Veg Plotting

My latest find just yards from our house is this intriguing candlesnuff fungus (aka Xylaria hypoxylon ) growing on a pile of logs by Hardenhuish Brook. It looks like little reindeer antlers adding a festive decoration on my walk into town, though the Woodland Trust tells me * it can be found year-round. I'm delighted to see it for the first time. Apparently the greyish white part contains the spores, so I hope the recent high winds have spread them out a bit as we have tons of fallen deciduous wood in need of a little decoration. Although it's the first time I've seen it, this fungus can crop up pretty much anywhere, from woodland through to urban parks. Have you spotted it in your neighbourhood? * = scroll down to item 7 on their list

  It's been great to find lots more public art around Chippenham this year; enough to make this collage for your delectation. From left to right and top to bottom we have: Mustard Bustards  by @lucas_antics  next to Cousin Norman's and Artel31 on Union Road; Morris Dancer by the ever reliable Chippenham Knatty Knitters  on Chippenham High Street for this year's folk festival; In Unity Beauty Unfolds by Sophie Mess at Rivo Lounge Kingfisher by Nathan Pritchard in the Kingfisher pub car park on Hungerdown Lane; Chippenham collage by 2024's Fringe February contributors; Canal scene by Ed Poster at the bus station Winnie's Barbershop by @hardlytryinganyway  on Sheldon Road; Mystery horse next to St Andrew's church; Rainbow High Street project led by Public Art Chippenham for Chippenham Pride 2025 Sadly the Morris dancer was the last topper for the post box as it's now gone solar as have at least 2 others in Chippenham. Fingers crossed the other locations get th...

We had a lovely time at Avebury Manor 's sculpture exhibition on Saturday and my friend W  kindly sent me this jolly photo from the day afterwards. When I saw it I giggled at how my chosen outfit picked out the colours of the Orangutan sculpture we found dangling in one of the trees, so it just had to be added to my irregular  series,  Separated at Birth today. I'm giggling again at how appropriate the series name is for this particular subject, seeing we're such a close relative to primates. It's lovely to have some humour back on the blog again - for those of you confused by my labelling, this series gives a nod to a series of the same name in Private Eye , where they deliberately label the items featured the wrong way round. I see they've now renamed the series Lookalikes, which you can see here .

We're back from a tour of the middle Rhine area, having travelled there by train and then making a base for ourselves at Boppard, just south of Koblenz. We had a lovely time exploring the beauty of the area, thanks to the local tourist tax of 1.50 Euros per night giving us the freedom of local buses and trains, plus free entry to the informative local museum. On our final day we headed upstream to the small town of Bacharach, a former capital of the region and full of old timber framed houses like those you can see in the above photo. It was also festival time, with the streets bedecked with colourful flags and other decorations, the central one giving a clue to us being in the heart of the wine making area, with vineyards stretching impossibly steeply up the valleys either side of the river. No wonder wine production continues to be mainly by hand in this area. We could see the first hints of autumn* along the river valley, though daytime temperatures and sunlight were distinctly ...

The Big Butterfly Count is one of my favourite 15 minutes of the year. Being in the garden without a thought of all the jobs lying wait, just admiring the natural world is time well spent in my view. I don't always document my count on here, but it's time to do so again this year as I have some new observations to make. Earlier in the year there was plenty of speculation on social media on the lack of insect life and what might be the cause - last year's dry summer, and/or cold winter, and/or climate change were often cited as potential causes. I often wondered myself especially during June when I was gardening without the usual accompanying thwing of various bees and other insects around me. I also thought our dreary July might affect the results. It was reassuring to find on my count yesterday that nature has restored itself over the past couple of months, in my garden at least. As well as more plentiful butterflies than usual - in numbers and species - there were plent...

Sunday's scarecrow trail over at Pewsham provided the latest unusual front garden in the shape of a vintage lawnmower used as a plantstand. It's quite ironic seeing there's no lawn! ATCO  is a century-old* lawnmower manufacturer and judging by its appearance this is a relatively old one. Unusually it's been quite hard to find out much information about it online. According to this guide , my best bet is to go back and see if there are any useful looking numbers on the metalwork. * = just over as the company was founded in 1921

It's Bank Holiday time for us to celebrate the Queen's Platinum Jubilee and amongst the usual Union Jacks and bunting, Chippenham has put its own special touches to the celebrations. Like many communities we have some special postbox toppers and I found the one above earlier this week gracing one in Monkton Park. I know our Knatty Knitters have other plans afoot, so I'm off to explore the centre of town later today. The Museum has had a couple of Jubilee projects I've been involved with. The Young Photographers group worked hard on their '70 Years, 70 Faces' and found at least one face per year of the Queen's reign. NAH and I went along to see ours at the Yelde Hall and add a new meaning to 'we were beside ourselves'! You may recognise a couple of the faces as Mark Allum (below me) and Lisa Lloyd (top right) from Antiques Roadshow live in Chippenham. I think NAH has fared particularly well in the photos, but then I'm biased! I - along with my WI...

