A-Z Challenge 2013 - 'F'- Foxglove

 My A-Z posts this year are based on my garden – flowers, animals, the birds and the bees, butterflies - with a bit of poetry thrown in. For some letters I am expecting to cheat somewhat – wishing they were here.

F - Fieldfare, Foxglove, Fuschia, Fern, Frog, Fox

From time to time we see a bird easily mistaken for a Spring songster

Fieldfare

 Or flocking fieldfares, speckled like the thrush,

Picking the berry from the hawthorn bush,

That come and go on Winter’s chilling wing,

And seem to share no sympathy with Spring.

It will be some months yet before the digitalis rise,

Foxgloves (Digitalis)

Through quaint obliquities I might pursue

These cravings; when the foxglove, one by one,

Upwards through every stage of the tall stem,

Had shed beside the public way its bells,

Or this shrub shows such blooms:

Fuschia blooms

And the glorious rose with her flushing face,
And the fuschia with her form of grace,

It isn’t always flowers that catch your eye among the flowers; fiddler's elbows can be quite striking even though they don’t raise a sound.

Bracken (Fiddler's elbows)

The young of this years spawning will appear among the shrubs usually in June. How soon will it be before they go a wooing too?

 I have yet to meet this cunning fellow in the garden, but elsewhere it is not uncommon

Urban Fox (in a Birmingham garden)

 Who

Wears the smartest evening dress in England?

Checks his watch by the stars

And hurries, white-scarfed

To the opera

In the flea-ridden hen-house

Where he will conduct the orchestra?

Poems:

• Fieldfare – John Clare, The Shepherd’s Calendar, March
• Foxglove – from The Prelude – Wordsworth
•  Fuschia – Harriet Annie Wilkins, A Song of the Flowers
• Fox – Ted Hughes

Photo attributions:

• Fieldfare – Feb 2012; By nottsexaminer; upload by Fae – CC BY-SA 2.0
• Fuschia – By Ron Saunders from Warrington, UK – CC BY-SA 2.0
• Fox – By Oosoom – CC BY-SA 3.0