Celebrating gardens, photography and a creative life
Seeing some of the posts in my Reader, I’ve been suffering snow envy… just a little, much as I’d like any seasonal snow cover to be. To try to assuage these feelings, I’m sharing this scene from one of our visits to Dunham Massey’s winter garden near Manchester, while it had a smattering of snow. Continue reading “Tree Snag and Lichen”
When my sweetheart described the woods near the Entwistle reservoir as temperate rainforest, I was taken aback. Rainforest sounds like something you’d have to travel thousands of miles to see rather than walk less than four miles up the road.
Our moist, cool, steamy climate encourages mosses and liverworts, lichens, fungi and ferns to creep over trees and boulders. The Irish sea keeps conditions mild enough for these ancient plants to thrive through summer and winter.
Having grown up scrambling through the wooded valleys of the moors, the Tolkienesque character of this type of landscape is as familiar as the open moorland over the hill. Wild orchids grow further along the path that heads from this spot towards an outcrop of rock called Fairy Battery; follow Cadshaw Brook and you may surprise a fallow deer grazing near Entwistle reservoir. Continue reading “Comparing Lancashire Rainforest With Mississippi Backwater”
