A WALK ON MAY-DAY

May Days are celebrations of . . . May  . . . and Spring (ish) . . . and manual labour.
Roman Catholic Readers may also be aware it's the Feast of St Joseph the Worker. A pretty good collection of celebrations!

For most of the day I was at the Lyme Regis Fossil Festival. It was really, really sunny - but not too hot. (Perfect.) There were masses of people. (Good for the town.) But not so many one felt crowded. (Good for me!)

I bought a T-shirt with a plesiosaur skeleton on it. Took a look at fossils for sale in a tent. (Bought none. Very particularly I didn't buy the £2,000 crocodile head from Africa.) Drank a cup of coffee from a cafetiere and went to a lecture about pre-historic creatures of the Jurassic Coast.

Then content after a happy day - came home.

Sunny days at this time of year tend to end in misty evenings and it's an inadvertent tradition that I set out to take photographs for Loose and Leafy when it's dull, or rainy or otherwise not-a-good-moment for taking photographs. My last post was sprinkled with rain-drops. Ready for this one, light decided to fail early. (If you are unfamiliar with Dorset, you may find it hard to believe this is one of the hottest and sunniest parts of the UK!)

Well, anyway . . . out I went with my camera.

 Trombidium holosericeum do you think?
(Velvet Mite)

Now the picture at the top of the post . . . you may find it a surprise here. Perhaps, you may think, this would have been more appropriate on my other blog - Message in a Milk Bottle. But if you examine it carefully you will find something very specially interesting - apart from finding a plastic cherub lying on the path. This little doll was very small - barely more than an inch from top to toe - but it showed up bright and pink against the black of tar. Unmissable.

Now do you see why it belongs here? At the bottom edge of the photo, towards the left hand edge, unbeknownst to me at the time, a tiny red creature had walked into frame. The red is extraordinary but I don't know what it is. Anyone?

This next picture . . . I know it will get much blood boiling among readers. Even I, one usually more conscious of the photographic potential in things left lying around than its status as rubbish . . . even I don't like to see washing machines or tumble driers or whacking great bits of board in ditches. But it is fascinating, isn't it? That someone has gone to the trouble of trundling it to a place where cars don't go so they can tip it under a span of honeysuckle and hawthorn.

Next up on my walk . . . 

I tend to call all sorts of plants dandelions when they aren't. Here's one of them which might be . . . or might not be. I don't mean the groundsel (with the little yellow flower) but the one with the bigger leaves. You know how I'm fascinated by urban plants? This is not one, despite the path. Behind me is the sea. Ahead you can see the blur of Alexanders. This is an urban-wannabe.

Here's another thing you will have gathered over the years - that I get to like particular trees and photograph them over and over - even if, like this one - it's impossible to photograph them other than against the light. I've watched a bud from this tree morph into a summer leaf and into autumn. And its seeds ripen. Here we go again - yet more silhouettes on this friendly sycamore.

If you are a long-time reader, you will be familiar with these kind of posts. If you are new to Loose and Leafy, perhaps I should assure you I sometimes take photos of pretty flowers in bright sunlight. In summer there will be butterflies and hoverflies and . . . and . . . things like that. And come autumn there will be hips and haws and blackberries. 

And I've noticed, over time, that despite the ordinariness of what I show you here - I've never yet found anything rare - Loose and Leafy has an indefinable yet specific identity. I reckon if I were to take its name away from the header, and that you found yourself here by chance, you'd know in a trice you'd landed on the Loose and Leafy blog. (Don't you agree?)

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PRETTY AND GRUESOME

I won't bore you with too many details - though I'm tempted to. I could go on and on about laptops. The important thing though is to say I have a new one. There! Self restraint!

Given that the only thing I want to talk about is adventures with laptops . . . I'm finding it hard to say anything useful or interesting about plants.

My old one started making fizzing electrical noises. It was quite sca . . . no!

Here are some bluebells. English or hybrid or . . . ( ? ? ? ?) - yellow pollen, drooping heads, curled up edges.

