Claraisreading 🌿💙📚📚

@claramay

books, wildflowers, pond plants

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Claraisreading 🌿💙📚📚@claramay· 8h

Plants with quirky #CommonNames for #WildflowerHour this week include Bacon and Eggs (Common Birds-Foot Trefoil) in a field after a hay cut, and Nipplewort (Lapsana communis, I had to look that up) with just a couple of flowers still yellow. (Also went looking for Bastard Balm - all shrivelled up.)

Little yellow flowers in short brown grass

Skeleton branches and seed of a Nipplewort plant, with just one or two tiny yellow flowers still just about in flower. Spindle tree and sedges behind.

Claraisreading 🌿💙📚📚@claramay· 1d

Finding Albion: Zakia Sewell’s Wheel of the Year Myth and Folklore book, an expansive exploration, and a very enjoyable read

Front cover of ‘Finding Albion’ by Zakia Sewell, ‘Myth, Folklore and the quest for a Hidden Britain’. Green background. Longlisted for the Womens Prize non-fiction category - deservedly: it’s excellent

Claraisreading 🌿💙📚📚@claramay· 3d

Two post about swifts arriving next to each other this morning

Claraisreading 🌿💙📚📚@claramay· 7d

A surprising find for #WildflowerHour - a late flowering Meadowsweet - spotted while collecting seed from all the other Meadowsweet plants

Unusually for August, the fluffy creamy white flowers of Meadosweet, growing by a pond, large Sedge in the background.
Must have been mown, broken, or eaten, back in the spring, and has only just come up to flower

Claraisreading 🌿💙📚📚@claramay· 13d

Seed collecting, Carex remota - a handy small tussock forming sedge that will grow in shade, foliage a bright shade of green, and ridiculously long bracts:

On a white background, seed heads of Carex remota, Remote Sedge, a UK native found in damp woodlands. The seeds are arranged in bunches* close to the stem, and the long bracts grow out from the stem at the nodes where the seeds are.

*not a technical/botanical term. I believe they are spikelets. See Francis Rose’s book Grasses, Sedges, Rushes and Ferns

Claraisreading 🌿💙📚📚@claramay· 14d

Tattered Bookswap copy I happened to find and read a couple of years ago: Very much enjoyed it. One of those books - writers ? - that is unlike anything else!

Battered paperback copy of Robertson Davies's Deptford Trilogy

Claraisreading 🌿💙📚📚@claramay· 19d

Old photo of two people having tea outside a tea shop

I'm sorry I don't have a source to credit for this picture, I saved it from Bluesky in case I ever wanted to talk to somebody about tea

Claraisreading 🌿💙📚📚@claramay· 28d

A few Marsh Thistles #StillFlowering for #WildflowerHour. Love the rich colour. Also lots of seed – Last year I grew some from seed and I have now got a pot full of very prickly seedlings. Hmmm.

Some Thistle flowers which are a lovely deep cerese pink colour, and some very fluffy Seed

Claraisreading 🌿💙📚📚@claramay· 28d

#StillFlowering for this week's #WildflowerHour - Common Birdsfoot Trefoil in a field corner. Many plants here have mostlyyellow flowers, but this plant shows why it's called 'bacon and eggs' - the flowers are yellow and red:

Little red and yellow flowers and groups of Little rounded leaves, in short grass

Claraisreading 🌿💙📚📚@claramay· 28d

From Grey Ghosts and Voices by May Wedderburn Cannan:

Extract from Grey Ghosts and Voices, autobiography of May Wedderburn Cannan.
“..Iwas at Fowey for a time while mother went to my sister. "O" was very tired. He had been lecturing to enormous audiences at Cambridge, driving himself to give his brilliant best (and it "killed thought a little" so he welcomed it) and in January had written to me "the supply of chairs gave out and some so young men and women seated themselves on the floor. It was a quaint sight and made me feel like some old boy of the middle ages with his disciples sitting at his feet." In December he had given a public Lecture in the Haymarket in London to "an audience of 800, and another 250 turned away." Now I found him with his Art of Reading in proof and beginning work on the index. His eyes were troubling him so I took my courage in both hands and took it away from him saying that I could do indexes; my father had said so, and was grateful and
proud that he let me. There was so little that one could do. We worked on the "Farm" rowing across the harbour among the big ships in the red boat, and in the quiet chilly evenings sat over the fire with the logs crackling (and he came in one evening and said what fool had sawn all the logs for his study too long, and it was me), with the tall oil lamps lighting our books; and sometimes friends came in for bridge and he would welcome them, and then saying "this is no place for you, child," carry me off to his small Library at the end of the passage; candle-lit, eight in a row on the big table in the window where he worked - I would read or write, and presently he would get up and walk up and down the room talking about whatever he was working on, or sit a little with me
by the fire. We had two griefs now to share.“

