The Last Week of June

A River of Stones........

A new month. Two swallows skim the holly hedge and circle, chattering, against a soft blue sky.

In the garden this week, everything looks stronger and brighter after days of sun and warm rain.

A lily flowers again. The corm was a birthday gift from an old friend, several years ago.

In the wild pond, there are common newts beneath the duck weed and water forget-me-not grows, waiting for female newts to wrap their eggs in submerged leaves.

Candelabra primula against huge leaves of Canadian skunk cabbage, whose yellow spring flowers smelled as pungent as their name implies.

Opium poppies, self-seeded on fallow earth.

White mallow and common fumitory in amongst the poppies.

Enough salad leaves to feed us....

...while the runner beans flower at last, held back by drought and cold nights.

Ripening strawberries....

....little green blueberries have a while to go.....

crab apples swell hard in rose-tinted green...

and Tay berries ripen in the sun.

A bumble bee dips in and out of foxglove flowers.

Cucumbers struggle in a greenhouse where there is too much overhanging shade from a spreading oak.

Flowering at last, Kiftsgate, the July rose.