Tag: flower

April 27th – A mystery finally solved. I first noticed this patch of what appear to be yellow dead nettles in Footherly Lane a few years ago. Every spring they return, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen them anywhere else.

This eye-catching yellow display is absolutely gorgeous and fascinated me for the delicate colour and intricacy of the flowers.

After asking online, it turns out the plant is Yellow Archangel or Lamiastrum galeobdolon and indeed is of the same family as the dead nettle, and a staple of our ancient woodlands.

What on earth did we do before being able to use the collective hive mind of the internet for plant identification?

April 18th – There are lots of floral arrivals at the moment but it would be wrong to concentrate on the dramatic, showy ones. One return in the last week or so and enjoying the morning sunshine today from every patch of grass and roadside were a huge number of one of nature’s most overlooked gems – dandelions. 

These humble yellow flowers are actually really lovely if you stop and look at them for a bit – which today, I advise anyone to do. They’re really gorgeous.

Sometimes, it’s the little, familiar things that are most beautiful.

April 10th – This looks like some pretty revolting flotsam and jetsam, but it’s actually an important and encouraging sign of spring.

These knobbly, odd looking root growths are the rhizomes of the water lilies so common here on the local canals in high summer, and this is the first stage of their… seasonal deployment.

When the season ends, water lilies decay, and the stalk and root mass they grow from sinks to the canal bottom where the excess growth rots off and the stalks over winter in the mud where the water stays warmer, fragmenting as they do so.

When the waters warm in spring, renewed cell growth in the fragmented stocks gives buoyancy once more and they rise to the surface, moving freely in the wind currents and boat wash. 

In time, new growth will sprout and they anchor, growing the familiar leaves and flowers we know so well.

It’s a wonderful, and very successful natural mechanism, and a sign of an oncoming summer…

April 9th – I’ve been passing this rather beautiful white shrub for a week or more now and have absolutely no idea what it is. It’s growing in a clump of cotoneaster in an industrial estate flower bed in Wednesbury. 

In the damp beauty of a misty morning it was absolutely gorgeous. Anyone know what it is?

March 31st -Spotted on Clayhanger Common, a touch of optimism in the gloom: one of my guerrilla seeded patches of cowslips is just coming into flower.

My favourite flowers that I spread the seeds for ten years ago now have returned, and in the middle of a wet Saturday when it seemed the sun will never shine, they appeared to cheer me up.

Spring, right there.

May 31st – Also a lovely sight and a regular here, honeysuckle or woodbine, and my favourite display grows up the embankment on the northwestern flank of the Black Cock Bridge; tumbling and cascading over the railings a fences, a huge bush flowers here every year and always looks and smells divine.

For a flower so entrenched in British culture, it’s got that alien look of tropical blooms, like the Passion flower: our wildflowers aren’t normally this brassy!

It would be very hard not to love honeysuckle.

May 21st – Also out in abundance was the sallow, which is shedding heavily and coating canals, tracks and lanes in clumps of soft fluff.

This isn’t such good news for me, as the damned stuff makes me sneeze, but it is rather fascinating.

If you see you local waterway coated in scum in the next few days, don’t assume the pollution is man-made, it may well be your local trees, doing their fluffy thing…

May 8th – The one blossom that’s always overlooked, but is actually beautiful is Elder; elderflowers of course make great wine and soft drinks,not to mention the berries but the blooms look pretty too, and smell divine – all the more welcome as often elder grows in margins, edgelands and waste ground otherwise considered ugly. 

Here on the cycleway at Goscote there’s a prolific and strong showing of the creamy white blossom which most be a good sign for the home-brew types this year too.

April 4th – Again at telford, just by the side of the cycleway, lots of this curious shrub – bright red leaves I think, rather than flowers with white, bell shaped blooms. Every year the pieris surprises me and this year it’s especially lovely.

So much coming into flower now, such a change from the grey days of winter, which were only a few weeks ago!

April 4th – I had to pop to Telford in the late morning, and was impressed, as I usually am, by the ever-changing flowerbed on the westbound platform, currently full of what I think may be alyssum, purple easter primroses and the most beautiful red tulips, just breaking bloom.

Telford gets a lot of stick (much of it from me over the years), but some bits of it – like this – are thoroughly gorgeous and a constant delight.