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.