country lanes

meadowsweet, valerian, foxgloves, hedge bedstraw, wood sage and ferns provide the framework for our lanes. It's well worth clicking on the lane label for this post to get a feel of how the lanes change through the year.

meadowsweet and tufts

meadowsweet (the white one) and tufted vetch (the blue one, and a member of the pea family). Meadow sweet has two distinct fragrances and has been used for centuries to cover floors and make rooms smell sweet. It seems that the name is in fact a corruption of "mede sweet" and it was used to flavour mead. One fragrance is soft, and one is sharp, and this explains another of its names in Yorkshire, courtship and matrimony. What can this be referring to??

The strawberry gateaux in the picture below are the ovaries which will become the seed. I like the intricate shape of the whorls on what will become its very distinctive seed.

another day in the hammock

the meadows were very damp yesterday morning and we all got soaked by the knee high grasses. These little chaps were just taking it very easy waiting for lunch to drop into their laps.

foxgloves in Downgate

It has been an amazing year for foxgloves. This bank of foxgloves is at the top of Downgate Hill; in the distance is Stoke Climsland Village, and beyond that the sunnier reaches of North Cornwall.

bedstraw

Kit Hill is covered now in a small, white flowered plant, heath bedstraw, a relative of woodruff and lady's bedstraw. There is a wealth of folklore attached to these plants (for example that the Virgin Mary lay on a bed of lady's bedstraw in Bethlehem because the donkeys had eaten the rest of the fodder) and they have many practical uses, not least of which was to put them in straw mattresses to make them smell sweet(er). Interestingly they also contain significant amounts of coumarin, an effective anticoagulant.

more from the house of hornets

We paid another visit to the Wiffill outhouse of hornet horror to see how things are getting on. As is obvious queen hornets are surprisingly tolerant, but I think this is as close as we are going to get without risking a sting in the tail. Canine habit of snapping at things that buzz may be ill advised in this situation.

This amazing site (German but in English) will tell you all you ever wanted to know about Vespa crabro