Claraisreading 🌿💙📚📚@claramay· Jun 21

Study in pink and blue

Seaside sunset, with a pink and blue sky, and a pink and blue beach hut

Claraisreading 🌿💙📚📚@claramay· Jun 21

No idea whereabouts in the field the Tragopogon is, until it flowers - or indeed until it seeds! What a spectacular seedhead: #WildflowerHour

Pasture with some buttercups and a spherical seed head of goats beard.
The leaves are linear and grass like so don’t really show up

bigger than dandelion seed, fewer seed on the head too, each much more robust - not very like dandelion at all really but has the same spherical clock format

Claraisreading 🌿💙📚📚@claramay· Jun 21

The Birdsfoot Trefoil is spectacular this year: #WildflowerHour

Pasture with an area about 2’ across carpeted in little yellow flowers, Common Birdsfoot Trefoil. There’s a hedge in the background and hills in the distance

Closer up - another spreading plant of common Birdsfoot Trefoil - a nitrogen fixing wildflower with yellow flowers

Claraisreading 🌿💙📚📚@claramay· May 29

Stop reading and go to sleep! This is very good: #nowreading (following The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and Agnes Grey, both by Anne Brontë) finally reading Take Courage: Anne Brontë and the art of Life, by Samantha Ellis

A blue book cover with a portrait of Anne Brontë on the front:
Take Courage: Anne Bronte and the Art of Life by Samantha Ellis

Claraisreading 🌿💙📚📚@claramay· May 25

Skylark! No, I can't see it either, but you can hear it alright

Claraisreading 🌿💙📚📚@claramay· May 24

All in red and gold this evening for the #WildflowerHour #WildFlowerShow: a great swathe of Meadow Buttercup in an old meadow; a dense stand of Red Campion, and a satisfying patch of Common Bird’sfoot Trefoil in the evening sun, complete with Small Tortoiseshell Butterfly

Old pasture looking golden with Meadow Buttercups; woods behind

Lots of deep pink flowers crowded together, on tall stalks,
with ferns, sedges and trees behind

Common Bird’sfoot Trefoil - they are little yellow flowers, some with a reddish tint here and there, growing in short grass, and a patterned butterfly in orangey brown with black and white blotches was flitting around enjoying the flowers very much

Claraisreading 🌿💙📚📚@claramay· May 18

Claraisreading 🌿💙📚📚@claramay· May 17

Thyme-leaved Speedwell Veronica serpyllifolia, performing nicely for the #WildflowerHour theme this week of #tinyplants

A very small plant with very small leaves

Little Veronica flower on a tall stalk – all of 3 inches

Claraisreading 🌿💙📚📚@claramay· May 16

Looking up Orobanche aka Broomrapes for a friend who is working in the Channel Islands:

Photo of a Broomrape looking very purple - they are parasitic - photo was sent by someone in Channel Islands

Old favourite wildflower book by Rev Keble Martin. Still a go-to text for all sorts of things. Open at Plate 60 Orobanchaceae

Claraisreading 🌿💙📚📚@claramay· May 11

Tree trunk in a hedgebank surrounded by greenery

Claraisreading 🌿💙📚📚@claramay· May 10

The first flowers I've seen this year of Common Vetch, Vicia sativa, in a patch of rough grass adjacent to a Farmyard. #WildflowerHour #carrotsandpeas

Common Vetch - two bright pink flowers amongst long grass

Claraisreading 🌿💙📚📚@claramay· May 3

#WildflowerHour Every year, in the woods by the brook, this little Wild Garlic plant comes up in a hole in the horizontally leaning trunk of a Small Leaved Lime tree:

A mossy tree branch with a hole in it, and a wild garlic plant - leaves and white starry flowers - growing in the hole. Woodland floor in the background. The leaning trunk is 2 or 3 foot above the ground.

Claraisreading 🌿💙📚📚@claramay· Apr 20

Lots of St Mark's Flies about the last couple of days - hedge & damp pasture – no, they don't show up in this picture but this is where they were!

The side of a Hawthorn hedge, greening up nicely, against a bright blue sky

Claraisreading 🌿💙📚📚@claramay· Apr 19

It's getting dark, so for my last-minute #WildflowerHour photos the camera flash is in paparazzi mode. Here are this evening's stars of the woods: Bluebells, Carex sylvatica, and a bank of Wild Garlic and Wood Anemones

Claraisreading 🌿💙📚📚@claramay· Apr 15

Malvern

Claraisreading 🌿💙📚📚@claramay· Apr 12

Nipping in at the end of #WildflowerHour #WoodlandPlants with a white Bluebell and the first of the local Wild Garlic

Circle of starry white flowers amongst bright green leaves - wild garlic flowers opening in sunlight

Just like an ordinary blue bluebell, but occasionally there's a white one

Claraisreading 🌿💙📚📚@claramay· Mar 26

Some great examples of community food projects here: an uplifting read – justfact.co.uk/projects/

Community food project in East London, photo from the Just FACT report https://justfact.co.uk/projects/

Claraisreading 🌿💙📚📚@claramay· Mar 25

Diagonal daffodils in the shops again: