Of flora & fauna

We've been having a run of warmish and sunny weather and it feels like every single plant has exploded into life at once.

Our daffs are finished, the tulips are out and I've seen bearded irises in full flower in Tours; although ours are yet to come out. Cherry and pear trees are covered in snow white blossom. The crab apple next to the building where I mainly teach in Tours is in full flower and covered with bees. Our ornamental cherry is just opening its candy pink flowers and over this weekend we'll have a look and see if we can find some early purple orchids. The colza, or rape seed field, are bright acid yellow.

Earlier this week we took Tim & Pauline's lift[giant jack] which raises a ride-on mower back to them -- they'd kindly lent it to us so we could fix a front tire. This gave us an opportunity to also go and photograph the snake's-head fritillaries which grow in a ditch not too far away from them.

Delicate snake's-head fritillaries in a roadside ditch

These particular snake's-head fritillaries are found in a shallow roadside ditch next to a flood meadow. They are exquisite with their purple-red chequered flowers and grow only in a very specific habitat: hay meadows in lowland flood plains. Before moving here, we'd only ever seen them in photographs -- they are rare because of this habitat. They need natural, i.e. unimproved [untreated], flood plain meadows, a type of meadow which is in heavy decline. We are lucky to have them!

Last year the snake's-head fritillaries were just beyond their best towards the end of April but this year, after the very mild winter, they flowered earlier and indeed on Tuesday, quite a few were clearly beyond their best. Nevertheless there were still some to photograph.

Close up you can clearly see the chequer-board pattern

We also found the chappie in the photograph below clinging on to our front door key last week. It was very determined to hang on. We know it's a moth, but wondered if any of our readers who know much more about these things could give us any further information. The wings seemed to be concertina-ed so we wondered if it was a newly emerged individual busy pumping out its wings.

Finally, speaking of fauna, we thought readers might enjoy this photo of Tinka "wearing" Niall's jeans! :-)