A very hungry caterpillar eating away at a blue alkanet. This individual will have hatched some time last summer from one of the eggs laid by a scarlet tiger moth, a brightly coloured day-flying moth.
The caterpillar survived the winter in some safe and snug niche. It re-emerged in April for a final feeding up. It’s now disappeared again to metamorphose, shortly to reappear as one of this year’s adult moths.
Some horse chestnuts have red flowers, rather than the usual off-white ones. They’re still arranged in candelabra.
They can sometimes be spotted, like this one, in large domestic gardens. It’s also keeping an eye out for them in parks; there’s a row of three in Bantock Park.
The flowers on horse chestnut trees are distinctive in growing in conical formation on stems which rise upward from the twigs of the tree. The elaborate arrangement gets the name candelabra (singular candelabrum).
Marsh marigolds, or kingcups. A buttercup species with plus-sized flowers, which are all the more striking for growing in clumps in damp places.
Cow parsley is one of the first umbellifers to flower each spring, and often grows in clumps along hedgerows.
A dandelion flowering by the path in the Smestow Valley Nature Reserve. On the flower, a common nettle-tap moth was quite active as it probed down for nectar.