Spring is sprung!

Well Spring is marching on and warmer weather appears at times to be on the way. 

In my last post I mentioned about plants that had been damaged by the winter and others that had seemed to survive.  I tidied the wildlife area and waited for things to develop.  So, here are a few things that are going well.


Flowering rosermary

The selection of herbs that always seem to be very popular with insects are doing very well.  This rosemary particularly looks and smells lovely.  Still no insects attracted to it, though.

I have continued the construction of a hardy and spikey area, firstly to stop people using our car park and wildlife area as a cut through (treading on all the carefully planned planting and possibly crushing little visitors) but also to introduce a different range of plants.  Thus I have added two gorse bushes.

Gorse

The fact that you see gorse all over harsh coastal areas, and also up the side of Olivers Mount in Scarborough, suggests that this is a hardy plant.  But from this link you can see that it also provides food and shelter to many insects and birds.



'Large White' Butterfly
 

We have had one very welcome visitor to our wildlife café and that is this large white butterfly.  It was attracted to a new osteospermum plant that I have put in to replace the two that were obliterated by easterly winds last winter.








With the purpose of telling you other types of wildlife that can be seen in the surrounding areas, I am reporting my very first sighting of a native English snake - an adder.  This was in Ravenscar, close to the old discussed railway station and on a patch of grass above the sea.  It was undoubtedly a young adder as this picture here, but it just crawled out of the undergrowth to be seen for a few seconds and then back into the undergrowth to disappear.  I couldn't take a picture as it was so quick, but truly and lovely thing to see. 

Spring 2015. What a Start!!

Well, I can't believe that last year's garden bioblitz was the last post I put on this blog.  2014 was a lovely summer, with really beautiful weather.  My tubs thrived and all went well.  But the beautiful weather also brought out lovely guests and we were so busy the blog went by the wayside!  Hay, ho.  That's the way things go sometimes.  Anyway.  A new year brings a start to the blog and spring has brought some wonderful suprises to my little wildlife garden. 

First to appear were a small number of snowdrops peaking their little white heads out into the harsh early spring weather.  These were then followed by crocuses.  I always forget what I have planted at the end of the previous year, so it's great when flowers emerge to remind me and show me that the planting was a success. 

Now, more recently we have daffodils.  I planted particularly small ones so that they had a better chance of avoiding any harsh winds.

 
Then. these lovely little pansies appeared.  I had planted them last summer and they flowered brilliantly.  Having died back it was lovely to see them make a further appearance this spring.

 Last autumn the buddleia was practically wiped out by a harsh wind, so I pruned it back quite brutally and hoped for the best.  Now as you can see the early growth is looking very positive.

There are some plants, such as the two lovely jolly osteospernums, that were also attacked by the harsh autumn winds.  I am not sure yet if they will recover, but fingers crossed!

There isn't much in the way of wildlife to report as yet, but I can't possibly not mention the fantastic sightings off Marine Drive of bottle nosed dolphins.  These lovely creatures have been seen several times and pictures of them are on our facebook page.  Also, Scarborough Porpoises on twitter have lots of information on sightings.

I mentioned the Garden Bioblitz earlier and 2015's Bioblitz is 30/31 May.  Have a look at the Bioblitz website if you fancy getting involved yourself.