Summer 6

Move on - nothing to see.

Sunday 26th July 2015

I was tempted to suspend my weekly waffle for for a while because almost nothing of interest has happened during the past week.  In fact it was more memorable for what didn’t happen.

I think the woodpecker has moved on to pastures greener - or has gone in search of a friend.  We haven’t seen it since last Saturday morning when I wrote the last post.

I am also sad to say that the little wood mice have not been seen for a couple of weeks.  The only rodent to visit recently was a longtail which was spotted taking food or bedding under the galvanised metal coal bunker near the kitchen door. My policy of “live and let live” doesn’t extend to longtails setting up home so close to the house although I don’t mind them picking up scraps under the bird feeder.  We manoeuvered the bunker off the concrete strips which support it above ground and I fitted some bricks in the gaps in an attempt to make the base ratty proof.  I haven’t seen any unwanted lodgers since but I may move the bunker again just to check.

On a more positive note, I was delighted to spot a dunnock twice on Friday.  They used to be daily visitors to the garden but hadn’t been seen for months and we wondered if they had moved away after the influx of cats to the neighbourhood.   And I saw a little female (or juvenile) blackcap on the raspberries too.  I rushed to get my camera and when I returned it seemed to sense movement in the study and departed quickly.  I haven’t seen it since.  

There was a second missed photo op on Monday when we had a brief visit from a pigmy shrew.  I got my camera in time but the kitchen light was on and I couldn’t turn it off without alerting the shrew to my presence.   The “best” photo that I got was an out of focus shot through light reflecting off the glass - but you can more or less make out the shape of the shrew.  The other shot only featured its tail - as it disappeared under the plants.

The garden is looking very tired.  It is definitely past its best and I haven’t helped by attacking the leylandii hedge.  The leylandii isn’t a boundary hedge.  It was planted about ten feet inside the “road hedge” by the original owner of the house who was paranoid about privacy according to an ex-neighbour.  When we moved in the row of conifers were reaching for the sky and over the years we gradually reduced the height to a more manageable level.  We could ask permission to remove the trees but they provide a screen which hides the large leaf mould bin that Tim built down at the bottom of the garden.

The leylandii had been neglected for over a year since Tim last gave them a short back and sides with the electric hedge trimmer.  The top hadn’t been trimmed for a couple of years and needed more radical pruning.  I don’t know what possessed me to to tackle the task a couple of weeks before a family visit when I was in the midst of some very late and much needed spring cleaning in the house.  I think it was the prospect of the huge autumn clear-up starting in the middle of August.  It is the busiest time of the year in the garden.  As well as the traditional post-harvest activities of hedging and ditching, there are all the perennials and the wild flower bank to cut back and the autumn leaves to deal with.

So I have spent most of the last week up a ladder hacking away at the hedge until I was on the verge of getting blisters.  I was using conventional secateurs and an old rachet lopper.  On Friday I bought some small rachet pruners which made the job much easier.  They could cut through all but the thickest of the stems.  I am still busy sorting and cutting up the bits.  The woody bits are going to the tip to be recycled into compost and I am keeping the leafy bits to use as mulch under some of the shrubs.

This is what the hedge looked like two weeks ago . . .

. . . and this is the poor thing now.  I hope it recovers.

There is still very little butterfly activity in the garden.  I looked back to see what was happening last year and was amazed to see photos of masses of peacock and small tortoiseshell butterflies feasting on buddleia.  This year the first flowers on the buddleia are just starting to open and there is not a butterfly in sight.

17 July 2014

25 July 2015

The only butterflies I have seen recently have been meadow browns which like the oregano in the back garden.  The oregano is one of the few flowering plants which is putting on a good display.  This patch is in the front garden but the butterflies prefer the flowers behind the house because they get more sun.

The hydrangeas are starting to look good too.  This one seems rather confused.  It always had blue flowers in the past but recently some of the flowers have had a mauve tint and this year there are some pink and some blue flowers on the same plant.

Outside the garden gate there is a self-seeded berberis darwinii which I have to keep trimmed because it tries to obscure the name plate on the gate post.  It is covered with berries which are a great favourite of the blackbirds.  These ones have only survived because they are near the road but a brave bird will probably discover them soon.

This is the view over our garden gate.  The white flowers on the left are feverfew and on the right there is a mixture of spiraea, hydrangeas, centranthus. oregano and a few perennial geraniums

The feverfew is pretty but is rather invasive so I try to cut it back before it spreads too many seeds

There are still a few roses.  This one is an unidentified original inhabitant of the garden.

