After a very slow start to the mothing season, things are finally heating up again in the moth trap.
Last night I got two elephant hawk moths, but they are not the same species.
The first, pink and orange beauty is the small elephant hawk moth – Deilephila porcellus For identification purposes it has wavey lines of colour on the wings.
The second is the elephant hawk Deilephila elpenor with straight demarcations of colour on the wings. It is larger than the first and has the most gloriously exuberant, lipstick pink bum!
It was unusual to see them both on the same day, so I thought I would share them with you, in case you ever want to tell them apart. The name comes from the caterpillar that looks like an elephant’s trunk.
The caterpillars feed mainly on rosebay willowherb (Epilobium angustifolium), but also other plants as well, including bedstraw (Galium)
In French they are petit and grande sphinx de la vigne – sphinx of the vineyard, which is an evocative image improbable image!
We have a few vines in the garden but luckily we are not hot or dry enough to possibly call the garden a vineyard.
The perfume of a flower is as essential to it’s appeal, as is the beauty of its colour and shape; but a great deal harder to share in a blog! Any way I will try to evoke just a few of the perfumes of my garden in July.
Petunias are irresistible summer stalwarts, but too often they are utterly with out scent. It seems only purple petunias are perfumed (try saying that fast!) . I have some grown from seed this year that promised perfume and they have not disappointed, being at their strongest in the evening and the deep colour is luminous in the dusk.
Meadow sweet takes its name from its delicious almond perfume. This frothy exuberant wild flower loves a sunny day to pour out its perfume. I have a big clump that flowers at the start of the school holidays and it always smells of intoxicating freedom to me!
Evening primrose, flowers not surprisingly, in the evening and all night long. It has a delicate spicy perfume and is attractive to moths as well as humans. By midday the flowers are shrivelled, but the next evening you can watch a new flower unfurl in front of your eyes.
Mignonette has small sweet scented flowers which soon turn to seeds that will catch on anything passing.
The most powerfully perfumed flowers in the garden today are the Madonna lilies . They produce such a cascade of rich of scent that they stop you in your tracks. You have to stop and inhale the heady wave of gorgeousness . A rose chafer beetle appears to have swooned and is motionless in cocoon of petals.
I have to end with a rose. The unlovely named cabbage roses have the best perfume and there is absolutely nothing to compare with the silky complexity of the scent of a rose . To bury your nose in the Turkish delight of a scented pink rose is luxury indeed!
“… would smell as sweet…” Romeo and Juliet – Shakespeare
I was just looking at the WordPress site of someone who was kind enough to follow my blog and l saw this advert , which I thought I would share with you.
Highly Intelligent AI Generated Articles For Your WordPress Blog.
End of Advert
AI is going to be a feature of our future and it seems even innocent blogs are not immune.
The question of why any one would want to read an AI generated blog , is obviously uppermost; but the much bigger question is why would anyone/anything want to generate one?
The only answer I can see, is to influence the reader without them realising that they are being manipulated. Advertising has attempted to do this for ever and product placement is the staple of modern influencers – so why worry?
Well, the idea that absolutely nothing can be taken as “true” any more; from the voice of a politician to the content of an innocuous blog is profoundly disturbing.
I have no intention of using robots to write this little blog, but it does make me increasingly wary of what I read on WordPress and on other social media sites.
Advertising funds WordPress. I don’t like some adverts that I see when reading blogs, but I can generally ignore them because I am sufficiently interested to see what the writer of the blog has to say.
How long will that last if you don’t know if the writer was even human?!
Greater mullein has huge soft furry leaves and country people put them to good use when “tending to nature” outside.
The flowers are equally impressive and a flowering spike can be 1.5 metres high. The yellow flowers are irresistible to insects of all kinds and provide a sky scraper of food at this time of year.
The leaves are loved by mullein moth caterpillars and they can munch this sturdy plant down in a week. As you may know I love moths, but I will pick these caterpillars off as losing a mullein plant that has taken two years to grow is too much even for me.
They seed into cracks in the pavement and in the middle of the vegetable patch in the autumn. This year I transplanted some in the spring so there was still room for the vegetables, but the two plants I left in situe have grown to epic proportions
…
I am sure they are visited by night pollinators and they are certainly alive with bees and other bugs all day long.
