never can tell

These mushrooms have appeared in our paddock. As far as I know this is the first time they have appeared. It is very hard to identify mushrooms without some expertise but I think these might be sheathed woodtufts (who knows?). No wonder we don't eat wild mushrooms. There seem to be more mushrooms around this year than for some time so it looks like it may be a good year for fungi.

coal tit

We normally only see coal tits on the bird feeders as they make fleeting visits, usually in pairs. They are in fact birds that like conifer woodlands and this male was singing very loudly in the cedar tree next to our house

sorrel

this very pale pink sorrel has appeared in our garden where an old privet hedge was grubbed out last year. It is far too late to be wood sorrel, so it may be pale pink sorrel which likes to grow on banks and under hedges, but it is a new species to me. If it is it is yet another introduced species, this time in 1739 from South Africa.

our house

Hate to think it but autumn is here.

hell hound returns

in the same woods lies the entrance to the Excelsior tunnel which leads deep under Kit Hill. It was used in operation Orpheus by the atomic Weapons research agency to test whether explosions could be hidden or disguised from seismographs (hence no doubt the reference to the underworld by some classicist in the Ministry of Defence). For more on this interesting part of local folklore see this link.

deer park woods

just for a change today we went for a walk in Old Deer Park woods (see link SX381724). We came across two invasive species, one of which, mimulus, we quite like, and the other, Japanese knotweed, is regarded as an absolute pest. The Japanese knotweed appears to have displaced the mimulus which is now growing along the course of the small streams in the wood. I am not sure that many of the plants in the woods are truly native, we must have one of the most disturbed and unnatural floras of anywhere in the world.