And this is Rushing Stream which is supposed to be a ground cover rose.

But there isn’t much colour apart from the patch of crocosmia which is doing its best to brighten the garden.

The bird’s foot trefoil helps too.  It is really a weed but is very popular with the bees and provides a bit of colour under the ash tree after the primroses and bluebells are over and while we are waiting for the knapweed to flower.

.

Summer 5

And now for something completely different . . .

Saturday 18th July, 2015.

Sunday was one of those “I can’t believe it” days.  After waiting for weeks hoping to see a juvenile goldfinch, not one but two visited the feeder today.  And it definitely wasn’t the same one twice.  The first one arrived in the morning before we left for the tip with the recycling stuff.  It had recently fledged and was still begging for food from an adult when I first saw it in the tree by the feeder.  It kept moving and I only got one slightly blurred photo before it disappeared.  A few minutes later I saw it again, foraging for food on the ground under the sunflower seed feeder.

After lunch I noticed another juvenile goldfinch perched on top of the feeding station.  It seemed confused by the weird contraption and all the other birds, and fluttered around for a while before finally managing to land on one of the peanut feeders.  I got a clear view through the dining room window and could see that it was older than our visitor in the morning.

We had another wet Monday and I spent some time watching birds outside the kitchen window.  The lawn is a bit patchy after the warm spell at the end of June but the July rain has stopped the brown patches from getting too large and unsightly.  A yellow hypericum is providing a splash of colour, along with the ubiquitous centranthus, foxgloves and purple toadflax. There is a hypericum hidcote in the “shrubbery” on the bottom terrace of the garden  which doesn’t get enough sun to flower well - but the  layered cutting which I moved to the back garden years ago is doing well.

I rather like the crumpled edges to the petals.

This purple toadflax self seeds and comes up in all sorts of inappropriate places.  It would be a problem in a tidy garden but I encourage it because it is a favourite of the small worker bumblebees.

I didn’t think it would be possible for another bird to upstage the juvenile goldfinch sightings - but I was wrong, as usual.  Just after lunch, Tim called me to the kitchen saying “Come and look at this - there is something big on the feeder.  Be careful not to frighten it.”  I crept to the door into the kitchen with my camera and was flabbergasted - it was a woodpecker!  I had never seen one before.  I took some photos - checked on the internet - and then emailed a photo to Manx BirdLife to ask for confirmation of my suspicions.  I was right,  It was a great spotted woodpecker and apparently they are not very common on the Island.

The great spotted was smaller than I expected.  One website described it as being about the same size as a blackbird another compared it with a starling.  The nice Irish lady at the pet shop had told me that she had friends in Andreas who had woodpeckers visiting their feeders - but I never expected to see one in our garden.  It returned twice on Tuesday.  The first visit was just before midday and then I saw it again at about eight o’clock in the evening.  It was in a better position to photograph but the light was so bad that the camera could only manage a very slow speed using the zoom, and woodpeckers move their heads all the time.  All the shots were blurred.   I was tempted to include one because it was the only one which showed the bird from the side so that you could see the the black and white spotted wing but I got some better shots later in the week.

No woodpecker sighting on Wednesday but that may be because I mowed the grass and the noise of the mower may have frightened it.  But it could have visited the feeder while I was busy doing something else.

I did see some butterflies though.  There was a small tortoiseshell on the meadowsweet up by the summerhouse while I was mowing.  It disappeared while I was fetching my camera.  I did see some other butterflies later - at least two meadow browns, a very tatty red admiral and an unidentified white in the back garden and a speckled wood near the drive.  I got a few more hummingbird hawkmoth photos too. These weird moths seem to be almost more common than butterflies this year.  I think this is the best photo so far.

On Thursday the woodpecker was back and has been seen three or four times every day since then.  We have to creep quietly into the kitchen if we want to make tea in case he (or she) is feeding and we frighten him away.  I got some much better photos of him - showing back and side views.

Initially I thought he (?) was a male because females have black heads but, after reading a bit more about them, I realised that our woodpecker is a juvenile.  Adult males only have a red patch at the back of the head (on the nape).  The juveniles all have the red patch on the top of the head and a paler undertail than the adults.