Locally people used the flowers to make a cough medicine that was kept all year to sooth a ticking throat.
When the flowers are long over the stem remains huge and up right to make a perch for the birds in the winter. The dried stems were used as torches to light the darkness in winter and I like to image them flaming in a gloomy medieval castle.
Truly a plant that is useful from the top to the tender bottom!
Boasting is ugly and blowing your own trumpet is a discordant noise, but I am going to do it any way because I want to share my front garden with you.
When we bought our house 14 years ago the front yard was limestone gravel.
It was big enough to park a couple of cars on and was the drive to the garage. So far, so boring. We soon realised that the previous occupants of the house could only have kept it “weed free” by drenching it in herbicides regularly.
I pulled up the odd dandelion thinking I could keep it “it clean” that way, but plants started to appear and I decided they looked better than the bare stones and so I left them. When walking in stony places I collected seed heads and scattered them randomly .
Each year new plants appeared in this hot sunny spot.
There was wild marjoram.
Wild carrot
St John’s wort
Self seeded lavender
Sedum
Tiny pink saxifrage.
Bright pink silène
Yarrow
And then the butterflies and the bees came.
And the bugs .
Just today I identified this plant as is Iranian wood sage, which has taken me years to identify.! It must have blown in as a seed or been dropped by a bird. It flowers all summer and is covered in bees.
And I was astonished by how much life there could be on a stony drive way, when you just let it be.
I do a little judicious weeding at different times to stop it grassing over and I pull out he odd interloper that seems determined to take over; but apart from that I do very little except cutting some down in the winter.
It amazes me every year with its profusion of life and the real reason I am so proud of it is that it exists because I overcame the curse of tidy.
I am retired and definitely grown up, but it has taken me all this time to escape from worrying what the neighbours will think about “ letting it go”. A “ tidy” garden can be a dead garden and mess can be life!
The British pet name for gooseberries is goosegogs and that is what we called them at home. They were rock hard, hairy and green and when stewed with sugar, made a tart pie filling after a family Sunday roast in early summer.
When I planted my own garden here in France I planted a couple of bushes and they thrived in an inconspicuous, thorny kind of a way. I dutifully picked rock hard green gooseberries when I deemed them ready and made pies that my husband would not eat.
One year I was too busy and uninspired to pick them and they ripened to plump, pink fruit that exploded in the mouth with sweetness and zing. My “laziness “ was a revelation: gooseberries were never intended to be eaten unripe. Left to fully ripen and turn the acid into sugar, they are absolutely delicious.
This of course is probably no revelation to most of you, but it was to me!
Picking gooseberries requires real patience and care. The low bushes are loaded with prickles, but as long as you are not in a hurry they can be harvested painlessly. One of the delights is to lift up a low slung scrubby branch and to see that in fact it is groaning with hidden luscious fruit.
My red currants and black currants shout their wares in garish colours, but the gooseberry is far more demure and yet yields more fruit and with less fuss than all the others put together.
Apparently gooseberry bush was slang for a woman’s private parts. Hence the expression “the baby was found under a gooseberry bush!” And I thought it was more to do with the shape of the fruit and a gentleman’s two fruits!
My prickled hands will be making jam tomorrow, but I am also going to try making gooseberry gin, which just involves steeping the fruit in sugar and gin for a few months, rather like making sloe gin, but thankfully available to drink earlier than Christmas!
Bees get the glory, but moths are also key pollinators, study says
By Erin Blakemore Washington Post
Drop of gold moth
Modern gardeners often plant bee-friendly flowers in a bid to attract the pollinators and ensure their long-term survival. But recent research on moths’ role in plant pollination suggests the less-heralded insects are just as important as bees — and hints it might be time to give them the respect they deserve.
Published in the journal Ecology Letters, the study looked at moths and bees in community gardens in Leeds, England, during the 2019 growing season. Bees and moths were collected during May, June and September. Researchers removed pollen from the insects using DNA sequencing to determine what kinds of pollen stuck to the moths and bees during their flights.
Their analysis revealed that the creatures visit different types of plants. While bees were most drawn to brassica crops like cabbage, maple trees and brambling plants, moths visited most often nightshade plants like tomatoes and potatoes, butterfly bushes and linden trees.
