A sunny day and our place is buzzing
No, not one of our wild parties but honey/bumble bees and butterflies….. Well, butterflies don’t buzz, but you get the idea.
Our garden is not particularly well kept. Yes, there is a piece of lawn which I regularly mow but otherwise we would simply not get to the door of the house. There is a flower border which I ‘manage’ by sporadically removing the ‘unwanteds’, but the hill is not far away. Any greenery we have actively planted or encouraged, fits with the general feel of low maintenance rustic cottage in the hills. This includes honeysuckle, nettles, brambles, broom, gorse, haw and blackthorn and fruit trees.
The change from garden to hill is deliberately blurred and quite subtle if it wasn’t for the fence and gate to keep the animals from walking in through the kitchen door.
I love exploring ‘beyond the garden’. All of five meters away.
So over the course of the year I wanted to see what fluttery loveliness I could find. I’ve got my sights set on 15 different butterflies…. Here’s what I have found (so far…):
During May
- Wall Brown, sunning itself on the rocks
- Small Copper hopping from flower to flower on the Stitchwort
- Small Heath, very fluttery and always with closed wings when it sits down
- Orangetip, female-white with some grey markings and male with the stunning orange tips….
During June
- Green Hairstreak, almost blending in with the dark green rose leaves
- Large Skipper, I nearly missed it it was so quick
- Common Blue, feeding on the buttercups
During July
- Meadow Brown, in abundance on the brambles
- Ringlet, loving the long grass behind the house
- Small White, very fluttery and lots of them about
- Gatekeeper (aka Hedge Brown), several on the brambles and ragwort (sadly the latter is all being pulled up)
- Green-veined White in the bottom boggy area
- Comma, along the ‘toad path’ where there are plenty of brambles
- Small Skipper, in the garden
- Red Admiral, particularly loving the Buddleias
So that makes 15! I am expecting at least two more, especially now the Buddleias are flowering all over the patch. They wont be a surprise. But I’d like a few more less ‘common’ ones too….
walkingbuddies 