After corresponding with Manx BirdLife about the identification of the woodpecker, I agreed to take part in their Garden Birdwatch.  I am only going to start after our Canadian family visit at the beginning of August because I won’t have as much time as usual to gaze out of the window counting birds during the next three weeks.

The garden is getting more and more overgrown.  It always does at this time of year but is even worse than usual because I have been doing more vacuuming, window cleaning and tidying and less gardening than usual.  There used to be a path along the bottom of this retaining wall but it is completely choked with a mess of penstemon, centranthus, spiraea and lady’s mantle as well as overhanging plants from the bed above.  I will let them finish flowering before cutting them back.

There is a bit of a lull in new flowers.  The main flush of roses is over and the plants that flower in late summer are just starting to open.  This is one of the pink mophead hydrangeas near the drive . . .

. . . and here is the first flower to start opening on the echinops.

There are also some flowers on the mauve erigeron.  

Thinking about the erigeron reminded me of the plants on the bank outside our kitchen window in Natal.  The bank was covered with a creeping ficus and maidenhair ferns but there were also daisy-like erigeron karvinskianus (Mexican fleabane or Santa Barbara daisy) and some pretty blue flowers which were probably a type of aristea.  I wasn’t able to identify plants so easily in those "pre-digital camera and internet" days.  Which reminds me of a bumper sticker that I saw in the Co op car park.  It read “I don’t need Google because my girlfriend knows everything”!  It crossed my mind that the reason his girlfriend knew everything was that she used Google.  

While I was in the back garden yesterday searching for non-existent butterflies, I noticed that the crocosmia flowers were opening.  No need to wait for a soft light to photograph them.  They were glowing in the strong sunlight.

After those unexpected bird sightings earlier in the week, I have been wondering . . . what next? Perhaps a sighting of fairies at the bottom of the garden! Although any fairies would probably have been blown away in the strong wind today. On second thoughts, we do have fairies . . . three rather sweet little miniature roses called The Fairy. This is a magnified photo of one of the flowers.

PS A “what next”involving a little siskin happened while I was finishing this post.  There was a loud noise which sounded suspiciously like a bird hitting a window . . . and hitting it hard.  I looked out and saw a siskin lying on the steps outside the living room window.  I thought it was dead and went out to pick it up.  By the time I got there it was moving but appeared to be concussed.  I carried it inside to keep it warm and see whether it would recover.  I ended up holding it longer than I intended because I wanted to put it up in the mesh bowl on the feeder (out of reach of neighbouring felines) but I had to wait because the woodpecker was busy eating peanuts.  

The little bird just sat in the bowl for ages and I wasn’t very optimistic about its chances of recovery.  I thought it might be stimulated if other siskins were around so I put a few sunflower seeds in the bowl.  Then I started preparing supper and the next time I looked out of the window the little bird had gone.  I can’t remember ever being so glad not to see a bird.

Summer 4

More of the usual . . . rain, wind, birds, butterflies and flowers

Saturday 11th July, 2015

On Sunday we did some shower dodging in the morning and took the accumulated garden refuse out to the amenity centre at Balladoole.  There was a full load because I have made a start on the weeding, dead-heading, edge of lawn trimming, hedge cutting, etc.   There is still a long way to go and much to be done  before the annual fern cutting starts in August. Yesterday afternoon I also cut back the hydrangeas that were overhanging the path past the crab apple tree.  It seemed a shame to remove branches with buds but they were blocking the path and we seldom see the flowers on that side of the row of lace caps.

I sent off a message to a local nursery garden asking whether they have blue flag irises and hardy white arum lilies in stock.  I must be mad - I don’t know how I will fit them into this crowded garden but I have admired some which are flowering in nearby gardens and I would love to have them in our garden.  I took a photo of the irises in a cottage garden that we passed on our way home from Brookdale  late in June.  I wanted to identify them them when I got home and a photo is more accurate than my memory.  

It's Monday and we had an early walk in our plantation which was just as well because we arrived home just as the drizzle started.  I wonder whether anyone has done any research on the topic of whether more than average rainfall falls on weekends and bank holidays.  I expect people who work indoors just complain more because they are more aware of rain when they are not working.  Anyway, it is raining and today is a bank holiday on the Island, Tynwald Day.  The Manx national day is on the 5th of July but the annual ceremony at Tynwald in St John’s is held on the Monday if the 5th falls on a Sunday.  I don’t like crowds of people and ceremonial events don’t interest me and Tim is watching the tennis on TV so we are having a quiet day at home.

