Wednesday Water

Are you getting warm?

What will it be?

It is already about 9" high...answers on a postcard...

Wednesday Water

Red in Tooth and Claw

Coming back to the house, after a session in The Bottom, I noticed that Chancey was creeping up on something near the wall. Suspecting it might be a lizard, and wishing to give it a chance to escape, I called to him just as he pounced. I didn't put him off his stride, and he ran towards me to offer me his prize; a foot or so of very young, very pretty, Horseshoe Whip snake. He dropped it at my feet, and it started to make its way back towards the wall, but then Charlie Badmash, jealous of any attention given to Chancey, cuffed him around the ear and made a grab for the snake. Knowing that I would deprive him of his fun, he ran off with it down to The Bottom, and by the time I got there, he had despatched it and you can see how sulky he is that I stopped him from starting his meal until I had my photo. It is not a very good photo, but you will see the pattern on the snake if you click on it. Here is a much better one of an adult snake that I found on the web.

It's a Doddle...

....Sorry, that should be Dodder... click on the photo to see it close up. Those thin red strands are only a millimetre in diameter, and the tiny pink flowers grow out of the strands. There are no leaves because it doesn't need them. For those of you who don't know this plant, it is a parasite that lives on a number of different plants and doesn't have any chlorophyll of its own. Believe it or not, it is a member of the Convolvulus family...a bindweed with a difference..

New this week...

ASTERISCUS maritimus stands out in the crowd; although The Bottom is full of hawkbit and coltsfoot, this plant has a much stronger egg yolk yellow flower that stands out, even though it is low growing. The pale yellow, shading to white, of CHRYSANTHEMUM coronarium is also easy to pick out, as the flowers are quite large, and the slender stems and feathery leaves of this relative of the chamomile let it dance around in the breeze. The final plant for today is PHAGNALON rupestre, that looks as if it has gone to seed before it has flowered, but its grey foliage is attractive even if the flowers are rather dull.

Wednesday Water

Pale Blue

The small wild Nigella has started to flower. It always surprises me how large the seed head is, just as large as in the cultivated variety. The other blue is an Echium I think, but I haven't decided which one. I need to look more closely at the plant.

A Touch of Pink...Again

I have now found more clumps of the Centaurium, and the Convulvulus is much more in evidence than it was when I made this post. I have also found another Silene, much taller and with darker pink flowers than this one, that is quite widespread in the lower left hand corner. It has a much plumper bladder than the earlier one, and the petals seem to curl up on themselves almost as soon as they open; at least I haven't been able to catch them in any other position! Googling around, I came across Silene nocturna, which doesn't open its flowers until just before sunset, so maybe I shall tootle down to have a look then.

I suppose this Knapweed is closer to purple than pink, but it can hold its own.

A Little Sport

The wild gladiolas (Gladiolus Italica)were not as badly hit as I first thought. There are quite a few drifts coming into flower, and not only that, but up on The Top, I have found a couple of sports, both pale pink instead of the usual fuchsia. It will be interesting to see if they multiply. They are in one of the bits that I get to weed, so they do have a chance...

...now that April's here...

...there are more flowers popping up in The Bottom. This group all have what I call pea flowers, and range in colour from pale pink of the anthyllis, or is it a trifolium? through yellow, to orangey red. Most are low growing, but the orangey red vetch (not as pink as it appears here) is about 30cm high. I have just realised I haven't included the yellow broom that has seeded itself around the boundary (and invaded next door's gravel drive last year), but my camera battery is on re-charge, so that will have to wait. I did have a wonderfully honey-scented gorse as well, but Ivan the Barbarian dug it out..

Wednesday Water

Wednesday Water

A Touch of Colour...

...on a grey day. It is too wet to be crawling around in the undergrowth, but this poppy, left in peace to grow under a dog rose on The Top, shines like a beacon.

Wednesday Water

Into the unknown...

...well unknown until I get my act together and identify them.

I think this is Teucrium pseudochamaepitys but I am not sure.

This big clump of white is a bit of a mystery. It has tiny leaves like a thyme, very widely spaced on thin stems. The flowers are similar in structure to thyme but the plant doesn't have any smell when crushed.

This little plant with tiny mauve flowers is quite widespread, but the flowers are only about 3mm across. I suppose I should have something in the picture to give a sense of scale. I'll try to remember next time I go out with the camera.

A touch of pink

CENTAURIUM erythraea Rafin: The Common Centaury. Only one plant so far, but there may be more as they usually flower a bit later than this, and this is low to the ground and other times they have stood up on a longish stalk and in a bigger cluster.



This looks quite sad. Just one flower straggling up the bancale. This bindweed can form lovely drifts across arid patches, and the smaller white form is usually in evidence, but not so far. I haven't given up hope though...

There are other pink things around; vetches and so on, but I haven't captured them yet. Walking around locally, I am reminded of things that are missing, mainly larger plants like the migonette, mallow, chicory, borage and the peculiar Thymelea, but I have a tiny plant of the latter in a plant pot of mixed foliage plants that the builder brought me as a Christmas present, so it may find itself transplanted to the wild...

Greeny - yeller

This Euphorbia strikes a lovely bright note in the grasses. It grows prolifically all over the place, but I am very careful how I approach it; I discovered to my cost, twenty years ago, that the sap brings my skin up in large painful wheals that take a long time to heal, and leave brown marks on my skin for months. The bare areas of soil are being colonised by this grey/green lichen, seen here on one of the rock outcrops in The Bottom. I know lichen is supposed to be slow growing, but this one isn't wasting any time. The flat yellow lichen below is much more stately in its pace of growth. These patches on the rock outcrop are quite large, but the patches on stone surfaces that were cut twenty odd years ago are only now reaching a diameter of 2cm.

Tiny Gems

It pays to get close to the ground. Some of the smallest plants are beauties. The pimpernels have such vivid colouring, but on this occasion, the close-up was more of a balls-up, and when I get a better shot, I shall replace this one. The shot of the red version was even worse...Edited to show a much better close-up of the blue.


The tiny Silene I found yesterday was all alone, and I couldn't find it again when I went out this morning to try to decide which species it was. For those of you who are not botanists, this is the same family as the Red Campion, common in the UK, but this is tiny, the flowers not much more than a centimetre in diameter and a pale, pale pink. I took this photo early in the morning, and the flowers, and the hairy grey leaves of the plant it is leaning over, are glistening with dew.

Edit I came across a Spanish website called Virtual Herbal, and I think I can now identify this as Silene Ramosissima. If you look it up on the Virtual Herbal and click on the link that says Imagen en el campo, it takes you to a photo that shows how hairy it really is.



Walking along the cliff top this morning, I took this photo of a large clump of helianthemum, a plant that at one time, grew all over The Bottom. When I got home, I went in search, and found this tiny specimen. I haven't bothered finding out which particular type it is, I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that I find more. Edited to say that there are more, in fact a couple of good sized clumps that I hadn't noticed until they flowered.The last one really is a weed; it grows rampantly all over the garden, turns up in pots, and even between the bricks in the walls; the ever present Herb Robert. Without anything to give it scale, it could be taken for a garden variety of Geranium.