I have a friend who helped to get herself through the first lockdown (in Denmark) by using her daily exercise period to find something and photograph it in enormous detail. She looked at flowers, insects, leaves, buds - and each photo was a small miracle and was shared with her chums across the world. Today I have taken a leaf out of her book and have details of two natural things that have brought me a certain joy.
People go on about lichen being rare, delicate and a sign of good, clean air. As some of these are scientists, I guess I have to believe them. Clearly the lichen in our garden is a mutant version, as a large quantity has chosen to colonise one of the plastic chairs in the garden, is growing away strongly and is pretty well impossible to remove, even with a pressure washer and a scouring pad. Why would I want to remove it? Well, I'm not so keen on sitting on lichen as it also marks your clothes quite badly (it is purely a nightmare that it would start to colonise my jeans as well, but someone might want to make a Dr Who script out of that).
That's the chair leg, and this is the chair back.
I've shared a couple of photos trying to show the joy of spindle berries, but today I found some that I could get up close and personal to, and these do show the colours and the shapes. My mother in law remembered seeing great banks of spindle berries on the shrubs by the side of the railway line over the Malverns, taking her and her sister to the school in Herefordshire they were evacuated to. We tried to buy and plant spindles in her garden in London, but they were never as prolific as the wild ones here around us.
Finally I did promise another racoon photo on a Sunday. Here is a photo of Rachel the Racoon, another of the critters fed by a friend of a friend in the States. Isn't she gorgeous?
Comments