Later: It turned out to be a good soaking rain and plenty of it - approximately one and three quarters of an inch.  We have had more rain during the first week of July than fell during the whole of June.  The bracken up on Skyhill is really enjoying the rain.  One of the things that I love about the Island is that the views change so much with the seasons.  I took this photo from our view site at the top of the plantation to compare with a similar one that I took late in May when the bluebells were flowering.  It is taken from a similar angle - just slightly further down the slope because I was trying to get the Scots pine on the horizon into the picture but couldn't because the bracken was too high.

6 July

29 May

Birds

As well as all the usual suspects, the lesser redpoll is still visiting the feeder every day.  It is the only bird which visits our garden that is on the “red list”.  (Red is the highest conservation priority, with species needing urgent action.)  

There is no shortage of blue tits.  Tim saw five juvenile blue tits sharing the peanut feeders one afternoon.  The tits are less aggressive than the finches which are all prepared to fight their corner when the feeders are crowded.

Butterflies

There wasn’t much to report for the first few days of the week, just meadow browns and unidentified whites.  I chased the whites round the garden for a while trying to identify them but eventually got bored because they nearly always turned out to be green veined whites.  On  Friday I rushed out with my camera when a small tortoiseshell landed on the centranthus outside the kitchen window.  It was very bright and must have emerged from its chrysalis very recently.  It was rather high and I couldn’t get a good angle on it from the path and then I got too close and it flew up and got blown away in the wind.  I kept looking out of the window to see whether it would return but had no luck.

When we walked past the display of plants outside the supermarket on Tuesday, they had some rather good hydrangeas.  A white one caught my eye but I wasn’t tempted, partly because I have too many hydrangeas and partly because they cost £15-99. Tim said he couldn’t understand why people bought expensive hydrangeas when they grow so easily from cuttings.  They could get free plants just by asking for a few bits from friends or neighbours  who were pruning their plants.

The conversation reminded me of the cuttings that I planted at the end of August from some discarded stems that we liberated from the “green waste” bin at the tip.  Five of my cuttings have grown and a couple have small buds.  The bits we brought home had intensely blue flowers but I have a feeling that the flowers on the cuttings will be bright pink because I grew them in commercial compost which probably has a higher ph rating than our garden soil.  Judging by the colour of our hydrangeas, most of our soil is acid apart from an area where an alkali leached out into the soil after the new garage was built and and a wide strip of concrete was laid at the top of the drive.

The wildflower bank is dominated by meadowsweet at this time of year.  It has a very pretty flower.

This is the view looking down the bank from the top step outside the summerhouse.  The larger flower in the lower left foreground is hogweed.  It isn’t one of my favourites so I cut it down to ground level after taking the photo.  Hogweed has a thick root and is difficult to dig out.  I try to dig out the smaller plants and cut back the others before they set seed hoping to discourage them.

I usually buy a miniature rose plant in a pot to put in the spare room when we have one of our  sisters or a daughter visiting.  I am not fond of cut flowers because I find the decision about when to throw them out difficult and end up with depressing wilting flowers in a vase.  I used to plant the little roses in the garden after they finished flowering but they never did well.  So last year I planted some in a big pot and this is the result.  It is larger than the original flowers and is magnified even more in the photo.

The pink spiraea are flowering now.  I have three varieties.  I think one is Little Princess (left) and I am not sure about the one on the right.  It is one of the varieties that has pretty golden new foliage which turns a yellowy green as the leaves age.  The flowers are similar to Little Princess, which I prefer because I like the darker green leaves which look better and seem less prone to mildew.

The third variety is probably spiraea x billardii.  It is pretty but is rather vigorous, sends up suckers, and needs to be controlled more severely to stop it invading the rest of the garden.

A better behaved shrub is the Deutzia.  I love the delicate flowers, almost white but with a sprinkling of pink on the outer petals.

While I was wading through ragged robin and various other plants down on the bottom level of the garden trying to get to the Deutzia, I stopped to photo this penstemon, sheltered below the wall but still a bit battered by the wind  . . .  

. . . and some lady’s mantle, growing under overhanging shrubs,  with a sparkle of overnight raindrops still on the leaves.

And when I was returning to the house, I noticed these oxeye daisies at the corner of the garage, back-lit by the afternoon sun.

Summer 3

Blackcaps and black cats, too many midges and a very small tragedy.

Saturday 4th July, 2015.