They also play a larger role in pollination than once thought: The researchers discovered that moths are involved in the pollination of redcurrants, strawberries and stone fruit, preferences they say were not previously known to be moth-pollinated. The moths carried more diverse pollen than the bees during the midsummer, accounting for a third of all plant-pollinator visits studied.
Mullein caterpillar
“People don’t generally appreciate moths so they can often be overlooked compared to bees when talking about protection and conservation,” said Emilie Ellis, a University of Helsinki doctoral researcher who was a co-author on the paper while working at the University of Sheffield’s Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures, in a news release.
It’s becoming apparent that there needs to be a much more focused effort to raise awareness of the important role moths play in establishing healthy environments, especially as we know moth populations have drastically declined over the past 50 years,” Ellis said.
That population loss could present a “significant and previously unacknowledged threat” to pollination of both wild and crop plants, the researchers noted. They said conservation efforts should target both bees and moths and take into consideration that moths seem to prefer wild plants.
These “important, but overlooked” insects may be more sensitive to urbanization than bees, the researchers said — all the more reason to include them in conservation plans.
I bought a lot of seeds this spring in an attempt to cut down on bedding plants grown in plastic pots.
My results have been mixed. Things grow so slowly for an inpatient woman and I have succumbed to buying a few pots of already flowering plants to brighten a garden table or planter.
My Colis seedlings are coming on, but they all seem to be yellow instead of the red variegated ones that I wanted. The scented petunias are finally flowering , but are very small. The nasturtiums are ramping away and about to flower . My zinnias and straw flowers were too long in the seed tray and are a knotted mass of un plantable seedlings that are devoured by slugs as soon as I water them .
However one great success has been my blue grass pea: Lathyrus azureus.
I was seduced by the information that they are the same type of seeds that were found in the tomb of Tutankhamen, so I bought some.
The fat seeds germinated easily and were put out in a planter in front of the garage that gets maximum heat and sun.
The flowers are small but a beautiful blue with un expected pink lips.
Each day they flower again and even the bees like them!
While watering them, I spotted my cat almost completely hidden in the grass, apparently guarding the post box.
As a link to my last post “Getting your eye in” see if you can spot him too!
Sunshine has arrived with all the shouting and hupla that comes with it. The music is playing, the kids are in the pool and the motorbikes roar by.
To avoid the brightness and the pollen we go a little higher up, to where our village land touches Switzerland. There are deep cool woods up there and when your eyes adjust to the low light, there are orchids.
Cephalanthera damasonium
White orchids show up against the dark most clearly. The large flowers of a white helleborine orchid Cephalanthera damasonium are easiest to see. The plants grow individually in the forest shade.
The greater butterfly orchid ( Platanthera chlorantha) is surprisingly tall for a European orchid . There are a pair of binoculars on the ground to give some sense of scale. The flowers are small and the petals flare out like butterfly wings, but the stem is tall and the plants cluster in clumps in a few places under the trees.
The hardest of all to spot is the bird’s nest orchid. It is all brown with a little yellow in the centre of the flower. It has no green leaves at all and takes nine years to mature from a minute seed in the forest soil. Once you get your eye in they are surprisingly frequent in the beech wood, easily mistaken for upright twigs or dried out seed heads from the year before. They derive all they need from the soil and the fungi strung out through it and have dispensed entirely with photosynthesis. The name is derived from the tangled roots that look like a bird’s nest.
It’s odd what you see when you finally get your eye in!
When all watchfulness is gone, when their plump furry bodies surrender to warmth and each paw stretches out to a quiet afternoon; then all is right with the world.
A warm cat exudes liquid contentment. So much is noise and fuss and nothingness that when a cat falls properly asleep on your sofa, the fractious and jarring world is settled safely for just a delicious, silent moment.
After a long, cold spring the moths are really back at long last.
My moth trap has been so empty this spring that I was beginning to despair, but it is not extinction emergency, just cool, wet weather. With temperatures suddenly in the twenties the moths are reappearing in my moth trap. They are all weeks late, but better late than never!
