Beautiful day

Paddling in the Cych is usually something I can only stand for a minute or two - even in summer the water is usually bone-chillingly cold. But yesterday was so hot that Is and I spent ages wading around in it.

On a big meander a fallen tree forms a dam and there's a pool that's deep and clear. As we paddled around we saw blue-green damselflies two or three times there.

They never rested in one place long enough for me to get a proper ID. I registered the coloured wings, so can say that they were demoiselles.

Photo: naturspektrum.de

Looking at the British Dragonfly Soc's photo guide it turns out that we have just two demoiselles and I reckon ours was Calopteryx virgo, the beautiful demoiselle. Good common name that - says what is does on the tin.

I'm planning to go back with a camera, but I'm not confident I'll be able to close enough to get anything that is worth having. Certainly I'd be lucky to get anything as good as this one.

Going off at a bit of a tangent, I happened upon the blog of macro photographer Matt Cole recently. His insect photos are used by BBC Wildlife, among others, and are as good as I've seen.
It's inspiring - but daunting. As a dabbler, when you read about the time and skill that goes into making them happen you realise how much you have to learn.

Hot topic

Today is a lemon tea day. For some reason I love it on very hot days, when everyone else is opting for fizzy stuff from the fridge.

I'm just about to make my third cup of the day. But what to do with the bag? I've worried about teabags for a while; only a little niggle of a worry it has to be said. 

Not quite the imminent collapse of the eurozone, but then I do have some control over my used teabags. But I knew I wasn't alone when I read Garden 65 on the subject a week or so ago. What should happen to all my teabags?

They were going onto my compost heap until our council decided to start doing a waste food collection some months ago. Now they go into the little plastic bin they give us and then disappear off to some mega-composting operation somewhere or other.

So, what's better - bags in the council's bin or onto my compost heap? I can't quite decide and now The Guardian was muddied the waters a little further because teabags aren't all they seem.

The Guardian quote the man from Unilever as saying his teabags are "mainly made from organic material". There's a sealant in there apparently that doesn't biodegrade.
Can I trust my lemons? Are they fully biodegradable? And perhaps it's time to go back to tea leaves and a strainer.

Thought for the day...

'We all need a daily dose of nature in our lives and, as a nation of gardeners, there is no doubt that nature needs us, too.'

Garden wildlife guru Chris Baines at Guardian blog.

PS No, the picture isn't from my back yard, but it was part of my 'daily dose of nature' for today. It was taken on a walk through a country house garden this morning.

No show

I'd like to be there, but I can't. The Chelsea Show, that is. My severe allergic reaction to London gets in the way.

So I'll have to enjoy it all from a distance, courtesy of the BBC. But it's nice to know that wildflowers are one of this year's Big Things, or at least Jane Perrone of The Guardian thinks so

Though it seems like she's as impressed by how native plants are looking after themselves behind the scenes as she is by the show garden creations. I like the sound of that.

Look for beauty in the every day, I tell myself. Especially when looking at my lawn, which this year seems to be more dandelion than grass.

Falling over

It's been a few years now since I last heard a cuckoo here on the Cych, but I continue to live in hope. I can relate to the delight Rudi at Tarka's Challenge felt when he heard one at Kenfig the other day - he says: "I was so excited I nearly fell over."

Photo: vogelart.info

Kenfig is only 50 miles away from me here, so I'll keep my fingers crossed for my own falling-over moment.But I wouldn't put money on the odds. 
The BTO is hoping to radio track cuckoos again this year, having followed the movements of five English cuckoos last year. Perhaps with a better understanding of the lives of cuckoos something could be done to halt the species' decline.

This spring the charity is hoping to raise £60,000 to keep tabs on 15 birds this year and it wants expand the study to include female birds and some from Scotland and from Wales. Visit this page if you'd like to make a contribution.

Alarming afternoon

Photo: Martien Brand

I've spent much of the day tidying up the bit of garden around the pond. A useful way to pass the time you'd think, but it has earned me a near-constant scolding from our resident wrens.

The wren pair now have chicks to feed in their converted swallow nest in our garage roof and have been coming and going all day. But whenever a perceived threat appears they start up with their click-click-click alarm call and keep it up until the danger has passed.

Today's 'threat' has mostly been me because I've been coming and going close to the garage door. The wrens also seem to have a problem with the pair of swallows that are using another of last year's nests, a couple of feet from theirs.

Most of the time they ignore the swallows as they come and go, but from time to time a swallow arrives as a wren leaves (or vice versa) and the alarm call sounds. I've been keeping out of the garage as much as I can to try to keep things as calm as possible.

