Song for Jasmine

I have written about my vegetable garden before, but I have another garden, a secret garden. It’s not secret because it’s hidden, on the contrary, it’s in full sight of everyone. No, it’s secret because I do nothing to make it grow, nothing to make it flower. My secret garden is the wild flowers around me, which I find as beautiful as any domestic garden I have seen.

There are lots of different sorts of flowers in my garden. Even the dandelions of spring are a part of it, fields of yellow that are just lovely to see, and which provide the emerging bees with some of their early-season food. For the most part, I don’t know the names of these plants. If anyone does, please, let me know!

There are lots of these daisy-like flowers, simple yellow-and-white things. I have no idea what the blue flowers below them are called, but the bees love them. So do I, the way the pink buds open to reveal blue flowers is quite something. They’re not quite as common as some of the other plants, and the flowers are a little more hidden below the upper leaves, so they’re a bit harder to find. But they’re worth it.

Then there’s one that I can name, Verbascum Thapsus, above. I learned their name quite by chance when my good friend Shannon mentioned them in her “Wildlife in Summer” blog-post recently. She has a photo of some of them flowering on a rooftop, having somehow found room to put out roots. According to Wikipedia, Verbascum Thapsus is a biennial, so those plants had been there for a while! They flower tall and bright, and they flower for a long time. I bet that if they were annuals instead of biennials, they would be popular with gardeners.

Thistles are commonly regarded as weeds, but the flowers are really quite pretty. The thistle has been the emblem of Scotland for over 700 years, and the story of how that happened is rather amusing.

I found this ‘Checkered beetle’ (Trichodes Nuttalli) on a thistle very close to my home. I’d never seen a beetle quite like this before, he’s really very colourful. Thanks to “The Marvellous in Nature” for a post just a week or two ago which identifies this critter!

This next lot, I have no idea what any of them are called. The spiky plant above is really quite impressive up-close, and I’ve seen that in winter the birds come time and again to pick seeds from it, so it’s worth encouraging. The pink flower to its right grows on small shrubs that flower profusely, one or two of them would fill a niche in a garden very easily. The yellow flower to the right is much smaller, but close up it’s really very delicate.

Then there are some more familiar plants, like the poppies that come up everywhere in spring and the pale blue cornflowers that follow them in summer. The flowers change with the seasons, but there are always so many to see, all through the spring and summer. I’ve only mentioned a few in this post, maybe I’ll show you some more of my secret garden later on. Stay tuned!