Yesterday, Crafty Green Boyfriend and I had a lovely visit to Edinburgh's Botanic Gardens. ((You now no longer need to book a ticket to visit the gardens, as the booking system put in place during lockdown has been removed. Though given the high rates of infection across Scotland at the moment, i wouldn't be entirely surprised to see it put back into place in the near future).
We made friends with this lively grey squirrel
who was feeding on the sunflower seeds that we scattered
but then suddenly another squirrel arrived, along with two carrion crows
and our squirrel ran away
The pictorial meadows (which I first blogged about a month ago, here) are still looking beautiful, with a different selection of flowers in bloom compared to a month ago
and though it's been a poor year for hoverflies overall, there were plenty of hoverflies amongst these flowers, including this batman hoverfly (Myathropa florea)
Plenty of flowers are still in bloom around the gardens too, not just in the pictorial meadows, including autumn crocuses
and these lovely yellow flowers, some sort of large daisy, but I didn't check what species they were!
What a lovely visit to the Botanic Gardens, I did enjoy seeing your photographs.
ReplyDeleteAll the best Jan
Grey Squirrels seem very active at the moment. We have one who somehow grips the bird-feeder pole. On Saturday evening we saw something on the breakwater. One side of the structure was already engulfed in incoming waves; the other side, not quite at that point. I thought for a moment the animal must be rat, but no, it was definitely a squirrel, probably a youngster exploring. I hope it was OK and had not been chased by a dog (which are meant to be on leads in the reserve). It seemed a strange 'squirrel environment', but we later read on the warden's site that these creatures frequent her on-site garden, though they have to cross wide tree-less spaces to do so. I clicked on your floral photos to enlarge them; a fabulous tapestry of flower-heads! Bright colours seem particularly important right now after the overcast skies of many weeks' duration. And the sun has at last finally come out.
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