Here are some from the last two days:
Buff tip. The perfect broken twig camouflage.Oak hook tip named for the shape of his wings and the food plant of choice.Poplar grey – obviously!Pale willow beauty ( I think!) markings like a frown.Chocolate tip. Looks good enough to eat!?
I have always been fascinated by how houses age like people and how they are renewed .
I find the skeletal bones of decaying houses beautiful. Like nature they are transient : sometimes persisting for years and sometimes felled by a storm overnight.
My own house in Wales was flattened one night by an oak tree toppled in a summer storm.
The tree through the roof.Rebuilding in Wales!
In my village in France I have seen many old houses and barns fall down from age and neglect. My sentimental nature wants to leave them in their ravaged beauty, but I try to remember how when my own house was destroyed, I couldn’t wait for the builders to put it back together again and to make the uninhabitable: a home again.
The house over the road has been falling into disrepair since its elderly owners died. It was sold, but left untouched for a few years.
It had to happen that the house was knocked down. A delicate machine picked the fabric apart and now the diggers are excavating a basement / cave for the new house that will be build . The kestrels that nested in the eves have moved out and are calling to one another as they look for a new nest site. The barns that were attached to the old house are still standing. Maybe they will nest there in a few years time.
I am sure there were bats in the roof and mice and voles made it their home too, but change is the nature of life. I watched the house decay, I have seen it demolished, now I look forward to the new house and the family who will call it home again.
When I was younger, people laughed at Prince Charles for talking to plants and for taking a profound interest in ecology. It would appear he was right all along. He was right to care about the health of his country side and of the planet; he wasn’t weird he was simply far sighted and everybody else is just catching up with his way of thinking!
To celebrate his coronation as King Charles III , I am just sharing the wild plants that are flowering in my garden today. I have shop bought exotic flowers that I also love, but these photos are all of native flowers that I have not weeded or herbicided or mown flat in the profoundly mistaken belief that “ tidy” is good in anyway.
I like to think that the new King would approve of this season.
Daisies from the lawn (Bellis perennis.) The simplest and sweetest.Eye bright ( Euphrasia sp) so delicate in the grass, gained its name from its obvious medicinal properties.Spindle bush (Euonymus europaeus) ( just about to flower) with ladybird eating aphids. The strong wood was used to making spinning spindles.Bugle, ( Ajuga reptans) lovely sturdy pyramids of flowers just waiting for the lawn mower to give them a chance!Dog wood. ( Cornus sanguinea) Full of life in spring summer and autumn.Dandelion. ( Taraxacum officinale) The first food for the bees in spring and later the seed feeds birds when there is little else in the way of seeds to eat in the springGermander speedwell. ( Veronica chamaedrys) so blue it takes your breath away , when you put away the mower for a while.Wild strawberries. (Fragaria vesca) Tiny to pick as a fruit, but the taste is sensational!Hawthorn or May ( Crataegus laevigata)- a hundred time better than leyland for a hedge. The smell is intoxicating and the berries feed the autumn birds.Purple Vetch – Vicia sepium (bees love it)Wild columbines (Aquilegia vulgaris) just waiting for some sun to open around the sun dial!Jack – to – bed – at- noon. ( named because it only flowers in the morning). The leaves are long and thin – the rosette of leaves is from hawksbit that will make flower soon.A Roman snail on the gravel drive. Speedy is not always best as Charles’ wait for the throne shows! To celebrate a Green King
My young neighbour is spraying weed killer all around his house, I can hear the swish of the hand pump and soon all will be a yellow kill zone . Weeds and all the creatures they support are dirty and wants his new house to be “clean” and dead.
The kite is restless, she is quartering low over the gardens, her tail fanned out in the uplift of a moment’s sunshine after so much rain.
Sitting under the covered patio a cold wind blows away the perfume of the cherry tree and the rain slides off the white petals
A black redstart investigates last years nest in the rafters. Her mate crackles electric pulses of encouragement from the roof top, but she thinks it too cold a spot for this spring and keeps looking.
A break in the clouds!
The dog wood is suddenly green with new leaves against the red stems and in the shelter of the new bounty, a black cap sings out his heart, throwing notes and trying trills between the rain drops. It is black again and the rain drums down marooning me in the abri
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Blue tits and great tits continue to burr back and forth to the seed feeders. One crashed into the window today is his desperation to feed. I found him apparently lifeless and tiny jewelled perfection on the step. As I moved towards him, a upturned claw twitched and I saw he was only stunned. A few minutes of safety from the cats in a up turned paper basket and he was restarted , restored and back in the tree.
