A-Z Challenge 2013 - 'T' - Tulips

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.

T – Tulips, Thrush, Thistle, Treecreeper

Our tulips have no association with Amsterdam, unless the bulbs, at some time long in the past, came from there.

Tulips

 No longer shy, as days grow longer,

Raising their heads

They begin to flirt

Tulips dressed in many a color

Breezes swirling

Each floral skirt

The songsters’ battle has been joined between the blackbird and the thrush; this fellow is very melodious.

 

Song Thrush

Within a thick and spreading hawthorn bush

That overhung a mole-hill large and round,

I heard from morn to morn a merry thrush

Sing hymns to sunrise, and I drank the sound

With joy; …

When I see any form of thistle in the garden I must confess I root it out and dispatch it to the compost heap. In the country however I always admire one like these.

 

Spear Thistles

Against the rubber tongues of cows and the hoeing hands of men

Thistles spike the summer air

And crackle open under a blue-black pressure.

The spear thistle is famous as the emblem of Scottish Kings. 

Just before Easter I spent nearly an hour trying to photograph a rare visitor to our garden, last seen in December 2010. The verse that follows could not be more apt; I did not succeed.

 

Treecreeper

Shy woodland birds of humans they show respectful fear

They climb tree trunks in search of insects and when human to them venture near

Of the tree trunk they disappear to the other side

Of watchers eyes they'd much prefer to hide.

 

Poems:

• Spring Flowers – Tulips – Mary Havran
• The Thrush’s Nest – John Clare
• Thistles – Ted Hughes
• Treecreepers – Francis Duggan

Photo:

• Common Treecreeper – Wikipedia Commons; CC BY-SA 3.0

 

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