Coat of arms of Edmund Lacey, Bishop of Exeter 1420 — 1455, in the porch of St Mary’s Church, Totnes. Portrayed are three spoonbills. A Victorian stained glass windown in the church also has the coat of arms, but with the birds misidentified as ducks; shovellers to be precise.
Deodar, a type of cedar native to the Himalayas, has impressively large cones. These, with a ladybird passenger on one, were on a mature riverside tree in the Bancroft Gardens, Stratford on Avon.
Time for gardeners and those of a sensitive disposition to look away. Large white butterfly caterpillars showing why the species is also known as the cabbage white. They had gone some way to finishing off the leaves of all the cabbages in the vegetable garden of Mary Arden’s Farm.
Large white butterflies, also known as cabbage whites, several flying around over the vegetable garden at Mary Arden’s Farm in late August. One had even flown in through the open door of the house, and was vainly trying to get out through a closed window.
I went rather overboard taking pictures of the mangalitza piglets on Mary Arden’s farm. Both the sows on the farm had litters earlier this year. Those of the young still on the farm were half-grown at the time of my visit, but each one seemed to have a distinct personality.
One of the two mangalitza pig sows on Mary Arden’s farm at Wilmcote. This is a Hungarian breed of pigs, very distinctive in appearance and in character.
Supposed to give a good impression of how some pigs may have looked in the Warwickshire countryside some four-hundred-odd years ago when Shakespeare’s mother or the bard himself were around.