Wolves Wild

Some of the Chinese pagoda primroses in the Sensory Garden at Northycote Farm,the seeds now starting to ripen. One of the same plants earlier, when it was flowering, here.

Yellow and black pattern of a hoverfly feeding on the yellow flower of a sow thistle.

Wild raspberries, with a lot less drupelets than cultivated varieties, but still looking as tempting as they ripened.

An Esssex skipper butterfly feeding on flowers in the same thistle patch as the small skippers featured earlier today.

The two species can be told apart by the colour of the ends of their antennae. Essex skippers have a black tip, small skippers a duller red/brown one.

Essex skippers were once limited pretty much to East Anglia as the extreme of their European distribution. In more recent years they have been spreading through the English south and midlands, and into Wales.

Small skippers feeding on the nectar of thistle flowers. What long tongues for such little butterflies!

Yellow flowers of dyer’s rocket up the plant’s tall, elegant stem. Now a common weed or wildflower according to taste, the plant was an important source of textile dye until the invention of synthetic alternatives in the Victorian age.