The Plantlife site has information about how to tell them from Spanish ones.

And beside them are hawthorn trees. The flower buds are pretty but once they've opened they get bashed around by rain which comes in sharp bursts then goes.

But not everything is lovely. In a moment I'm going to show you something quite gruesome. If you are brave, a doctor, a nurse or a vampire you may have no trouble . . . I'm hoping you'll be interested but I'd better let you know in advance so you won't scroll too far ahead if you don't want to. (There will be a second warning so you can keep reading for the moment)

Being at last able to use a laptop (. . . why do they sell ones so shoddy one has to take them back to the sh . . . NO!) . . . having a laptop means there's been a point to carrying my camera again so I've been pottering around without a theme; simply re-visiting old places to see what's going on and where. Remember the sycamore in a drain? It's still there!

In a minute, I'm going to show you part of a dead gull and a clear photo of some of its insides. In the meantime . . . here's an ant on a front door.

The gull was on the grassy bank beside the bluebells and hawthorn trees. Its head was missing, its guts exposed and its entrails stretched straight. I'm sparing you somewhat. This is only part of the picture - but it was an interesting opportunity.

When I found a dead goose on a beach I was able to photograph it in detail and I would have liked to do the same with this bird but instead of the trees protecting me from a new onset of rain, the onset of rain was knocking drops from an earlier shower onto my camera. So I beat a retreat.


I photographed this first. I don't know what body part it is. Do you? I've never seen the inside of a gull before!

And a few footsteps further - more bluebells.

It's all nature!

It's good to be back, it's good to be back, hello! hello!

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We go way back with the sycamore in the drain. Click here and you'll see it in April and May 2012.

DON'T MOVE A FOOT

On the turn of our journey, when we were leaving Newcastle-upon-Tyne to come south, I saw a Black Headed Gull with its head already turned grey. Very soon, it would be winter-white, a black spot behind each eye to keep its name in.

Elderberries matured while

 we were on our travels
and are already

dropping from

their umbrella-rib frames.

The first breath of autumn.

The hedgerows which were solid green on our way up the country were mottled with early yellows by the time we came back the other way. I hadn't intended to post for another couple of weeks but the birth of autumn cannot go un-noticed.

How, though, to limit myself?

There's lots to be done on a return and I hadn't planned to write a post for Loose and Leafy until around the 17th September.

So I hit on an idea. Walk a short way from my house. Stand in one spot. Don't move a foot. Stick my nose in a hedge, see what can be seen, take photos - go home.

Result? Lots of wobbly photos from unfortunate angles in an awkward light.

Second result. I tried it in several places, forgetting that lots of ones add up to . .

. . . Never mind. I've set myself a trend.

All the photos in this post were taken within a four minute span with my feet stuck in one spot. Neither pottering nor re-positioning allowed! (11:10 - 11:14, Sunday 28th August 2011.)

At first sight, the bushes seem little more than a splurge.

I used to think these were
Ground Elder seed-heads
 until Mag of Ragbag
tactfully put me right.

But when you re-focus your perception - here are Alexanders seeds.

The tattyness of these blackberries first drew me to this spot. Walking on after my foot-stuck-photo-shoot, I found there are plenty of fine and juicy ones near by, though their flavour seems mostly to be adequate rather than fantastic.

Haws - the fruit of Hawthorn.
You can see what the flowers looked like
in the spring in the post
Lights and Bells, Mists and Flowers. 

Haws can be overwhelming. I find them vulgar in over-profusion - and, this year, they are definitely over-profuse to my eyes. I'd even say I am repelled by them. It's the same with caterpillars. One is interesting, possibly pretty - but in a writhing bunch they are less appealing. However, taking haws branch by branch, they are beautiful berries - red and shining.

Never neglect the ground.

All sorts of bits and bobs in there and, tipping us ahead to Christmas . . .

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shines the Ivy.

Note - There's a picture of a Black Headed Gull in winter

if you scroll down this page of news  from the Portland Bird Observatory.