Gorgeous light and I love the way these plants flop over but still keep trying to grow upwards. (Filmy green of the pond in the background.)
Some of my attempts to photograph dragonflies. They didn't settle anywhere to have their photos taken though - they just flew relentlessly back and forth over the surface of the pond creating bright blurs!
Fish basking in the sunlight.
Spiders web with neat adaptaton near the bottom where pine needles have caught on the web.
Beautiful silk tree flowers. I love the delicate leaves too!
Golden rain tree pods looking fabulous!
I've never seen it with so many pods on before!
I love watching the bees at work.
Path between the prairie bed grasses.
Flowers in the prairie beds.
Another happy bee.
Masses of beauty berries (Callicarpa) growing.It's an incredibly abundant year!
Beech nuts
Spindle berries forming.
Cornus - most have only one of the papery bracts left - the bobble on top is where the flowers are forming.
Smoke bush featheriness and a few leaves turning gold and red.
Pokeweed - what an unattractive name for such an amazing plant! It goes through so many changes - tiny pink flowers turning into green pumpkin like berries and on to red berries which darken to almost black - on those bright pink stems. Pokeweed is poisonous!
Cheerful sunflowers.
Funny tufty middles on these orange flowers. The gardener mentioned the name of them (I wish I'd written it down!) He said thisis the first time he's planted them in the herbaceous borders.
Cosmos - extravagant structures in the centre surrounded by petals that seem to glitter.
The spiders have been busy around these teasels.
Watering.
Love-in-a-mist seed pods.
Bunches of grapes are weighing the branches down over the notice board.
Hop flowers
Two dragonflies - yes I was still trying to catch a decent photo of them in flight!
I stopped off for a treat - a tasty cherry ice cream.
The gardener told me that a wedding party was coming in the afternoon to take some photos. I decided to pop back for a look.
Walk 2. Monday afternoon (6th August)
While waiting for the wedding party to arrive I waited by the pond - and the gardener occupied himself weeding and dead-heading in the flower bed by the gate.
I'm not going to show the photos of the wedding party that I took because I didn't ask for permission to share them - but the gardener and I took a few informal photos while the official photos were being taken and our photos have been forwarded to the family.
The flower beds near the entrance are overflowing now - barely an inch of soil showing.
The silk tree flowers are going to seed.
The prairie beds are spilling over with colour, pathways hardly visible!
Parched grasses recovering a little after the rain. The wild flower/meadow area has been mowed now, a little bit left for the insects to escape to, Several neat heaps of grass cuttings were ready to be collected.
Golden rain tree pods......
Branches hanging low with the weight of them all - just the right height for photographing them close up.
Prairie beds.
Some bees are very systematic - working their way in circles around the centre of the flower from the edge into the middle.
Occasionally a flower does something a bit different from the rest.
The candyfloss tree (Katsura) just beginning to turn orange. The fallen leaves will smell of candyfloss.
Evidence of the gardener at work. He has been cutting back plants that have either finished for this season or spread where they shouldn't or are making the main pathways difficult to use.
Spindleberries - such a lot of them!
Red Cornus flowers. (These are the flowers - the creamy petals that were before this were bracts not petals.)
Gardener hard at work.
The other kind of spindleberries. They look as if they have been piped out of an icing bag!
Those lovely orange flowers again and a bee mountaineering over the tufty centre.
No tufty centre on this one - the extravagant mass in the middle has all opened.
While I chatted to the gardener (and forgot the name of the orange flowers again!!!!) he rubbed areas on this sunflower seed head creating a smiling face and left it in the flower bed.
Nicotiana - the gardener said it was the first time he'd put these in the herbaceous border. They look very at home there!
Happy bees.
Very different in size!
Another mountaineering bee.
A maass of orange.
Deep orange to pale orange on these.
Grapes now hanging even lower obscuring the words Coombe Wood on the notice board.
Apparently the next stage after the hop flowers is the hop cones - and that's what these are.
Looking closer.
Thank you very much for joining me.
so much to drool over, it's been a while since I've enjoyed your pictures from Coombe Wood. First, love the silk tree flowers; and the echinachea, and all the orange! What a gorgeous setting for wedding photos, I hope they were happy with the results.
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