Rob Duffy: Sidewalk Botanist – Side-walk Botanist goes Walkabout
The plants in the cracks of the pavements and brickwork begin to lose their fascination with the…
Rob Duffy: Sidewalk Botanist – Early Spring Notes
Last Saturday, the 14th, was the warmest day (at 14 degrees celcius) in nearly 5 months and an excursion across the Roby fields and ponds was a positive pleasure. Beyond the M62 bridge, a huge field of young winter wheat covers a kilometre in length and somewhat less in width; within it a series of ponds are enclosed by hawthorn hedges, ditches run with clear water and here and there are alder and willow “carr”.
Jim Pearson: The Purple Fumitory
Purple Ramping-fumitory is a nationally scarce and endemic to the UK, the only place it grows naturally in the world. It is an annual plant which used to be widespread in the mixed farming and arable areas of Britain. However, during the last 50 years it has undergone a drastic decline throughout its former range largely due to modern farming methods such as the move to autumn sown cropping and the introduction of broad-spectrum herbicides which threaten its continued existence. It has also declined in areas where there has been high arable reversion to grassland
Setting the Stage
The Andrena clarkella mining bees at Court Hey Park are indeed now active! At the moment there appear to only be a few burrows open and i only saw males so i suspect they have only recently started to emerge, perhaps stalled by the drop in temperature again.