Category: David

Remnants of one of last year’s ferns, growing on the end of a tree stump which was fringed with moss.

Clump of daffodils, just sending up the first flower buds.

Despite appearances, the early March day didn’t have a grey sky with white clouds. The picture’s background is the canal at Castlecroft. The colour of the clouds remains, but the blue of the sky has been lost in the reflection by the water.

Finchfield Brook spends most of its short course in underground culverts. Here it is seen in a section which must be fairly near its source.

It pours out of a pipe to flow by a footpath which runs between between Coppice Road and Finchfield Lane, where it is once again covered up.

Further downstream, the stream is again visible west of the Smestow Valley Railway Walk, as it heads for the place where its waters discharge into the canal and the Smestow Brook.

This winter has been a good one for scarlet elf cups, fungi which grow on dead wood (sometimes buried). There have been at least two or three distinct patches of them in the Smestow Valley Nature Reserve’s Hawthorn Wood.

Views of a conifer in Himley Plantation. Its trunk had been snapped in February’s gales.

Cramp balls are common but often inconspicuous fungi which grow on dead wood. They are also known as King Alfred’s cakes, or as coal fungus.

Cramp balls were used as tinder in traditional fire making, as was the horse’s hoof fungus.

These were on a tree stump by the towpath near Compton Lock.