Garden Project 15 Maintaining Balance

Keeping a good balance between cultivated and wild flowers continues to occupy a lot of my gardening hours but is certainly rewarding in terms of biodiversity of plants and their dependent insects etc. The front 'lawn' is a meadow of Buttercups with Vetches and Yellow Rattle coming up ready to flower next. Red Campion, always a favourite, has taken up residence in most of the flower beds along with Cow Parsley, Comfrey and Anchusa, which all need culling fairly frequently. A new venture this year is leaving an area of the back lawn long planted up with Bulbs - Grape hyacinths, Tulip and various Alliums plus I am planting various annuals into the long grass such a Cosmos, Nigella, Annual Chrysanthemums, Marigolds etc. I still maintain a small vegetable and soft fruit area so plenty of weeding there!!

Stinking Hellebore and Garden Birds

I was really pleased to find a colony of Stinking Hellebore, Helleborus foetidus, on the old railway embankment in Toft. This is a short-lived perennial herb of shallow calcareous soils. It is a poor competitor, and intolerant of deep shade, so is usually found in small colonies in woodland glades or open scrub, on scree slopes, rock ledges, hedgebanks etc. There are other plants of the species around Toft but I have not found new colonies before. 

With the cold weather, our garden is hosting lots of Goldfinches, Greenfinches, Blue Tits feeding on the old seedheads and the provided sunflower seeds.

Garden Project 13 - In the Summer Heat

The garden is a mass of flowers and insects at the moment. Here are photos from the small  meadow, vegetable patch, pond, flower beds and woodland meadow area. The best insect species are the teasels, scabious, wild carrot and wild parsnip, knapweed, ragwort, linaria, marguerites and evening primrose.

Garden Project 11

 The garden has progressed a great deal in the last two and a half weeks so we now have many species in flower in the wildflower areas of the garden. Our cat enjoys sitting in the wild area at the back of the garden amid the Red Campion.

Early Purple Orchids

A wonderful display of Early Purple Orchids in our local woods at the moment. A very difficult species to do justice to with its supersaturated colour and always ' messy' surroundings, especially as I prefer to have the flowers with enough detail in the background to show habitat. A very variable species in its colour and petal shape etc.