Musings from the bower 45

MUSINGS FROM THE BOWER 45

 

 

In case anyone is wondering, I am still brooding in my bower but have been unable to post due to my browser suddenly becoming incompatible with Blogger! Not being of technical mind, I had to wait till my son could come and sort out my computer. However, at last, it is back on track, and I can woffle again! The bower is still pretty, and although the clematis has now ceased flowering, the honeysuckle is a mass of crimson berries and there is a passion flower and a mock orange, though the latter, also, has no blooms now.  Nearby are some buddleia bushes (which nowadays we are meant to refer to, for some scientific reason, as ‘buddleja’), one deep purple and another white. These are large bushes.  There is also a tub containing two patio buddleias, one white and the other pale mauve. The other day I noticed a beautiful pale yellow buddleia in a garden – gosh, I’d love one of those. We are certainly having a ‘Butterfly Summer’ – the garden has been full of butterflies drinking their fill on the buddleias, especially peacocks, large and small whites, commas and small tortoiseshells.

 

 

We visited Anglesey Abbey, near Cambridge recently, just to walk around the grounds. They were beautiful as always. The dahlia garden was a riot of colour, as was the herbaceous garden, and the white-trunked birches in the winter garden bore pale green leaves, looking so pretty when the sun shone through them. The mill stream was green with duckweed, and there were plenty of yellow water lilies with their large, butter-cup like flowers and thick oval leaves, perfect for moorhens to walk across. Which they were – there was a family of moorhens and their babies happily mooching about the greenery on the stream.  Some of the dogwood seems to have been cleared away in the grassy area by the river, making it easier to get to the small pond nearby. The cyclamen will be out very soon; a few were already showing pink along the paths, a reminder that autumn is on its way. We decided not to visit the house this time, but it is an interesting place, well worth looking round if you haven’t done so.

 

Polecat at the British Wildlife Centre

Young red squirrel at the British Wildlife Centre

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A couple of weeks ago we went to one of my ‘special places’ – the British Wildlife Centre at Lingfield, Surrey. Red squirrels climbed up my legs and over my arms, and I spent a long while watching a stoat running in and out of a hole. A baby polecat slumbered in the sun, otters chased each other in their lake and across the grass, an enormous marsh frog grinned vacantly and the wildcat kittens were gorgeous – though, as their keeper explained, they inherited the wildness and they could not be handled or even touched. We bought sandwiches in the café, and then took them along to the picnic tables near the roe deer enclosure, as it was such a lovely day. Later, we walked through the wetlands trail, along the new boardwalk, seeing quite a lot of butterflies and birds.

 

 I’ve seen quite a few butterflies and dragonflies lately, with trips to Hatfield Forest and to Wicken Fen. On one of my tips to Wicken, which is near Ely, Cambs, the boardwalk had a peacock butterfly every couple of feet, and as I walked along, they would spiral up and settle behind me. Dragonflies were abundant, many of them coupling or egg-laying, while some enormous ones swooped, reminiscent of early fighter planes! At Hatfield Forest a tiled roof was a suntrap for small tortoiseshell butterflies that flattened their wings against the warm tiles so that their bodies absorbed the heat trapped underneath them. The thistles had decided to seed, so there were swirls of thistledown – very pretty, though it made me a bit sniffy as I suffer from hay fever. Through the trees we glimpsed a group of fallow deer, the sun illuminating the white spots on their backs and showing off the bold black and white markings on their tails.

 

On the 17^th August, my daughter and I were up very early as we had to drive to Coventry and set up our Doll Showcase stall (we produce a quarterly doll magazine) at a doll and toy fair. The fair went off very well, and it was interesting to see the old toys. I bought a small wooden piano, just like one I had as a child – I can still play ‘Pease Pudding Hot’ on it! I also bought a toy washing machine and cooker. The washing machine is made of a heavy type of metal, with a mangle attached with sharp rivets while the cooker is made from tinplate. It always amuses me to think of how we played with such ‘dangerous’ toys as children – no one worried about sharp edges in those days – and we survived.  I was reading the other day that German kindergarten children climb trees at school – I can’t imagine ‘elf and safety’ allowing that here!

 

Over the bank holiday my husband was demonstrating a railway layout at the model railway club near Hoddesdon, Herts, of which he is a member. It was the club’s open day and was very well attended. There were lots of model railways there as well as a ride-on train for youngsters, a tombola and an excellent refreshments stall, which was doing a roaring trade. There were model boats being sailed around the boating lake, too. My daughter and I went to see how he was getting on, he had a queue of children waiting for a go to operate his train. It struck me as a quintessentially British affair – all it needed was a few Morris dancers and the thwack of a cricket ball on willow!

 When I visited my son recently I left my trainers behind. (My son has a cream carpet and so is very fussy about footwear! So I took a pair of lightwiight canvas shoes to slip into but went home wearing them.) Next time I visited, he was away and we had called in to water the garden and of course to collect the trainers. I searched and couldn't find them at first - then discovered this box obviously waiting for me. My son has a strange sense of humour - I wonder who he inherited that from?!