Author: David

The gardens of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford on Avon mainly feature plants which would have featured in Elizabethan/Jacobean gardens. The pictures here were taken in Hall’s Croft, the house of Shakespeare’s eldest daughter and her husband.

At the centre of the lawn at Hall’s Croft is a medlar: a tree once grown for its fruit, which are now a culinary rarity. This flower was already beginning to go over.

These are unripe mulberries

These are flowers of the holm oak, an evergreen. It probably didn’t feature in Stratford gardens during Shakespeare’s lifetime – it is originally from the Mediterranean, and most likely introduced into Britain in the seventeenth century.

The snail was eating as much as possible before the sun warmed everything up.

The foam of “cuckoo spit” is the protective cover for the nymphs of froghoppers – the name describes the habit of the adult insects in jumping from plant to plant. Overnight rain had left a drop of water hanging from the foam, forming a minute lens.

The male and female flowers grow on different plants. I don’t know which these are.

A common butterfly on hot days in spring, but normally hard to photograph. Usually very flighy, heading off at even a distant human approach.

This one settled to feed where I was already standing looking for other subjects, and then spend some minutes feeding, giving me views of it from various angles.

Wings from above and edge-on; its incredibly furry-looking body, long antennae and, in some pictures, seemingly even longer tongue probing flowers.

This is a male – the females lack the orange mark on each wing.

This robust thistle was growing as a weed in someone’s front garden.