Some days just make your heart sing and Saturday was one of them. One of my WI friends arranged for us to walk to Calne along the old railway line  and laid on the perfect day for us to enjoy six miles of walking in the finest of company. Lockdown made this a familiar walk for us all. it's one of the few which takes you to a destination instead of around in a circle and has more of a sense of a journey as a result. Familiarity doesn't mean there aren't any surprises - we were delighted to find extensive bluebell woods either side of the track once we were close to the Bowood Estate . I thought I'd found all the local, walkable bluebell woods during the past two years, and I'm delighted to be proven wrong. There was plenty of wild garlic too - walks there during the rest of May are going to be quite pungent! May the month of May be as delightful for you, whatever's happening in your neck of the woods.

It's the May bank holiday and coincidentally peak flowering time for two of our most iconic spring wildflowers; fritillaries and English bluebells .  It's a good year for the fritillaries at North Meadow in nearby Cricklade, so NAH and I headed out yesterday morning to see them. It's hard to show how marvellous this location is in a photograph as the fritillaries are small and there are dire warnings not to leave the marked footpaths so the flowers can get on with doing their thing. We chose the blue route which is the longest walk around the meadow, around two miles in total. It doesn't encompass them all and soon we were walking amongst thousands of fritillaries, with a pale pinky, purple haze on the horizon showing there were thousands more still to see. It's a few years since we were last there, and I'm sure there were more white forms dotted amongst their darker cousins this time. I haven't managed to find what determines the variation: genetics, or en...

I returned to one of my regular walks last week and found a delightful surprise along the way. It took me most of Lockdown 1.0 to find Westmead's owl shown above as I usually walk on the lower paths from town instead of those by the car park at the top. I now marvel it took me so long because once you know where it is, you can't miss it! It's been joined recently by lots of other wildlife sculptures to form a trail through the newly planted woodland nearby. Luckily this time I've found them just as they're being installed. The robin was the first one which caught my eye as it's easily seen from the Avon Walkway nearby. I simply had to investigate and find them all, as were a family of four whose children were excitedly running to each new discovery as they found it.  Not all of them are installed yet, so this is something to return to another time so I can snap all eleven. There'll be benches installed for us to rest and ponder the view and perhaps stay a wh...

Last weekend's walk was a new-to-me-route from home and full of surprises. The quest was to find Lanhill Longbarrow, something I've known about for a while and probably Chippenham's oldest feature, as it dates back to between 3,500 and 2,500 BC i.e. Neolithic times.  The first surprise I found was the pictured intriguing stone at the side of the road... it looked ancient - especially as my head was full of images of standing stones at the time - but what looks like a mason's mark towards the bottom made me think it's not quite as old as it might be.   Then I found the footpath to the barrow, which was surprisingly not at the top of the hill where I thought it would be, especially as there's a tell-tale clump of trees, but I liked the view over the surrounding countryside anyway.   As I walked down the hill, I suddenly saw a low-ish mound with a gaping black hole. I had found the barrow! The chamber is one of three the mound is reported to contain, but this is th...

I spent some time this morning looking for a suitable poem about spring or blossom to mark today's World Poetry Day and the first day of spring. For some reason nothing seemed quite right, so I set off on my daily walk to help clear my head and come back refreshed. Little did I know I'd find some quite different inspiration towards the end of my walk. We must have a Dylan Thomas fan amongst our midst, who has hung up various covers of his works along the path by Hardenhuish Brook. A quick look at the pictured work online, and at last I have my poem - albeit nothing to do with spring or blossom - in the form of the extract below. It's the line about seeing the best side of people, not their worst which stands out for me. I readily admit I don't always manage that, but I do strive to see the best in a situation, and that resonates particularly in these strange times... "Every morning when I wake, Dear Lord, a little prayer I make, O please do keep Thy lovely eye On...

With our third Lockdown in full swing it's easy to start thinking about the places we can't go and slip into the slough of despond. Once again, I've found walking and the #walk1000miles challenge offers me a way out of this sad state of affairs. We're currently confined much closer to home and my neighbourhood's muddy pathways* have turned my thoughts towards alternatives to get some rest from them. As a result I've revived one of my walking projects, namely to walk on every street in Chippenham aka 'street bashing'**. It's turned what could be seen as boring urban walks into regular treasure troves. It's surprising what discoveries can be made just by being forced to look more closely at the everyday familiar***. Streets with nature names like Primrose Way and Willowbank have proved an avenue of pleasure and it's been fun to try and match the real thing to the names on my travels. This week, I'm walking in an area of town where the stree...

