Wolves Wild

Hawthorn flowers also known as may blossom, so the bushes should be covered with it about now.

View from a footbridge over the river Worfe (just visible in the foreground) towards an old mill and its millpond.

Rindleford is the last settlement on the Worfe before it joins the Severn near Bridgnorth. Originally a hamlet for millers and farmers: several of the buildings, constructed from stone quarried nearby, now seem to have undergone barn-conversion type transformation to up-market housing.

Pink cherry blossom on a tree in Bantock Park, seen against a blue spring sky.

This female orange tip butterfly was just yards away from the male featured in a post yesterday. For me, proximity to one or more males is the easy way of telling the female from one of the whites.

I think that the green tinge shown on the underwing here is because it is being lit by light reflected off the leaves – the darker green pattern normally shows against a white background.

Red (or perhaps more accurately pink) dead nettle flowering, for comparison with the white dead nettle which featured the day before yesterday.

Like them, this one was growing by the verge of one of the quiet lanes between Wolverhampton and Bridgnorth.

Orange tip butterflies are one of the commoner hedgerow butterflies around April / May, when their preferred food plant, jack by the hedge, is heading for the flowering season.

Only the males have the distinctive orange tip to the wing.

Umbellifer on the edge of Church Pool at Badger when its floret was just about to open.

Swan sailing on the West Park lake. Its wings are raised, and the neck held back against the body: a threat posture.

Dead nettles are plants with a general shape and leaves which look rather similar to nettles. But they aren’t related, and don’t sting – that’s why they’re “dead”.

Their flowers always come in a contrasting colour to the rest of the plant, unlike true nettles. Some are red, some, like these, white.

Japanese acer and magnolia in front of Bantock House.

The red leaves of the acer contrast with the colours of the other tree: the green leaves and the white petals, on high as well as carpeting the ground.

Lone periwinkle growing among the nettles and other vegetation under the hedge on the verge of a quiet country lane not far from Bridgnorth.

Bedraggled bee clinging tightly to the leaf of a borage or similar. Plant and insect were both drying out after overnight rain.