David

Buglosses are a group of flowers related to borage. The plant itself is sturdy, with stiff “hairs” to discourage animals from eating it.

The pale blue flowers seem disproportionately small (at least to me) for such a tall plant.

It’s quite common near to canal towpaths locally, and flowers for most of the summer and autumn.
This one, by the lower end of the Birmingham Canal, still  had lots of flowers earlier this month.

Meadowsweet seems to like a setting right by the canals locally: between the towpath and the water.

This one was still in flower recently

A line of close-planted leylandii create a near-sterile zone around their base, in part because the debris they shed acts as an effective growth-inhibiting mulch.

The mushrooms poking through this debris here are an agaric species, as indicated by the ring on the one in the picture above, which had been disturbed to show at least part of the stem.

Bedraggled and barely open sow thistle flowers on a plant near Compton lock on a gloomy day earlier in October.

Where the web of this garden cross spider was against the background of the sky, it didn’t register in this picture, making it look like the spider was levitating.

Autumn colours a few days ago from one of the beech trees by the paddling pool on Tettenhall Upper Green.

Pictures showing the range of colours the leaves of Japanese acers can take in the autumn.

All of the trees shown here are beside paths connecting the south and west gates of West Park, passing via the front of the tearooms – a walk of a couple of hundred yards.

All the pictures were taken yesterday or the day before. Hurry to catch views like these before the wind brings all the leaves down.

Can you spot the squirrel which was watching me from under one of the trees?

Otherwise known as an echinops.

This one grows regularly by the footpath entrance to the Smestow Valley Railway Walk from Alpine Way, Compton.

This picture of a rather ragged michaelmas daisy was taken, by coincidence, on Michaelmas (St Michael’s day, September 29th).

I made a recent visit to the Shropshire countryside to see if there were any new fungi for the autumn. But all I managed to spot was that these sandy stiltballs were still going strong.