Of course pedants would say that a weed is only a plant in the wrong place, so perhaps this should be called a rather less provocative "in praise of wild flowers"? Whatever, looking through the photos of the week, many of them are of flowers, not all in the right place, not deliberately sown or planted in most cases, but all looking too gorgeous at the moment. Suddenly the weather has gone spectacularly nice, even those days forecast to be wet and horrid were only grey and mildly disappointing. The forecast for the week to come is spectacular, so as soon as this is written and launched, we are getting the abri cover out so that sitting in the garden is a real thing and a pleasure.
Anyway, here is the first of this week's pin ups - probably a lady orchid, and the best it has looked for perhaps 6 years, as in 2020 it was deformed and lopsided and hasn't really done well since then.
An unsung hero of pretty weeds is the speedwell, often overlooked, but the intensity of this patch in the Orchard is really rather pleasing.
On Easter Monday, we made a pilgrimage to the One Acre Wood to admire the new leaves on the trees and see how the ponds were doing. The upper one was alive with "things", probably baby newts, the lower one was quiet and neither had much water. Up at the top, where we leave our car, there were lots of wood violets.
Further down in the Wood, the lily of the valley were up and in flower. It is traditional to give sprigs of these lovely flowers to friends on the first of May, but I think most will be over by then, given the weather conditions.
There are some cultivated areas, with this bed full of non-flowering broad beans, young peas, onions and some rather slug damaged pumpkin plants. I hope we will have food from some of them, but I am starting to despair with the broad beans.
That bed is overlooked by one of our bird boxes. It is inhabited - I have spent a lot of time this last week watching two great tits flying a relay between any good sources of grubs and yucky things and the box, and today the babies were definitely screaming to be fed a lot of the time. If all goes well, I guess they will fledge in a couple of weeks and perhaps then there will be a second use of the box.
We had a visitor in the courtyard yesterday - damaged, so probably dropped there by a cat or a bird, but still able to wriggle around and look threatening. John got his litter picker out and took it over the road to the long grass, in theory so that our cats did not find it and play with it. Rare and protected, but not from other wildlife or cats!!
So that is it for this week. It has been challenging getting the photos to load up, I think all part of a cunning plan to get us to change our broadband line for a fibre one. It isn't helped by the age of my computer or running a version of Windows that Microsoft would prefer I didn't, either. A project for another month I think!
Have a good week!
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