August 27th – Just on the canal bank between the Black Cock Bridge and Walsall Wood Bridge, a crab apple tree with lots of good fruit.
This is the first tree along here I’ve seen with fruit this year. Normally there are three or four.
A sad reflection on the season, which seems to have been a bit strange. But never mind, this will make a lovely jelly for someone.
April 28th – There are a couple of unsung hedgerow stars at the moment. For everyone else, right now it seems to be about oilseed rape, bluebells, and cherry blossom. But look around. Pretty much everything is having a great year so far. The dandelions – the yellow, beautifully delicate yet ubiquitous wildflower – are really, really prolific. The apple blossom too is astonishing in its density and clarity.
It might be about the spring classics right now, but look beyond them and there’s a whole host of other stuff just trying to get your attention.
These were all on a very short section of canal bank in Walsall Wood.
April 16th – Of course, the real star of this year’s Springs Got Talent is the blossom, which has been extraordinarily abundant this year. Apple and ornamental cherry line the cyclepaths of Telford. The falling petals are a delight, and shower any passing cyclist with confetti, like some groom of the spring.
Fantastic stuff.
September 5th – A hectic, mad day. I started in Telford, then shot back to Tyseley, then over to Darlaston. I didn’t get many photos, but this lone apple tree intrigued me. Laden with fruit, on the embankment of the motorway at Telford, it is some way off the cycle path that runs beside the M54. Clearly not planted deliberately, as it appears to be the only one. The fruit are growing are untouched, save for bird-pecks. I wondered, idly, if it had grown from the seed in an apple core tossed away by a driver, or perhaps a passing cyclist.
Guerrilla planting of a different, accidental kind.
July 29th – Oak Apples, or galls, are an interesting thing. Very visible right now, they are the gall of a type of wasp that lays it’s egg inside new oak leaf buds. A chemical reaction caused by a secreted fluid causes the gall to grow, and inside, the wasp larva feeds on it, eventually burrowing it’s way to the surface and flying away.
Isn’t nature amazing?
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