There is a chiff chaff calling and a flight of crows scrambled indignantly from their nests to ward off a pair of ravens down from the forest hungrily looking for nestlings. The woodpecker has finally discovered the fat balls.
Spring in all its noisy urgency is not deterred by a little rain and neither should I !
Spring has been spluttering along here between cloud bursts and wind – very bracing and British.
Thinking of Britain, there is memorial in the woods just over the border in Switzerland to the worse plane crash on Swiss soil that happened exactly 50 years ago.
://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-somerset-65206551.
In an April snow storm ( always the worst here) a plane from Bristol, full mainly of ladies on their way to Basel, crashed into a hill very close to the airport and broke apart, killing 108 people. 55 children from a small area around Bristol lost their mothers that day. The women were from a ladies’ club going sightseeing in what they imagined would be lovely spring weather.
50 years later, this spring is slow but there are some stars out.
My favourite very early flower is golden saxifrage. The opposite leaved golden saxifrage like damp spots in the woods and seems particularly to enjoy the runnels left in wet places where the felled tree trunks have been stored before being hauled away. It is unassuming and the leaves and petals seem the same colour, but it’s flattened face is open to the first sunshine to filter through the canopy of bare trees.
The wet runnels are also favorite place for frogs to lay their eggs. These eggs have hatched and the tadpoles are eating the soft shell as a first meal. If you enlarge the photo you can see the dark wriggling mass of new tadpoles.
Further along the wet woodland edge is the unmistakable spring star: the big yellow marsh marigold flower. This is a very large buttercup with a bright gleam. It has many folk names and my favourite is bachelors’ buttons which I assume comes from the similarity of the well polished buttons of a hopeful young man to the round bright yellow buds of the unopened flower.
Roads are dug up, tram tracks are relaid and hotels and office blocks are eaten in moments and replaced by higher and more horrible sky scrapers before the coffee is even cold.
Amidst all this renewal, the oddest places survive.
There is a ribbon shop, long and thin between the noodle bars and the watch shops, that looks like it belongs to a gentler time. In the window are lace making bobbins and buttons and thread and fasteners of makes that are no longer made. There are tiny drawers of pear buttons and pins and needles that someone sometimes opens.
There are reels and reels of ribbons that were made to dress a bonnet or trim a child’s dress in dusty spools, that look like discarded films. And yet they are the bed rock of this city.
The silk ribbon trade required coloured dyes to make the ribbons beautiful and the dying trade founded the chemicals that brought the chemists that made the drugs that founded the pharmaceutical companies that built the sky scrapers that ruined the city.
It is only a matter of time before the last remaining Basel ribbon shop becomes a coffee shop, where influencers can blog about their authenticity in an endlessly reinvented city by the Rhine.
What we choose to do with the little (or big if we are lucky!) bit of land we call garden , really does matter and the absolute worse thing we can do is kill it with concrete or tarmac.
I am really pleased that water companies are recognising how important it is to just let the rain fall on soil, even if you aren’t growing anything wonderful for wildlife in the soil. The rain goes down and is ends up in the water table, slowly percolating through the soil. It is a very small thing we can do. I call it avoiding ” the curse of tidy” but it makes a big difference to the health of the planet.
Some are tiny, some are huge. Some are quick and some are slow, but they each carry within them all the information they need to make everything from an oak tree to a tiny daisy.
Seeds are germinating all around us in the earth, but the ones on my window sill are the most keenly awaited in my world and I stare at the eye level miracle with obsessive greed.
It snowed this morning, but my blue peas are germinating nonetheless. I am growing them because apparently they are the same species as were found in the tomb of the pharaoh Tutankhamen. The flower is bright blue and I have no idea if the pea is even edible. The ancient Egyptians buried their rulers with gold, but they also ensured that they included seeds : the real wealth of life.
The root is pushing down into the soil as we speak and the shoot has already emerged, with the shape of the leaves to come stamped upon the stem.
Cathy's real country garden 
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