Teasel

Vapour Trails

last year's teasels
make way for new growth
vapour trails

Teasel

The teasel is taller
than the tree that sheltered it.
In the warmth of the sun
the shallow pools of rainwater
it carries at its leaf nodes
have all dried up.

Purple spirals of flowers have faded
to leave nests of tiny black seeds
like wasps in springtime

but

it resists pulling,
shallow roots clinging on
until it succumbs
to the sharp
snick snack
of secateurs

and is dragged
shouting from hollow stems
and spitting black pips
to the compost heap.

There, old comb-thistle!
the bees and I love your flowers
and your shadowshine
but you shall not despoil my flower beds
so readily.

Fences and Benches again

This is a fence on the way to (or back from) the local shop. You may remember I posted this fence before, here, when it was covered in an elder tree. Now the elder has gone and the fence looks poorer for it.

This is a sweet piece of fencing in someone's front garden. It's only about a foot high but it's quite charming.

Someone else's garden.
I just like the juxtaposition of colours and verticals.

Not an interesting fence, just a good composition.

If I go to the field via the post box, this is where we come out and where we enter the field.

Trickster's shouting impatiently as I fiddle with the camera on the phone.

Bear id anxious to get into the field too.

I limbo under the middle post.

The waste bin is back again - and it hasn't even been emptied.

How very odd.

The front garden, and the teasels are just coming into flower.

Delightful, though i shall have to do my best to stop them setting seed. From a cultivated plant two years ago they're rapidly becoming weeds.

Poppies and Gravesides

Poppies and teasels. How delightful are they. They bloomed today in the front herbaceous garden. It needs weeding again -- there's a new jungle of convolvulus but it has to be my favourite bit of the garden.

Also on the herbaceous bed are these: our first raspberries of the season. There are more plants in the back garden but I stuck some in here to fill a gap. The purple is a flowering hebe.



Blue skies!

Hottest day of the year so far, apparently.





Even in the Park of the Dead the sun was shining.

Several council workers were cutting the grass around the graves - one had a sit on mower to do the large areas, another a small mower for between the graves and a third with a strimmer to reach the parts the others couldn't reach.