Any excuse to take a walk in the woods – and spotting the bird boxes we put up last year in the woodland on the Sewerby Estate was a the perfect reason to grab a coat and head out in the gentle spring sunshine.
At either side of the track winding through the still bare trees, a flood of yellow aconites poured over a small incline. Someone told me that aconites don’t actually open their flowers until the temperature reaches 10 degrees, so Iguess it was nippier than I thought.
A little further on, a sea of snowdrops appeared out of nowhere. Wave upon rippling wave of white flowers as far as the eye could see. I remember reading a strange snowdrop fact (the kind of thing that you hope will come upin a pub quiz) - apparently the flower contains a substance that was used as anti-freeze in tanks during the First World War.
Then I stumbled across some fan-shaped fungus which, my Assistant Warden informed me later, is Turkey Tail, and you can see the resemblance. But I would have preferred a name that was a little more poetic…fungus-shaped –like-shells-that-tiny-mermaids-sit-in,perhaps?
All this took less than an hour and I even managed an alfresco sarni plus a glimpse of the park’s herd of deer to boot. I must remember to go out to lunch more often.
Aconites
Snowdrops
Turkey Tail