Not everything is lovely in the garden all the time. On Thursday morning we witnessed the last hour of the very brief life of a baby blue tit.

I was watching the birds on the feeder when I noticed one little ball of fluff that appeared to be sleeping on a peanut feeder perch.  It wasn’t trying to eat and didn’t react or beg for food when an adult blue tit perched nearby.

I was worried about it and kept a close watch.  When it dropped off the perch and fluttered to the ground I rushed out to pick it up because there have been predators in the area.  Last night this hunter was spotted under the feeder.  It was sleeping peacefully - until the resident mad old woman burst out of the kitchen door and chased it out of the garden.  I wasn’t sure whether it was waiting for birds or was after our wood mice - or both.

I held the little bird while Tim filled the sunflower seed feeders. A cat came lurking round the corner of the house but beat a hasty retreat - as soon as it saw us.  The blue tit was tiny - even by baby blue tit standards  - and was very young. The remnants of the yellow gape at the sides of the beak were still very obvious.

I wasn’t very optimistic about its chances of survival but I put it up in the bowl where it would be safe and would have a source of food if it was capable of eating - half hoping for a miracle.  

Then I went round the side of the house to photograph some roses and the next time I checked on the bird it was lying on its side. It was sad, but I consoled myself with the thought that death is an inevitable part of life and at least it had a peaceful end and the cat didn’t get it.

Then Tim came out to tell me that there was a blackcap outside the living room window again.  Due to a combination of defective hearing and paranoia about cats, I misheard and thought he was warning me of a black cat in the garden.  So I charged round the house and frightened the poor little bird away.  It isn’t the first time I have muddled blackcaps with black cats.

I have a tendency to run around the garden chasing cats and pheasants like an elderly, demented Jack Russell.  I sometimes wonder whether I would save myself a lot of trouble by investing in a real Jack Russell but then I think back to the Schipperkes.  When they were young they were quite prepared to chase cats and large birds for me but when they got older and I suggested a pheasant chase they just looked at me with an “Oh no - not again” expression and went back to sleep.  There are a few benefits in doing my own chasing.  It is good exercise and I do sometimes end up in parts of the garden that I seldom visit - like half way up the bank behind the summerhouse - and find some bracken or about-to-flower weeds that have been overlooked and need to be pulled out.

But, back to the rest of the week . . . there isn’t much to report about Sunday because I was recovering from staying up too late on Saturday night writing about last week’s highlights for the blog.  I am hoping to be more efficient this week, recording events as they occur, or at least at the end of each day.  This may  result in  the post having a mixture of tenses as I switch between past and present.  Sunday’s only noteworthy event was a visit from two red admirals.  They both looked in better condition than the one I photographed last week although this one had a bit missing from one wing.

On Monday morning we walked in Skyhill plantation.  It felt almost autumnal, damp and overcast.  The first toadstool had already appeared . . .

. . . and yellow leaves littered the path.  They weren’t proper autumn leaves - just old leaves from the holly and ivy which are shed when they put on a spurt of new summer growth.

But Monday’s big news was that our mouse was back.   I am fairly sure that we have two - a male and a female  although I haven’t seen them at the same time  Perhaps we can look forward to tiny wood mouse babies - cats permitting, of course.

Tim was surprised at how small today’s mouse was.  He had only seen the photos of the ones that I had seen earlier and it is impossible to judge sizes from photos without an accompanying ruler, traditional matchbox or old penny for comparison.  I often magnify the butterfly photos so that the details are clearer - and hope that anyone looking at the photo will realise that they are not life-size.  It would be difficult to get a live butterfly to pose with a ruler or matchbox, and anyway matchboxes seem to come in all different sizes these days.

We also saw a  baby blue tit on the peanut feeder pecking away vigorously.  Then an adult blue tit arrived, accompanied by another juvenile.  The first arrival lost interest in feeding itself and started quivering and begging for food.  Both babies were given a bit of peanut before they all flew away.

I thought the baby tits had arrived later than last year so I checked.  I was right - I photographed them three or four weeks earlier in 2014.  The great tits in our nest box fledged before the end of May last year.   This year the first juvenile tits to visit the feeder arrived late in June.  The young great tits, with their narrow chest stripes and less shiny black heads, and blue tits, with their yellow tinged cheeks, are easier to distinguish from the adults than the young coal tits which look rather similar to the adults.  And coal tits are such jittery little birds that they barely sit still long enough for me to get a really good look at them.

