Parts of the garden are a riot; rich with the wayside plants of the Mediterranean and Balkans intermingled with the local and far flung. The Peacock Garden is dominated by bright yellow umbels of great fennel Ferula communis contrasting with the mauves of honesty Lunaria annua, greater meadow-rue Thalictrum aquilegifolium and, I think, dame’s rocket…
Tag: Green-winged orchid
Nebrodi National Park
Parco Naturale dei Nebrodi is a great forest of oak and beech that rides a long ridge of rolling hills inland from the north coast of Sicily. We reach it on the tiny back road from San Marco d’Alunzio, missing Frazzano and running past the Monastero San Filippo Fragalá that is occasionally open to visitors….
Kent – 13th May 2023
Saturday was a grand tour of some of Kent’s finest places. The day was bright and breezy and confirmed that May, the month of many weathers, is the best month of the year for wildlife (and possibly gardens). Sissinghurst We checked the plant species in the cottage garden where the colours are always burning hot…
Meadows and brambles
At Bough Beech there are no nightingales this year but a garden warbler is singing its continuous rattle from the bramble patches in the wilding fields. Nearby a chiffchaff makes short sorties to collect dead leaves and grasses to construct a domed nest in a short tangle of grasses and brambles. At Marden Meadow, the…
Adders on the meadow
There are just a handful of traditional lowland hay meadows left in Southern England. On a land use map of Kent, Marden Meadow looks like a short line of postage stamps stuck on a large, white envelope; a remnant from a time when the only implements to work the land were scythes, carts and barrows…
Moulin de Perdrigeau
April 5th and 6th 2016 The old windmill with no sails sits on the hilltop in the centre of the forest like an upturned flower pot; the top is now a watch tower wth 360 degree views over the pines and farmland, with distant wooded hills, villages and La Vallée de la Tude that runs north to south away to…
Le Pech Bely, Montaigu-de-Quercy
Spring: 22nd April – 1st May 2013. The small road from the ancient, bastide town of Tournon d’Agenais runs along the valley of the river Boudouyssou, a small tributary of the Lot. Above the river, on a small plateau accessed by a narrow spur road, sits the hamlet of Pech Bely; nothing much more than a…