Nature In The Home

Joining in with Lou and her Nature In The Home series.This week the challenge was to forage for green foliage and flowers. I have Euphorbia in the garden, and was going to photograph them. But.....


 Olly and I went out for a walk with Honey and a bag of carrots to feed the horses we encounter on one of our 'long/short walks.' I have blogged about the walk before now. Have you noticed that everywhere is so green at the moment? Lots of rain, and some sunshine thrown in, have made the hedgerows go berserk.

I started picking stuff. Then a bit more. Then a bit more. Olly joined in. By the time we got home, I had an armful of glorious green. Not only that, I had interesting forms and shapes. I looked at the commonplace in closer detail. I got out my book and scoured it's pages, trying to match each plant with a name:

Ivy, Foxglove, Cow Parsley or Jack by the Hedge,
Sheep's Sorrel, Alexanders, Lady's Mantle,
Hogsweed, Hoary Plaintain, Weld, Cocksfoot

 It was satisfying to put a name to each plant. Some of them were hard to ascertain, and I may have got a couple wrong. But no matter. I was absorbed in this little project. Olly enjoyed looking at the book with me.

Higgledy piggledy. As in life...

Olly's 

How fantastic are those names! The names of these unobtrusive plants that fill our hedgerows and green spaces. Online I discovered The Botanical Society Of The British Isles website and blog (they have their own blog!), and a site devoted to the easy identification of grasses and sedge, because there is a definite difference (it's all to do with the stem; cylindrical and hollow versus triangular and solid). Who knew it was such a complex world?

When I was a little girl, we would regularly pick grass - Golden Oat Grass - and say and do the following:

 "Tree in the summer,  Tree in the winter,        

  Bunch of  flowers,  April Showers!"             

We would hold up the grass, then strip the grass from it's stalk. This became a posy between our fingers, which we would then throw up into the air! I think Mum must have taught us it. Does anyone else know it? 

We had fun. The dog had fun. The horses enjoyed their carrots.


Leanne xx


Postscript

I think there are green flowers. Or should that be chartreuse?!