Other flowers are available

At the end of April, I thought I'd had all the bluebells I was going to get, at least in Bristol, but there were a few late surprises in some more sheltered pockets, like this lane at Winterbourne in South Gloucestershire ...

... and also at nearby Monk's Pool Nature Reserve.

There were also cowslips still blooming in one of the meadows on Purdown beneath the BT tower.

Mostly, though, it's been a glorious month of cow parsley and wild garlic, both of which bloom in profusion at Badock's Wood, in the Trym gorge ...

... and in Hermitage Wood, high above the River Frome on Purdown.

Oh, and mustn't forget my favourite whitethorn, here also in Hermitage Wood ... 

... and further upstream on the Frome, at Winterbourne Down.

And, of course, lots of other flowers too ... 

row 1: cowslip; red campion; yellow mustard; ground ivy; whitethorn x 2; comfrey

row 2: greater stitchwort; wood avens; cuckoo flower (lady's smock); hedge mustard; dog rose; jack-by-the-hedge (garlic mustard); bluebells, yellow archangel, wild garlic; hemlock water dropwort

row 3: horse chestnut, whitethorn and cow parsley; green-winged orchid; rowan; forget-me-not; flag iris; lesser celandine; columbine; elder blossom

row 4: fringe cups; yellow archangel; buttercup and vetch; wood speedwell; wild strawberry; herb Robert; black mustard; alkanet

The squeeze-belly stile leading down to Wickham Glen was also beautifully dressed with cow parsley and alkanet ... 

... while downstream at Eastville Park lake, there were cygnets, ducklings, goslings, cootlings and, rather ominously, the local heron. 

Where there are lots of flowers, there are insects, but most of them far too flighty for me to take a photo of.

Fungi don't move around much, though there's not a lot about at present:

Good times for hoggin finding, though: last year's leaf litter is gone, mud is no longer an issue, other people are out walking and displacing soil, and spring showers make the ground soft enough to dig bits out:

On Halfpenny Bridge at Snuff Mills

Path at Vassalls Park

There was deep sadness one morning when I was walking at Blaise and found that a favourite tree - a sweet chestnut estimated to be between four and six hundred years old - had fallen in the four weeks since I'd last visited it. 

I'd got into the habit of photographing it every time I saw it: above, on the left hand side, is how it looked in November, March and early April. 

Nearby in the wood, there was another fallen tree - a beech - blocking the path ...

... and another in the woods at Winterbourne Down. It's been such a year for falling trees, with no signficant wind storms to cause it. I can only assume it's down to extremes of climate - a hot dry summer, followed by a very wet winter, followed by a dry spring.

Other sadnesses: a fallen bluetit and a fallen nest. 

More predated bluetit feathers here, along with an (early) moulted great spotted woodpecker tail feather, a goldfinch primary and a tawny owl secondary.

After the loss of one old friend, making the acquaintance of a new one - this magnificent, railing-eating oak in the woods at Bishop's Knoll - was a comfort. 

Old Sneed Park nature reserve

Old Sneed Park Lake

After the hurly-burly of spring, Cwtch and I are looking forward to summer, where you can wander along side paths and end up getting lost in woods you know perfectly well all the rest of the year. Bring on the peace of the deep, dark woods.

A Whale of a Time

After half a century plus of living in Bristol (give or take a few years of exile in the middle), it's always a bit of a thrill to find somewhere new to visit, especially when it's a nature reserve right in the middle of the city.  So off it was to one of the most affluent parts of the city, Snide Park.

OK, so it's Sneyd Park really. Snide Park is what we used to call it when we were kids, living on the wrong side of the B4054 Henleaze Road. The name has stuck - and so have I.

Look, you can tell it's dead posh by its oak-framed information board.  

The moment you leave gracious suburbia, you're in Bishops Knoll, once part of a mediaeval deer park and later, in the 19th century, the gardens of a (now demolished) mansion, complete with terraces, an arboretum, orchards, lawns and paddocks.  We stuck to the footpath through woodlands to get down to Bennett's Patch and White's Paddock, alongside the River Avon, being inspected all the way down by a persistent Southern Hawker. 

Being next to the river means it's also alongside the Portway, one of the busiest and fastest roads in the city, and the Severn Beach line - between the two, in fact, and very noisy. But I have a handy trick for dealing with that, which is to pretend the traffic is the ice-age torrent that originally carved the Gorge. That way it doesn't impinge after a while. 

Our reason for coming here was to see the whales in their new home. Well - not real ones, obviously; rather, the wicker ones designed by Cod Steaks, which graced Bristol during the city's stint as European Green Capital (back in the halycon days before our ex-Prime Minister asked a stupid question and got a very stupid answer). 

Here they are in their sea of plastic bottles in Millennium Square, exactly a year ago.

And now they are surfacing in the city's newest nature reserve. 

It's an appropriate place for them to find a home because in 1750, the ship Adventure brought back two whales, which were rendered to blubber just up the road at Sea Mills Dock. The venture into the whaling trade continued for almost 50 years.

They remind me quite a lot of the beached barges at Purton near Sharpness, which we went to see just over three years ago.

Instead of going back over the railway bridge, we walked down to the tunnel that goes under the track. 

Being a geek, I was excited to spot a brick from the old Cattybrook Brickworks near Almondsbury - one of those names I hope to fit into a poem one day. 

Then one last glimpse of the whales through the trees and home.