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Poisonous Red and White Spotted Toadstools: Fly Agaric

Red toadstool with white spots

Early autumn is a great time to hunt for fungi, so I have spent some time searching for the most atmospheric of all, red and white spotted toadstools, in all the likely and less likely places I could think of near where I live. As often happens, when I was not searching, I glanced up and had the thrill of seeing twenty or thirty of them growing on a hillside in a narrow strip of mixed, light woodland on the edge of peaty moorland.

Toadstools are the fruiting bodies of underground mycelial networks. Happy to return to earth, they emerge only briefly after a rain, swelling rapidly to full size then rotting back after releasing spores from white gills on the undersides of their caps.

Fly agaric growing in moss and leaf litter

Continue reading “Poisonous Red and White Spotted Toadstools: Fly Agaric”

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Wilde Weelde, Floriade: a Partnership Between Humans and Nature

Wilde Weelde flower border with heleniums

While your eye may naturally pick out the flowers, when I was face-to-face with this memorable landscape, I marvelled at that long, structured wall of tree trunks and re-purposed construction materials in the background. The fauna wall was by far the biggest insect hotel I’d ever seen.

Ash logs and reclaimed material in the fauna wall

Broad swathes of the Wilde Weelde garden’s boundary are made from small sections of logs of different diameters, stacked leaving gaps between them – the log version of a dry stone wall, you might say. The effect reminded me of the ramparts of a castle, except these walls have gaps that a raider could saunter through. Continue reading “Wilde Weelde, Floriade: a Partnership Between Humans and Nature”

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Wooden Garden Benches: Smooth and Rough-Hewn, Traditional and Modern

Garden bench under a tree at Scampston Hall Gardens
Scampston Hall Gardens

The longer we linger in gardens and green spaces, the more we value a place to sit. Over the last 18 months one of our most useful garden accessories, the bench, has been widely used and appreciated as never before.

I’m celebrating wooden benches that range in character from beautifully finished to rough-hewn and from classic to contemporary, by way of quirky and downright artsy. If your imagination works this way, try removing the bench from one pictures and replacing it with another. Garden furniture is more than just practical: the style of each bench alters the way we see its surroundings.  Continue reading “Wooden Garden Benches: Smooth and Rough-Hewn, Traditional and Modern”

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A Peek into an English Bluebell Wood

Bluebell wood

Bluebells woods have a mysterious air. To get the full effect, you have to imagine everything moving in the lightest breeze, bees humming in the bells, birds singing as they attend their nests, and the odd grey squirrel bouncing around.

Bluebell wood

Light dapples through the tender young beech and chestnut leaves, moving across one patch then another; brightening or fading as clouds float between the woodland and the sun. Continue reading “A Peek into an English Bluebell Wood”