Wolves Wild

It was a couple of days after the Diamond Jubilee long weekend. A floral display on the terrace of the Black Swan (aka Dirty Duck) in Stratford on Avon had obviously been designed to have a colour theme to fit the festivities.

The weather was rainy and windy, more like autumn than early summer. The white petunias didn’t appear to like the conditions, and had closed up so they were hard to spot.

But the water drops remaining on the plants and the diffused lighting added drama to those flowers which were out. I like photo opportunities when I am sitting comfortably with a nice pint in front of me.

This bee was out early one morning a couple of weeks ago gathering nectar from chives flowering in one of the city’s allotments.

Some grains of pollen can already be seen sticking to it.

The flower usually looks somewhat like a small dandelion growing on stems which can reach a couple of feet. The white filaments for dispersing the seeds over the breeze are at first glance like a dandelion clock. Get nearer, and they appear finer and silkier than dandelion parachutes.

These plants, on the outskirts of Worfield, had outer petals which were a paler yellow colour. Normally the entire flower is the colour of the inner portion here.

On a walk through Cotwall End LNR towards the end of May I spotted these crowds of day-flying moths which had antennae much longer than their bodies. Every so often they would settle on whichever set of nearby leaves were about waist height.

Most of the groups were under trees which put them into deep shade. This group was the exception: they were in a clearing with a nettle patch by the path. The pictures don’t do justice to the iridescence of their wings and bodies.

They are male longhorn moths, probably Adela reaumurella as far as I can tell.

The top of a flowering nettle in the midday sun.

Flowers from four adjacent bushes by one of the entrances to West Park.

The gardens of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford on Avon mainly feature plants which would have featured in Elizabethan/Jacobean gardens. The pictures here were taken in Hall’s Croft, the house of Shakespeare’s eldest daughter and her husband.

At the centre of the lawn at Hall’s Croft is a medlar: a tree once grown for its fruit, which are now a culinary rarity. This flower was already beginning to go over.

These are unripe mulberries

These are flowers of the holm oak, an evergreen. It probably didn’t feature in Stratford gardens during Shakespeare’s lifetime – it is originally from the Mediterranean, and most likely introduced into Britain in the seventeenth century.

The snail was eating as much as possible before the sun warmed everything up.

The foam of “cuckoo spit” is the protective cover for the nymphs of froghoppers – the name describes the habit of the adult insects in jumping from plant to plant. Overnight rain had left a drop of water hanging from the foam, forming a minute lens.

The male and female flowers grow on different plants. I don’t know which these are.

A common butterfly on hot days in spring, but normally hard to photograph. Usually very flighy, heading off at even a distant human approach.

This one settled to feed where I was already standing looking for other subjects, and then spend some minutes feeding, giving me views of it from various angles.

Wings from above and edge-on; its incredibly furry-looking body, long antennae and, in some pictures, seemingly even longer tongue probing flowers.

This is a male – the females lack the orange mark on each wing.