In my last post I mentioned that I had been out and about looking for a cowslip to take a picture of and had failed miserably. This may seem a bit of a strange problem given that I had been expounding on the fact that there was a multitude of the little harbingers of spring about. Well, there are, just not within a short walk of my house. I started on the industrial estate where I had seen some on my way home. The problem is that I could only find one, it was looking a bit sorry for itself and I couldn’t get a picture without an incredibly unphotogenic industrial unit in the background.
Never fear I thought, I will find some in the grassy area near the reservoir and posh houses, or on the verges on the main road. Ha! All I found were dandelions and daisies, pretty, but not what I was after. Where was I going wrong? According to Wikipedia (I have just checked this in case I was being a muppet and was looking in the wrong place) as well as somehow apparently being used for the treatment of headaches, whooping cough and tremors Primula Veris (cowslip) is ‘a low growing herbaceous perennial plant…found…[in] open fields, meadows’. Not such a muppet.
In case you are thinking why didn’t she just go back to where she found them in the first place, the clouds were grey and threatening rain (and delivering hail) and I only wanted to take a quick snapshot, I thought it would be easy!
Still, all was not lost, I took the photograph of the celandine shown in the previous post, found some grape hyacinth growing photogenically at the base of a tree (shown below left, but must go back and take a better picture with my other camera) and discovered a host of wood anemones (below right) growing in a spot I discovered a few months back that was covered in winter aconites. All in all, not a bad afternoon’s work.
