This blog is about the many things of interest to me – from photography, jewellery making, my garden, walking, the natural world and the English Lake District.
Oh! roses and lilies are fair to see; But the wild bluebell is the flower for me. Louisa A. Meredith. The Bluebell. (1922)
On visiting a place that is set in fabulous grounds, I saw that in the week since I was last there, the bluebells have all burst forth in flower. We’d commented last week that they were just emerging and would soon be at their peak, so were thankful that the sun was out this time and I walked the last few hundred yards so that I could both enjoy them and take some photographs.
Forget-me-nots and primroses nestle at the base of this tree.
Over the last couple of visits we have enjoyed very good patches of primroses at the edge of the woodland and whilst many exposed patches are now passing their peak, with faded flowers, some in shady spots are just at their best, now snuggled up in the fast growing grass with bright blue forget-me-nots and a few pink primulas.
Whilst summer tends to offer up blousy, vibrant and colourful blooms, designed to make the most of the insects that are most active in warm sunny weather, I am personally very fond of the more subtle, diminutive blooms of spring. Those little delicate things that have to time their peak in that niche of time between improving weather, longer days and warming sunshine and the time when the trees gain their foliage, blocking out the light to the woodland floor below.
A gorgeous carpet of bluebells spread through deciduous woodland.
Bluebells are perhaps some of the more obvious woodland flowers at this time of year, because their spreading carpet tends to look at its most intense when glanced from a distance, where perspective foreshortens the distance between the blooms, deceiving the eye into thinking that there are more than there probably are. You can see that illustrated in my photographs, especially on the left, where there seem to be many more in the distance than the foreground, but in reality they’re evenly spread. When you get close to bluebells growing, they’re often quite thinly spread out, but en mass at a distance, they’re much more impressive.
There are few sights that would gladden my heart as much as a carpet of bluebells amongst deciduous trees, illuminated by the glow of warm spring sunshine, it feels like such a treat – and one that is often hidden and you have to seek out to enjoy. They seem to be early too – it was over a month later last year when I made a similar post about bluebells – those photographs being taken on the 23rd May.
Mini Gallery:
You can view the images in sequence by clicking on any photograph and using the next and back arrows.
What a dense and fabulous collection of spring blooms at the base of this tree.
The bluebells take advantage of the warming spring sunshine before the leaves emerge. There are also yellow Celandines just flowering through the leaf litter.
A gorgeous carpet of bluebells spread through deciduous woodland.
It’s such a heart-warming sight to see bluebells emerge in woodland, especially when lit by glorious spring sunshine.
She turned to the sunlight And shook her yellow head,
And whispered to her neighbour:
“Winter is dead.”
A. A. Milne, Daffodowndilly, When We Were Very Young
I saw my first ladybird of 2016 on a gorgeous sunny spring day in early March. Obviously catching some rays to warm and wake up.
My husband and I have been laid low by one of those especially horrible winter colds that happens about once every 15 years. A particularly nasty variant that kicked the stuffing out of both of us for around 6 weeks. Whilst we both experience long-term chronic health issues, we’re not ‘poorly’ very often and neither of us take much time off work for illness. But this episode has caused us to merely exist for all of February, having started at the end of January and extending now well into March too.
So we’ve done a lot of treading water and not made much progress beyond concentrating on getting from one day to the next. And we largely shut ourselves away in an enforced quarantine, as we certainly didn’t want anyone we cared about to suffer with it.
We found a very quiet spot to eat some lunch in the car and just enjoy looking out at the spring sunshine.
But I think we both are at the tail end now (I think I’ve progressed a little faster, my husband had surgery just before it took hold and certainly had two separate colds in the same time) and can start looking forwards again and think about a bit more than just going through the motions.
Thankfully, after we’d met our commitments this weekend, the weather forecast was supposed to be decent and we decided to take advantage and just get out for some fresh air – we’ve long wanted to, but this weekend was the first time that we had the energy to make that desire to do so, into reality.
I know that we both seriously enjoyed it and I’m sure it did us both good too. There’s been talk in the media lately of the value to health and well being of green spaces and spending time in nature, but this is something I’ve known since childhood. Fresh air, sunshine, good food and quality sleep – Mother Nature’s healers.
My first lambs of spring 2016. They were very new and clean, but Mum, understandably, wasn’t keen on me getting too close.
We didn’t do anything particularly energetic, but the spring sunshine felt wonderful after what has felt like a bit of an enforced curfew – just hearing the sounds of the countryside and breeze through your hair on a particularly nice spring day was most rejuvenating.
It makes me long for the long days of May and June when we try and get out as much as we can after work to enjoy those extended evenings – I think that’s perhaps my favourite time of year.
The area we travelled through had a lot of livestock in the fields, including some fabulous long horn cattle, which I wasn’t able to photograph due to the narrow nature of the lane and an impatient 4×4 driver behind us, but there were a lot of heavily pregnant ewes. I finally saw my first lambs of this spring, two youngsters just tucked inside the perimeter wall of their field, so I got out of the car quietly, hoping to snag some photos, but Mum really wasn’t keen and promptly took them away, so all I got was retreating bottoms this time.
Gallery:
I’ve popped the photos from above, plus a couple more into the gallery below, including a couple of new ones from this week. They each have captions to describe them. You can click on any of them and it opens a pop up window and you can scroll through the full set.
It was fabulous to get out to enjoy the spring sunshine after suffering a prolonged and miserable cold.
The colours of the newly opened crocuses in the garden really sing in the spring sunshine.
The vibrancy of the colours in the delicate crocuses in the garden is such a welcome sight each spring.
I saw my first ladybird of 2016 on a gorgeous sunny spring day in early March. Obviously catching some rays to warm and wake up.
We saw a pair of wrens in what looked to be a pretty violent courtship ritual, then one of them (the male I suspect) stopped chasing to belt out a song, presumably saying “don’t mess with my girl”.
The catkins on my corkscrew hazel opened this week with the warm sunshine on them. They’re fascinatingly complex structures when you look at them.
My first lambs of spring 2016. They were very new and clean, but Mum, understandably, wasn’t keen on me getting too close.
We found a very quiet spot to eat some lunch in the car and just enjoy looking out at the spring sunshine.
My work this week:
Coiled copper teardrop loop earrings.
I have a number of designs that feature either twisted wire or coils of wire and it has been my practice to use a small cordless screwdriver to give me the twisting/coiling action. It needs a power tool that’s capable of a gentle start and slow speed. I’d been using an inexpensive and very small hand unit that worked a treat for this, but it has been in its death throes for some time and I knew it wouldn’t be long for this world, despite giving me long and valued service.
But my father came to the rescue with a more substantial cordless screwdriver that had a failed battery and he adapted to run from the mains instead. It works an absolute treat and the additional size and weigh allows me to use it standing on its big heavy battery base, freeing me from the need to hold it up as well as co-ordinating the trigger finger and guiding the wire etc.
A longer teardrop of coiled copper wire in these antiqued copper earrings.
It has an accurate, well aligned chuck, which is especially valuable when coiling wire and it starts up lovely and gently, making for much easier coiling, less wire wastage and reduces the amount of swear words uttered. I’ve enjoyed using it so much, that I replenished my stock of coiled wire lengths for regular designs and was able to make longer pieces than I have previously, so I put together some new teardrop loop earrings, as shown.