By the pond some of the lawn has been taken over by speedwell. It's a plant that usually rates as a weed, but I rather like its pale blue flowers and so cut the grass around it rather than strim it to oblivion.

I'm not sure which speedwell it is. Based on my field guide I think I'd plump for germander speedwell (Veronica chamaedrys), or bird's eye speedwell.

New leaf

Some sunshine and a weekend, remarkable... It was good to get out and catch up on the lawn-mowing and spend some time seeing what's going on out there.

Finally something is happening with my "watched" tree. It's actually more a watched hedge as it happens, a big, mishapen old ash down by the compost heap.

It's surrounded by plant growth, but until the last day or two has shown no sign of responding to spring itself. That's now changing as, at last, buds are bursting.

The great thing about taking such a close interest in just one tree is that you do look so much closer than you'd normally do. So, I was a little surprised to see how buds are at different growth stages at different points on the tree.

Close to the trunk in the shadier part of the hedge the buds are only just beginning to swell, but further out at the tips of the branches new leaves are forming. For now the foot of the hedge in bathed in sunshine, but as the ash canopy forms overheard it's all going to be lost to shade.

Just now there's a bank of Red Campion, that catches the morning sun and is attracting insects. There are lots of bees and some butterflies too - including this green-veined white.  

Before I went to find the camera to take these photos I could hear the creaky-gate call of a young robin somewhere close by. One of its parents kept an eye on me from a distance.

It took some time looking into a tangle of brambles to spot it spot the newly-fledged youngster perched in a little pool of sunlight. Of course it goes without saying that by the time I was back with my camera it was nowhere to be seen. 

On time

In between heavy showers I've been out working in the garden this afternoon. Deep in concentration I didn't at first register the sound that I was hearing, but then my hearing zeroed in on - a swift's shrill scream.

And there in the grey sky over the valley was a single swift, flying high and fast. It has spent the rest of the day buzzing our house, which has me hoping that we'll have a swift nest over our birthday again this summer.

Looking at the diary I've kept since we moved here it looks like the first swift of the year has usually turned up in the first week of May. The earliest arrival time I've noted is May 1 and the latest - in 2007 - was May 8.

So, everything is pretty much running to schedule. Shame this year's first bird has to arrive to such wet and dismal weather.

Pteridomaniacs anonymous

 

Forget ducks, the weather here this week is probably better suited to pteridophytes. I've spent some time today out in the garden with a camera looking for ferns and there are plenty of fronds emerging and unfurling.

I love their colours, their intricate shapes and how they seem directly connected to the distant past - very Jurassic Park. I don't know enough about British ferns and keep meaning to get a good field guide and learn to ID native species, but I do have just a touch of what the Victorians called 'pteridomania' - fern mania. 

Collecting ferns was a mid-19th Century craze that reached such pitch that fern collectors - both amateur and professional - had a lasting impact on some species. Charles Kingsley cdame up with the term 'pteridomania'.

He wrote: 'Your daughters, perhaps, have been seized with the prevailing ‘Pteridomania’ and are collecting and buying ferns…and wrangling over inpronouncable names of species, (which seem to be different with every new fern that they buy), till the Pteridomania seems to you something of a bore.’

Most of the ferns in my garden are self-seeded. I have bought a few exotics, but most have brought themselves to me.

The climate here seems to be just right for fern-growing. In wetter places ferns and mosses cover the groung and the boughs of older. Looking around in the garden today I found a few self-setters, some of which I'll leave where they are and others that I may move to somewhere better (from my point of view).  

Back home

No cuckoos, sadly. I haven't heard one calling here on the Cych for as long as I can remember. But it's cuckoo time elsewhere and I can hope.

Thanks to the BTO's tracking project we know that returning cuckoos are arriving now in eastern England. Since the beginning of the week Chris is now in Essex and Lyster is in Norfolk.

Photo: vogelart.info

Lyster  was in Algeria on April 25. That means he covered the 1,200 miles to Norfolk in just five days - at around 240 miles a day.

We might not have cuckoos, but we do have 'our' swallows. Over the last couple of days a pair of swallows have been performing high-speed chasing manoeuvres around the house and into the garage, presumably to check out last year's nest.

Are they last year's parents back to raise more young?  I like to think so. There is still the problem of the sitting tenants though; a pair of wrens have taken over last year's swallow nest and are now incubating eggs.

What will the swallows do? There are a couple of part-built nests from earlier summers that they could make use of - or will they evict the smaller birds?