Category: Nature

I Wish I was Ten Again

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That’s what I felt like at Holly Hill Country Park last week. It’s on the edge of Fareham in Hampshire and I went with my daughter and family so that Scarlett could feed the ducks. Very nice ducks they were too, Buff ducks!

There were pretty bridges, wooden steps and muddy banks. A beautiful bench that would have fitted Jude’s July theme and several woodland art pieces. The list of flora and fauna is really impressive, the planting is subtle and naturalistic. With trees as varied as Dawn Redwood, Cork Oak, Gleditsia, Hornbeam and Japanese Cherry, it’s a real arboretum. A variety of bats, stoats, voles and hare are among twenty eight mammals listed.

Here are some photos, apart from ducks, the only wildlife are the granddaughters!

Amazingly this lovely place is free to visit. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did, see some more of Jo’s Monday Walks here.

Flora, Berries and Seeds on a Nature Walk

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A few days ago Meg posted a memoir of some the amazing walks she has taken so far in her lifetime. She talks of walking on Broken Hill, even the name evokes wonder, casuarinas looking south to Gulaga and a father emu with his nine babies. When she wrote of ‘heathland flowering up to our neck’, I compared the abundance of flora and fauna with here in England.

Then yesterday I went for a short dog walk beside the river and canal, and observing my surroundings I became aware of just how much there was to see. exe1

Lots of seed heads, Queen Anne’s Lace I believe.

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More seeds and grasses.


Flowers galore!
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and some early blackberries.
This wasn’t a planned photo walk so I only had my silly i phone, but these were all taken in less than a mile, without searching very hard. Sometimes the unexpected brings the most pleasure.

I’ve decided to call this a nature walk and link to Jo’s Monday Walk. The Exeter canal runs parallel to the river Exe for around six miles. The canal is great for walking, or cycling, as long as unlike me, you can stay upright on a bike, and there are several watering holes along the way. I hope it fits Jo!

Half Hours in the Tiny World

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What does “enveloped” mean to you? It could be your post-bath toddler wrapped burrito-style in a huge fuzzy towel. How about the ever-present fog that meanders through your city? Is it the well-loved hammock you lie in devouring novels as if they were candy? Maybe it’s your favorite fluffy comforter, edges worn from love and use?

Krista asks this question for this weeks photo challenge and as often happens when I’m stuck, I let my imagination run away with me.  When I need to escape or when I’m tired I let myself be enveloped in a book. It could be fiction – a novel perhaps, my ‘comfort book’ is Miss Austen’s Emma, a short story, or perhaps a poetry anthology. The shelves in my house are stacked with books on a wide variety of subjects and include some antiquarian books. Here is one of them.

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It’s packed with treasure from the natural world, such as the metamorphosis of gnats, delicately sketched.

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The life of a spider,

bees and wildflowers

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This book has a dedication inside that reads:-

Third prize for
General Improvement,
merited by
Rose Weller
Cambridge House July 1879

That’s a long time to be enveloping people in its magic!

5 Photos 5 Stories Day #4

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I met this little fella at the allotment today, and it’s a Cockchafer beetle, Melolontha melolontha, otherwise known as a May bug. It’s about 3 cms long and this isn’t the best image, because I took it with my phone and cropped it hard.  It was lurking under a new leaf on a pear tree and my friend scooped it onto a shell so we could check it out . Luckily that same phone meant that Mr Google could identify it in seconds.

I’m not keen on bugs and creepy crawlies in factb but Sonel’s blog has converted me into someone that can appreciate their uh . . . beauty? and this one was quite cute, do a google image search if you don’t believe me. Cockchafers spend three to fours years of their lives underground as larvae, and once adult, they only have six weeks left to mate. It turns out that its a bit of a pest, the larvae are voracious feeders on roots, so as we don’t want to share our potatoes, it’s  been dispatched, not killed, that would have been hideous, just taken elsewhere!

Jude at Travel Words has nominated me for the ‘Five Photos, Five Stories’ challenge, and I would like to nominate Margie, a photographer and writer from Michigan who has Zen eyes. This would be an easy challenge for you Margie, if you feel like taking it up, no worries if you don’t have time.

The challenge is to just  “post a photo each day for five consecutive days and attach a story to the photo. It can be fiction or non-fiction, a poem or a short paragraph and each day nominate another blogger for the challenge”.

 

 

 

The Force of Nature

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For many years now this boat has been abandoned in the river Exe opposite Topsham quay. When the tide is low, you can see how much mud it’s trapped in. I’ve been watching it decay, and I’m sure I’m one of many, many others doing the same. It’s acquired an almost iconic status, the view just wouldn’t be the same without it. One day it will no longer be there, the forces of nature will have totally reclaimed it to the earth.
This post is for the Weekly Photo Challenge, Forces of nature.