verbena bonariensis | Musiewild's blog

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comfrey, comma butterfly, gatekeeper butterfly, hornbeam, hornet mimc hoverfly, Orange hawkbit, scabious, verbena bonariensis

More August photos. When I let ‘the meadow’ grow, it was interesting to see the flowers that the grasses produced. Here are just two of them:

Here’s a spider nursery in the long grass:

Bumble bee on Verbena bonariensis, spreading the pollen.

Wood pigeon taken from, rather than in, my garden, though I suspect there was a nest in my hornbeam as I once found a broken egg underneath it. (Bella, cat, licked it up later.)

Mallow

Comma butterfly on v.b. You can just make out the little symbol for which it is named on its back wing.

Small tortoiseshell on v.b. The whole plant is not the most attractive, being very spindly, but the insects love it and the small flowers are very pretty.

Gatekeeper on …? I planted it but I can’t remember what it is. Possibly Burning bush, Dictamnus albus.

My lavender is right at my feet where I sit for coffee on nice days. I took many tens of photos of insects on it this summer.

Gatekeeper and friends on eryngium

My neighbour Sue gave me this Orange hawkbit to plant in my meadow. It flourished and I hope it will have offspring next year. Being of the dandelion family, the insects love it. I find that it is also called Fox and Cubs.

You don’t see grasshoppers until you move around in the long grass, at which point they start living up to their name.

Honeybee on scabious.

Two gatekeepers on eryngium

I have to admit that I was a little afraid when I first saw this, 2 cm long, though hornets are not in fact very aggressive. But I was relieved when further research introduced me to the Hornet mimic hoverfly, of which this is fine example. It’s on water mint at the side of my pond.

This micro-moth is on lavender. It is no more than 6 or 7 millimetres from nose to tail.

Arachnophobes alert. There will be a couple more photos of spiders at the end of the week…

This is comfrey. Some weeks previously the plant had been in tatters. I could have prevented that by removing the larvae of the tiger moths which were munching away at its leaves, but I preferred to wait and enjoy the beautiful moths that would emerge later. To my great pleasure the plant fought back once the larvae had had their fill, grew three times as big and flowered again.

Here are a few of the plants in my pond. Not strictly wildlife, but placed with wildlife in mind.

Pontederia (lanceolata I think)

I just fell for this at a garden centre a couple of years ago, and I can’t find it in any of my books. Any help with the name would be appreciated.

This is about 2 metres tall. I think it’s a verbascum, but I’m not sure.

It is clear that I am not very good at retaining the names of cultivated plants.

Young sparrows caught red-beaked

A wren thinking of getting in on the act.

My three feeders all hang from my hornbeam at about 8 feet off the ground. This is good because the tree’s bark is very smooth and the cats cannot climb up it. This is a little bad because the light is poor where they hang, and clear photographs are difficult to obtain. That’s my excuse anyway.