flowers without gardens

Because we don't have a garden, more of a yard with lots of steps, we have to use our town parks for garden stuff.  The kids and Jason do grow food with some friends on a plot of land, but this time we wanted flowers

so this is Morrab gardens, full of beautiful flowering magnolia trees at the moment

and of course daffodils, we sketched and sketched, there are so many beautiful flowers there.

we photographed too

We feel lucky to have such a beautiful garden a five minute walk away

we did have some crocuses in a pot in our yard but they died so quickly

and I just love magnolia trees when they're flowering.  It feels like summer is on its way...

Blackberrying

I absolutely love this time of year, when the blackberries are out and we can pick our own pudding for free!

how ridiculous that there isn't more fruit for free, we get elderflower and berries for wine and sloes for gin but really that's about it for West Cornwall.  Perhaps there is more in other parts of England, I hope so

it's not just the blackberries, everyone's up for going out for a walk and the insect life is so abundant that Teague gets to use the macro setting on his camera

to startling effect!  Now I know where all those science fiction creatures come from.

and crickets are happy to land on a pair of fuschia leggings, and stay there for quite some time

and we still have flowers.  In fact it almost feels like too much, a last burst before autumn.  Time to get our dusty nature diaries out again I think.

Nature diaries

Every year we try to keep nature diaries and every year we end up with scraps of paper and many many started but never completed books. I'm not sure why we find it so difficult to be consistent and record the animals and birds we see in one book labelled 'nature', but this year it's going to be different. We have already recorded two separate trips out in the same books! This was a rockpooling session
and all these pictures are of birds we saw when we saw the spoonbill

except we didn't see an owl

and we certainly didn't see a red grouse

that's the trouble with leaving them to follow their interests we end up with birds we couldn't have seen in the day and birds we absolutely never see down here. But we do have consistent nature books so lets see if we can keep it up!

On a similar note of inconsistent home educators Caitlin Moran (home educated herself) has written one of the most wonderful articles on home education I have ever read and definitely the most honest. I'm not sure if it will help or hinder the home ed cause but it's so worth reading. Just look up 'hey, teacher leave us kids alone' in the Times online. The truth is on the whole we all turn out ok in the end.