of the week the only photograph that I had taken was a rather boring shot of my variegated thyme that I emailed to a cyber friend after power was restored on Monday.

July has been better . . . so far.  I wandered around the garden on Saturday in search of interesting flowers and found a few pretty weeds.  I really like this slender St John’s wort (Hypericum pulchrum).  It thrives in the drier sunnier parts of the garden.

Down by the gate there are patches of plants.  Most of them are not strictly weeds - unless you define weeds as being “plants in the wrong place”.  They have mainly self-seeded from other parts of the garden.  Nothing much grew in the dense shade here until the big beech tree by the gate was cut down.  Now the area under the cypress gets more light and there is a mixture of campanula, centranthus, feverfew, foxgloves and orange hawkbit and white clover flowering there - as well as some shrubs which were probably “planted” by the birds . . . cotoneaster, berberis, broom and even a small bay tree.

On the other side of the drive there is a lot of centranthus which should be attracting butterflies but we have seen very few this year although Tim did see one which was “too orange to be a speckled wood” near the gate when he went down to fetch the post.

There are some “proper” flowers in the garden too - mainly on flowering shrubs.  The senecio in the back garden is flowering.  It provides a bright splash of colour but doesn’t combine too well with the foxgloves which look better against the silvery leaves of the shrub before the flowers open.

But the bumblebees don’t care about colour combinations.  They value  flowers which are a source of pollen and nectar.

This neat little hebe has a some flowers on the sunnier side of the shrub.  It didn’t flower for years - until I moved it to a sunnier position.  Now the nearby rowan tree has grown and is shading one side of the shrub but it is too big to move again.  It has produced a crop of offspring but none of them have flowered yet.

I am sure the plant was supposed to have pink flowers but you can see from this magnified photo of the flowers that they are white although the anthers are bright mauve.  I wonder whether the seedlings will be identical.  I had another type of white hebe which produced mainly white flower children but also a few pink ones.

This fuchsia has the same colour scheme as the fuchsia magellanica, which escaped from gardens and now grows wild on the Island, but the flowers are much larger.  I found it growing up at the top of the garden and expect a cutting discarded by our previous neighbour took root up there.  It dies back almost to ground level during cold winters but has enjoyed the last two years.

This Deutzia  which I bought after admiring a plant in our neighbours’ garden could be Deutzia scabra “Codsall Pink” but its label was lost years ago and I think it may just have been labelled Deutzia anyway.  It is one of the few flowers that looks better facing away from the camera. I had to bring a sprig inside for a photo session because the wind came up and I couldn't focus on a moving target.

On Saturday there were also a couple of sightings of birds which we don’t often see outside the kitchen.  We have had a number of brief visits from this female greenfinch this year and I finally managed to get a photo.  Last year a pair visited the feeder but this year she has only been seen on her own.

Stop press - Saturday the 9th!  Less than an hour after I wrote about the female greenfinch being seen on her own this year I walked into the kitchen and saw a male eating peanuts. There was no sign of the female.  It is odd because they always came to the feeder together last year.  I am glad this year's female has a handsome friend and isn’t the only greenfinch in the glen.

Another bird which must live nearby, but isn’t often seen because it doesn’t visit the feeder, is the little wren.  We occasionally see one in the back garden searching for small insects in the moss on the wall or in cracks in the bark on the tree.

A couple of days later there was an even more unusual sighting but unfortunately no photo.  I was reading and Tim saw a small bird perched on the wooden fence.  He called me but by the time I had found the right glasses, it had fluttered down into the roses.  I got a good enough view to identify it as a newly fledged black cap before it flew over the hedge into the next door garden.

On Sunday I mowed and then I devoted a few days to trimming the edges of the grass and cutting back the road hedge.  I wanted to finish the road side of the hedge before work starts on our road and heavy vehicles roar up and down endangering life and limb.  Work on river bank stabilisation was supposed to start on Monday but nothing has happened yet on our Glen Auldyn back road, although there has been activity up near the top of Fern Glen.

The good news is that two of our neighbours contacted the Department of Infrastructure about access to our properties while the road is “closed” and were told that it was all right for residents at this end of the road to ignore the road closed signs.  Apparently the whole road is officially closed in case there is any damage to the surface.  The department doesn’t want to be sued if someone falls into a pothole . . .  but we can use the road “at our own risk”.

There is a lot that should be done in the garden but procrastination is more likely than activity.  I would like to trim the Leylandii hedge after I have finished the last bits of the road hedge.  The main holly hedge can be left until the big autumn clear up which will start after our American family leave in the middle of August.  With a bit of luck I may finish cutting back the ferns and ivy and trimming the holly hedge before my sister visits in September.  Then the wildflower bank, as well as all the old growth on the perennials like the oregano, campanula, etc, will need to be cut cut back . . . and I am trying to avoid thinking about the inevitable drifts of wet autumn leaves.

Our walks have been limited recently to the top of the glen roads.  On Thursday we saw the first evidence that work on the river bank stabilisation had started - not far below the turning circle at the top of the Fern Glen road.  The temporary post, wire and rubble structure which was erected after a section of the road was undermined during the winter floods had been removed and a foundation for a permanent section of wall had been laid.

On Friday we walked up again and saw that the wall was already in place so I took my camera up there on Saturday afternoon to record progress.

The blocks which they are using must be extremely heavy.  There is still a bit of finishing off to do and the road will need to be resurfaced but it shouldn’t be long before they start working on our road.

When we returned from our tour of inspection I saw the first baby robin of the season.  It was investigating the bird feeding area but was a bit scared of the other birds.