In the afternoon I started pulling out bluebell seedheads.  They have already seeded themselves all over the garden and I really don’t need any more seedlings.  The work came to an abrupt stop when a blackbird started scolding loudly.  It was on the other side of the hedge and I wasn’t sure whether I was the source of the annoyance or whether there was a cat in the next door garden.  When I moved away the scolding stopped.  So it must have been me.  I went up to dig creeping buttercups out of the daffodil bed in the back garden instead.  

Monday may have felt like autumn but Tuesday was definitely summer with a maximum temperature of 24 degrees - a heatwave for the Island!  The wind direction had changed and hot air was blowing in from the south east.  We did the usual shopping in Ramsey and, when we walked out of the Co op, it felt distinctly hotter outside than it had been in the shop.  This is the first time this has occurred this year.  We don’t have air conditioning in the shops in Ramsey, only heating in winter, so it is almost always warmer inside than outside.

I decided to mow the grass because the weathermen were forecasting and even hotter day on Wednesday.  It was windy when I started.  The wind must have been even stronger overnight because some small twiggy branches had blown off the ash and beech trees.  It  clouded over before I finished and the wind dropped so the midges emerged in force.   I had to put on my “fishing” hat with a fine mesh veil and finished mowing in a cloud of midges.

Wednesday was not as hot as expected.  The wind and sun came and went and so did the midges.  We chose to walk in Skyhill because it is shady but the sun didn’t shine for more than a few minutes while we were out. I took advantage of the overcast conditions to photograph a buttercup near the stream.   

I had written to a friend on Tuesday and told her “There is a bit of a lull in garden flowers now - just a lot of oxeye daisies and foxgloves plus a few rather wind-battered roses.”  But when we walked down the drive before our walk I saw that there was a big patch of campanula near the gate.

I decided to make a list of all the plants that are flowering now but it ended up so long that I gave up.  There are not many in full flower but when you add the ones that have nearly finished flowering and those with the first buds opening it adds up to a surprising number.  There are normal garden flowers like my beautiful, fragrant Gentle Hermione rose . . .

. . . and this peony.  Although the flowers are a bit too bright and brash for my taste, I can't help admiring their over the top, messy exuberance.

Then there are flowering trees like this Chilean lantern tree Crinodendron hookerianum . . .

. . . and shrubs like the Mock Orange Philadelphus

. . . and the wild flowers like this delicate slender St John’s wort hypericum  pulchrum which was difficult to photograph because there was too much glare when it was sunny and as soon as the light started to fade the flowers started to close.

. . .and a wide variety of approved weeds including these “fox and cubs” Pilosella aurantiaca glowing in the morning sun.  

When we returned home from Ramsey on Friday I saw a hummingbird hawkmoth feeding on the centranthus near the drive so I rushed inside, leaving Tim to carry the shopping into the house, and grabbed my camera.  I think this is the best of the photos.  Not great - but not bad considering the uncomfortable circumstances. Those moths move about fast and that part of the garden is swarming with hungry midges.

In the afternoon Tim found a bee in the living room.  I went outside and sure enough there were a few circling the chimney.  I think they were just scouting bees but we lit a small fire to discourage them from setting up home.  Tim went outside to watch while I started the fire and he didn’t see any bees flying out of the chimney.  Those which were “casing the joint” left quite soon.   So it appears that they hadn’t moved in yet.

Our recent bee problems paled into insignificance compared with the experience of a couple who live in an old cottage further down the glen.  They returned from holiday after TT to find “a huge number of very angry bees in their sitting room.”  Our neighbour wrote  “There appeared to be a nest in their chimney.  They got the Pest Control Officer the next morning who came and dealt with the problem with a smoke bomb.  He said they did not like killing honey bees but at the moment they have no choice.  Apparently there is a huge problem with nests and swarms and infestation of chimneys by bees in the Ramsey area.  They are dealing with dozens of call outs every day!”

It hasn’t been a great week for butterflies.   Just the two red admirals and a few speckled woods early in the week and three meadow browns and two green veined whites in the back garden in the afternoon while I was popping in and out to check the chimney for bees.

On Friday night the garden was battered by heavy thunder showers.  This morning the roses were drooping under the weight of their wet petals and the back lawn was littered with wild rose petals.  There is a popular story that George II described the British summer as “three fine days and a thunderstorm”.  Like most “information” it may or may not be true.  We had a few hot days this week and last night we had the thunder showers - so perhaps summer is over already!