Colourful and attractive “wildflower” bed by the bridge at Ironbridge yesterday.
The dominant flowers were California poppies – the name is a clue to their geographical origin.
There were red flax (main picture, with visiting small fly and smaller beetle) and white flax – garden varieties of the blue flowered plant cultivated as the source of linen and linseed oil.
In summer Turner’s Field in the Smestow Valley Nature Reserve becomes a mass of rosebay willowherb. Bees and other nectar-gathering insects love it.
Bistort grows in damp places. The flowers of the wild plant most often seem to be red, at least locally. The pictures here also include paler, pink and white, flowers. All are from plants growing in the same small area.
Also grown as a garden flower, which has larger, more showy pink flowers.
More large white butterflies, these feeding on flowers in the Sensory Garden at Northycote Farm: a buddleia and a verbena.
Purple loosestrife, its flowers rising almost to waist height. A plant which prefers damp ground – these were growing on a patch of scrub in Baggeridge Country Park.
The large white buttterfly is not a favourite of vegetable gardeners. Their caterpillars are notorious for the damage they do to brassicas (“cabbage whites”).
This adult was feeding on the nectar of a lavender someone had growing in their front garden.