WE took another walk beside the River Lynher at the bottom of Cadson Bury among the dog walkers. In fact we rarely see a walker without a dog on this waterside path and children are a very rare sight. However, we did manage to spot a black–tailed skimmer dragonfly on vegetation beside the Lynher. This one must have been born in one of the adjacent pools of water in the nearby woodland but prefers to patrol the fast flowing river on the wing.
On the road back to the car there were hundreds of yellow cow-wheat flowers on the roadside bank. Their seeds look similar the black wheat seeds and according to a myth, woman who eat these seeds are more likely to have male babies. Anyone with a wild flower garden though will appreciate the cow-wheat’s long flowering period.
We drove on to the ford beside Warren House Plantation and on the way saw lots of rosebay willow herb out in bloom on their tall stems. An alternative name is ‘fireweed’ as it was one of the first weeds to grow on bombed building sites after WWII and on wasteland.
We also noticed that there were lots of deep purple self-heal flowers out in bloom on squarish stems. Its leaves are said to be edible and have been used for centuries to heal wounds made by grass cutting sickle tools. These flowers will create blue patches of colour on your lawn if it is left uncut, so enjoy them and leave them for the bees and hoverflies.
A plant that is happy to grow on roadside hedge creeps, on meadow grassland and in woodland pathways is birds-foot trefoil with its clusters of yellow flowers. Its name is derived from its seed pods having the shape of a birds claw and the leaves are in bunches of three, hence the name, trefoil.
On a sunny hedgerow I notices what I thought were young, small grasshoppers jumping around. It looked like a whole family of them and I counted a dozen, but looking closely I could see they were grey bush–crickets with antennae that are longer than their bodies. They must have just hatched out en masse.
We have a fruit frame at the end of the garden where we grow raspberries, blue berries and blackcurrants and last week I was intending to go in and pick ripe raspberries when I notice a long black insect with wings, on the leaf of the small fig tree. This odd looking creature was a currant clearwing moth, there are a dozen clearwings all with different markings on their bodies. This was a female as the male has four bands and is so named as it bores a hole in the currant bush to lay its eggs in and the caterpillars obviously eat the leaves and twigs of the bush.