PONDY STUFF

This is then path down to the pond lined on either side by self sown wild garlic or ramsons. I am now glad we have a hand rail!

In the pond the water crowfoot, a white buttercup that has to be

 

carefully hoicked out before it takes over, and bogbean are flowering.

Now for a little story - last year my good and generous friend P game me a chunk of gunnera and it produced leaves. However this year so far there was no sign of it - until today - and you can see the first leaf by the meadowsweet and golden saxifrage alongside the ditch stream.

Down by this hedge where the pond stuff grows R planted a small stunted eucalyptus fifteen years ago - and it has grown!

Not far away is an amelanchier also known as serviceberry, sarviceberry, sarvis, Juneberry, saskatoon, sugarplum and shadbush just for a few.

 

Anyway back to the pond which attracts many visitors from a plastic egret to a pair of wandering pheasants.

In the pond itself the usual plants are emerging - flowering rush, water lilies, bog bean, irises and so on and though we had a lot of frogspawn I am still to see some tadpoles but they may be hidden under the pondweed. I have seen large water beetles, newts and water boatmen and whirligigs on the surface. 

We seem to have lost our moorhens and the mallard have also forsaken us this year. A heron has arrived for breakfast but whether I can blame him for the shortage of taddies who knows? The kingcups or marsh marigold light up the darkness between the pond and the stream (ditch).

So drought over, May gosling to you all and it is raining, at last. I got the mower stuck again - it slid off the path and into a bush, had to get the big son to help me lift it out before he goes to Grand Canaria, (and sun).

The Muncaster bluebells will have to be missed this year but Carstramon Wood here we come.

Muncaster is well worth a visit and details are on their website - https://www.muncaster.co.uk/castle-gardens/gardens/bluebellheaven.

And there is a cafe and rhododendrons and birds and heron feeding etc.

On the banking above the pond the shrubs are flowering - Viburnum plaicatum Mariesii, lilac and the yellow tree peony. The latter is a cutting from my late mother's tree and many of the family have it now.

Now I have to go out and, after mending the wheelbarrow, remove the clematis armandii that has decided to grow along the washing line.