Category: David

Within the enclosed space which forms the Cathedral Close at Canterbury, the gardens displayed a variety of flowers. A lone pyramidal orchid was flowering in the middle of one of the lawns of the cathedral itself.

The yellow-flowered red hot poker, a variant I’d never even heard of before, was in a garden on the other side of the ring road. Everything else here was within the precinct.

Purple salsify is another species I’d never heard of before. Around the west midlands salsify is quite a common wild flower – jack go to bed at noon, with yellow flowers which close around mid-day. This garden plant was my first introduction to the purple species. A few days later, I noticed it was one of the many plants growing as a wild flower on the Rye Harbour Nature Reserve (pictures soon).

Stinking iris seemed to be quite a popular choice in the parks and gardens we came across around Canterbury. One had a plant with flowers which had crinkled petals: a hybrid of some kind.

The Great Stour as it flows through Canterbury. Most pictures were taken in the popular Westgate Gardens – the West Gate can be seen in one shot, with a bed of canterbury bells flowering in the foreground. At least one view is of another arm of the river from the quieter Greyfriars Gardens.

This spiky plant, native only far to the south of the African continent, was flowering and flourishing by one of the lawns of Canterbury Cathedral, and immediately caught the eye.

The old churches in the former Cinque Ports of Rye and Winchelsea are built at the highest points of their respective towns. They’re surrounded by a lot of space for churchyards: in Rye that also extends to a street leading to an open space by the Ypres Tower.

All that makes the areas ideal territory for jackdaws, which were stalking the two churchyards blithely ignoring any people passing close by.

I’ve not seen a single duckling in the West Midlands this year, mainly because I’ve not been near the right bodies of water. But a brief visit to the south east more than made up for that.

The Great Stour running through Canterbury passes through Westgate Gardens, a popular and flowery public park. Every few yards along this stretch of the river there was a female mallard with her clutch of ducklings, each clutch at a different stage of growth.