BB FANS

cc that looks really good.

We have a patio on the bottom lawn so you are away from the house and by the middle of the summer we should be hidden by Buddleias.


The other two have lots of colour at different times of the year.

This is a recent picture of the middle lawn


And this is the top lawn along with my little satellite dish in the corner. Again the level of colour varies through out the year.

I'd send a pic of my window-box, but it ain't very impressive

Its got daffs in, or did have anyway, and a red flower, not sure what it is, it may be a weed

Don't have many summer pictures, only the frogs which I posted in the spring thread which were actually taken at the end of summer lol!

Shall maybe try and take a picture of the pond with the tadpoles tomorrow but it could be iffy.

CC.... your garden is so nice!

Here's another one of todays pictures. Last year when I started taking wildlife pictures I spent quite some time trying to get both types of Damsel flies. And today I got both the Blue and the Red versions without trying to find them.
I've already posted the Blue one so here's the Red one.


Next one on my list is one of the small blue butterflies that always seems to fly over the garden but never settles long enough to photograph.

Home grown Strawberries.

Picture taken with the Olympus u-Mini Compact



The variety are producing large fruit.

Nicknamed - 'The Triffid'
Real name - Cynara cardunculus
Common Name - Cardoon

This plant is huge. It's a member of the thistle family and can grow to about 8ft high and 5ft across depending on the type. This one is already a good 4 ft across and about 3 ft high.
It got moved tonight into the very large pot so we could use the border for some of the other plants.

I don't think if we knew how big it a grow to it would have been bought in the first place. But it does produce some giant thistle type flowers. I've found reds and blues while searching tonight.

I think I might have to put some stakes around the pot to make sure it can't blow over.

Did you model it yourself Hippo?

More from the garden.



A few of the summer time insects.
The Butterfly is a 'Painted Lady' and is the first one I've seen in the garden for a few years.



That rose tree is always a source of some good pictures.

The Buddleias are starting to flower. The Ball shaped flower one already has 4 or 5 small orangery - yellow flowers that are growing larger each day and the Blue regular Buddleias have the starting of buds. The Reds ,Whites ,and Mauve ones haven't started forming buds yet.

Was only saying yesterday that there are so many Butterflies that used to be in the garden as I was growing up that we never see these days so this morning I had a read about the habitats that the missing ones are normally found which made be realise why they have gone. You see for many years at the bottom of the garden used to be a spinney and then after it was levelled and abandoned for years it became over grown and the the woodland habitat is what the other Butterflies like. These days it's a housing estate !

We have gone some way to create a Butterfly garden with a wild patch with Nettles ,thistles ,grasses etc and the rest of the 100ft plus garden has popular plants and heavily scented flowers that Butterflies like so maybe I'll get to see a few more return this year .

This started with this Starling making a hack of a noise every time I entered the lower lawn.

After some care full searching I discovered the reason

The parent bird kept appearing with food

After a while it stopped giving the young bird the food but used it to get the bird to come out of hiding.
It was a very windy day and I guess the young bird might have been flown against the fence.
Taking the pictures of the unfolding events were going very smoothly until one of our cats joined me at
which point the parent bird started screaming again and doing circuits of the local gardens before returning to mine.
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Discovered today that the female Damsel Flies eat the male after mating !

Time for some more images and my more familer subject Butterflies.

This might take a while to load ,but I've greatly reduced the sizes whilst trying not to loose the detail.