Tag Archives: My Garden

A bird table is a joy every single day!

There were some lovely visitors to our bird table this morning…….
Great tits…
A1  great tit
Only a very few are still feeding their babies…
A2 g tit feeding baby
Thank goodness!
a3a BABY GREAT TITS
There were Blue tits….
A5  blue tit
With plenty of less gaudily coloured youngsters in attendance….
© Marshall Faintich London, UK July 12-19, 2011
For some unknown reason, it can be spelt either Coal or Cole tit, but they were there anyway…

Coal_tit_UK09 wiki
With what I felt were possibly the more dully plumaged youngsters…
Coal_Tit_juvenile_2
There was plenty to look at, with lots of recently fledged youngsters in evidence, taking the easy way to find food.

Soon I will be taking a more in depth look at bird tables, and also at what I am seeing as an increasingly worrying lack of insects in our organic garden.

 

 

 

 

1 Comment

Filed under My Garden, Nottingham, Wildlife and Nature

A Monarch in the garden?

By far and away the best garden plant for attracting butterflies and bees is the buddleia, named by Linnaeus himself, after the Reverend Adam Buddle (1662–1715), a botanist and rector from Essex, England.
buddleia-flowers_2317869b
This nectar rich plant originally came from Asia, Africa and the Americas, and reached England only as late as 1730. Nowadays, it is ubiquitous, and can easily be seen on almost every piece of derelict land.
Buddleia must surely be the easiest plant in the world to grow cuttings from.
Once your buddleia bush is reasonably large, after a couple of years, you will need to prune it annually, right down to about a foot or so above the ground,  before it starts to grow too tall. This is best done around May 1st, to avoid late frosts. Virtually every bit that you cut off could be planted for new plants, and your neighbours will probably enjoy your free gift. If you prune your bush back vigorously, you will always get a lot more flowers than foliage.
With a little bit of luck, you should get a peacock…
peacock
or a small tortoiseshell
10_Buddleia
With luck, a Red Admiral…
Red-Admiral-Photos
or even, for punctuation fans, a Comma…
P1280277

You might get something really weird. I don’t know what this is, but it ought to be called the Jaws Butterfly…
c
This year, we had our first ever Hummingbird Hawk-moth, hovering like its namesake…

In your wildest dreams, a Monarch butterfly may cross the Atlantic from the USA and replenish its energy in your garden….
Monarch-Butterfly-earth-lovers-8585417-800-600
Good luck!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Leave a comment

Filed under My Garden, Wildlife and Nature