I've tended to pass poinsettias by in the run up to Christmas, but this tasteful display in a local florist's window during my recent wander around town made me pause and think again. They're quite an unusual plant, so here's a little more about them... They originally hail from Mexico, where they were valued by the Aztecs, who used them to decorate their temples and also thought they represented a new life for warriors who'd perished in battle. Another Aztec legend says the plants red bracts represents the blood of a goddess who died of a broken heart. This inspired the plant's French name, Etoile d’amour  aka Star of Love.  Poinsettias became more widely known following a botanical expedition to Mexico in 1803. It was named as a new species, Euphorbia pulcherrima by Johann Friedrick Klotzsch in 1834. The name poinsettia comes from Joel Roberts Poinsett, the first US official to Mexico, who was an avid botanist and brought it back to the United States in the ...

My walks have seen me in the centre of Chippenham a lot more lately because it's taken on quite a festive air. Whilst Christmas is set to be a much quieter affair this year, it's time to celebrate what's actually happening to cheer us up out there. It also means there's a chance of surprises - like the well-known local rider who often brings his horse down the traffic-free high street. Sunday's get up meant he was stopped quite a bit on his travels! There's a charming  Joy of Christmas window display which consists of artwork from 24 talented residents - both children and adults - together with their thoughts on what makes them joyful at this time of year. The canny town council have placed these in the windows of civic buildings and also at some of our independent shops. As a result the trail covers quite an extensive area and I found some not-known-to-me before shops which I plan to return to. I was also pleased to my friend W 's work is one selected for ...

A sunny day earlier in the week, a new walk to explore courtesy of the Bremhill Parish History Group , and a good friend* to explore it with, what could be better? A new-to-me discovery in the shape of the pictured postbox was the icing on the cake.  Not only is it a particularly attractive one, it also bears the intriguing sticker " Priority Postbox ". A little light googling when I returned home tells me this is one of 35,000 in the country which are standing by to accept completed home coronavirus test kits. Apparently special arrangements are needed to ensure kits are collected promptly (from postboxes and homes) to maximise the chance of a correct result for the test taken. Unsurprisingly the one closest to me is at Chippenham's main sorting office, a short walk away, though the two actually on our estate aren't included in the scheme. This one is at Charlcutt , a tiny hamlet of 20 properties in the heart of Wiltshire's countryside. It's a reassuring find...

The author may have been referring to perfume in his novel , but I've been musing on the very same thing lately whenever I walk past the pictured oleaster hedge (aka Eleagnus x ebbingei ) on my daily walk. Most of the time it barely merits a second glance as it looks pretty dowdy (in my view) which serves its purpose perfectly as a tough plant bordering a public footpath and requires little in the way of maintenance. All that has changed over the past few weeks due to its knockout scent which I can smell at least 50 yards away; from even further if the wind blows towards me. It brings back such a powerful memory as it's just like the smell of the suntan lotion mum used to rub into me on our summer holidays. It was a tropical scent which came out of a white bottle with an orange cap, I forget the brand, but ohhhhh the smell. One waft from that hedge and I'm back in Cornwall or The Gower , itching to wrest myself from mum's grasp and explore every pebble and rock pool t...

I thoroughly broke my plant buying duck at the weekend with a trip to the public plant sale at West Kington Nurseries . This usually happens in late April and early September, but this year's events meant both were combined into one sale spread over the longer Bank Holiday weekend instead. Like so many places these days there was lots of hand gel in evidence and sprays available to ensure safe wheelbarrow handling before I headed off to view the goodies on offer. Facemasks were the order of the day in the glasshouses and polytunnels, but thankfully not for coffee and cake time whilst I sorted out my plan of attack for the day. I was pretty good and stuck mainly to my list, though a rather nice Eupatorium* 'Chocolate' also leapt into my barrow, as well as a Hydrangea paniculata 'Diamant Rouge' and Actaea 'Hillside Black Beauty'.  I was pleased to find the foxglove 'Glory of Roundway' and aster 'Little Carlow' as both originate from nearby D...

Chippenham is currently all a-buzz with news of the appearance of a huge field of sunflowers to the north of the town this week.  Come with me on the three or so mile stroll to see them in their full glory - the photo above is a mere teaser of what truly greets us at the end of our walk... As you can see our countryside's having a bit of a blonde moment as the grasses which line many of our roads have now dried to show off their decorative seed heads. We're lucky on this walk as we're following Maud Heath's Causeway for much of the way. It means we have a nice safe path to walk along away from any passing traffic. We go under the railway and even here the path remains as... ... we have our own pedestrian tunnel. The path predates the railway by centuries (15th vs 19th). Here we're looking back the way I've come so we can see the evening light through the tunnel. More blonde moments... ... a pause by a shadowy bench... ... over the ancient clapper bridge , then...