Author: David

Three views of the same plant. Even the flower buds are spiky on some thistles!

The season’s heavy rain meant that many of these cherries were splitting before they had ripened completely.

Berries beginning to ripen – and it isn’t autumn yet, whatever the weather.

It wasn’t long since the same plant was flowering.

This beetle was heading through short grass with a determined air.

A young bird was using the bandstand roof as a lookout post. On the picture taken with a standard lens (below) it is barely visible silhouetted against the sky.

This was probably another member of the same family, hunting on the ground nearby.

A few cultivated (or escapee) hawkbits were growing on a lawn which was being taken over by wild ones.

The wild plant has yellow flowers, one to a stem. Cultivated varieties tend to the orange. They are sometimes, as here, yellow towards the centre of the flower, may have smaller flowers and more than one per stem.

This velvety-textured fungus can be seen growing at pretty much any time of year. The trees they prefer are elders, as here.

This medicinal herb has been used as a sedative for at least a couple of thousand years.

Blackening waxcaps are small mushrooms which change colour from an ocherous yellow to black. The process has just begun on the first fungus.

These are somewhat further down the road.

From here, the toadstools are well on the way to complete blackening.

They are small enough to be half-hidden in short grass, as are other waxcaps.

These were in the lawn of flats near to West Park.

They don’t trap their prey in a web. Instead, they hunt by stalking and leaping.

On one of the plants being grown in the Conservatory, Bantock House.

Cuckoo spit can be found on many plants in late spring/early summer. Nothing to do with the increasingly rare bird, but a protective foam for an insect larva, a froghopper. This one was on the top of a nettle which was going to seed.