Urban flora

Here are some photos of plants and trees in a local town centre. When I took a friend on a short tour of the town, I avoided the area near the busy cross roads, because it was shabby at that time. Now it is looking much smarter. There are floral displays with brightly coloured begonias all over the town. I have included a picture of a park we visited.

The silver birch trees are the sort which gave the title to a book I read recently – Ghost Trees.

Crossroads

Trinity Gardens

Street trees and flowers

Begonias and birches

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A diverse parish

Within walking distance of my home there are many different habitats for wildlife. The beach and cliffs have featured more than once here. There is also arable land, pasture, woodland, marshland, hedgerows, ponds, streams (or becks as they are known locally) and gardens. I have chosen a few snaps of some of these areas in June and July.

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A riverside and lakeside walk

Hubby and I had already decided on a trip to Crummock Water, when I checked Twitter and discovered that the challenge for #wildflowerhour was #bythewater. For a similar challenge last year I found so many flowers that I wrote a blog post about them.

 

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Crummock Water has featured on this blog before. Even before we arrived at our destination we had some excitement. There was a red squirrel running along the side of a country lane through Loweswater. (The place not the lake!) We parked in a National Trust car park and walked through woodland beside the River Cocker to Crummock Water. It was a sunny day with a cooling wind.

The scenery was stunning and I found many different wild flowers, including about a dozen new to me. I managed to identify some of them from reference books (field guides) and the experts from #wildflowerhour helped with others. We also spotted a few birds, mainly wagtails. One was a small bird which hovered (and had a white rump). Any idea what it was? There were some fairly small fish in a stream.

Some people who overtook us as I was taking a photo alerted us to the presence of a lizard. We retraced our steps to find it. It was undisturbed by people and dogs passing nearby.

We had a picnic lunch under a hawthorn tree with a view. Then we continued along the path finding more interesting flowers. We returned by the same route along the lake, but a different path through the woods. I took about 90 photos mainly of flowers. Digital photography is a useful invention!