River Pang

Headwaters of the river Pang. Actually, the river starts as a dry ditch between our house and the research institute, but it's not pretty! This is about 5 miles down stream.

Forgetmenots

Of course not all blue carpeted glades are full of Bluebells. These are Forgetmenots



They have a rather nice shade of blue...



Across the road were these rather nice flowers. Not sure if they are Selfheal, Hyssop or another of the mint family. Not in to sitting down with the wildflower book to get a specific name. They just look nice!

Bluebells

This is the path with the celandines and wood anemones, but about a month later. It's a favourite place...



There are several miles of woodland with glades like these visible from the road



And for two years I used the M4 to bypass all this!

Woodland

Early morning woodland on the way to work. Nice day.

Cowslips

This cowslip by the side of the road is typical of the clumps and banks all over the place.



That particular one turned out to be an escapee from this meadow.



The meadow is overkill, so I suspect it may have been seeded deliberately. Natural cowslip meadows are around but time limits when I can get to any of the local(ish) nature reserves...

Wood Anemones

The Wood Anemones are quite brilliant too, a slightly pink tinted white.




Of course they too are highly successful in their own niche




You can see Bluebell leaves among the Anemones. They're now in full glory at the moment as this is a picture from a month ago, all I need now is some sun around mid day and the camera... Oh, and being in the woods rather than the operating theatre!

Celandines

The Lesser Celandines (yellow) have a long season, starting with the Blackthorn and running in to the Bluebells. These ones were competing primarily with Wood Anemones.

Blackthorn

Well I got to take some more pictures but never got time to upload them so...

The Blackthorn came out all of a sudden. A nice show in March. One particular tree in a water meadow off of the M4 was amazing, like a while candle flame on a brown, dry grass tussock field. A combination of weather, work, traffic conditions on the motorway and finally a flat battery in the camera made me miss it and the flowers are only brilliant white for a few days. The wild plums from these flowers are small and pretty tasteless with a large stone per unit flesh. Quite paleo really, not your average (delicious) Victoria plum! Mmmm and don't mention Greengages.....