Marbled White Butterfly

 

This is one of my favorite butterfly shots I uploaded to the Alamy stock agency a couple of summers ago... a Marbled White (Melanargia galathea) feeding on a Small Black Knapweed flowerhead. Early morning is a good time to see the Marbled White as it absorbs the warmth of the sun's rays with open wings. This species can be seen quite easily, even from a distance, and you may see a flower head with several adults feeding on nectar together... especially on the rich food sources Thistle and Knapweed.

Soft Plum Blossom

 

The Plum - which I will always recognize in future after reading-up on the blossom shown here - has many forms and varieties... my favorite being the Mirabelle, which I have never seen growing in England, but is common here in France. It was probably cultivated for European soils by the Romans, from origins in the Anatolia Caucasus. Shakespeare refers to cultivated Plums, Prunes and Damsons... and many gardens of his generation must have contained a large variety of those fruits.

His contemporary, Gerard, in his own 1597 Herball wrote... "To write of Plums particularly would require a peculiar volume... Every clymate hath his owne fruite, far different from that of other countries; my selfe have threescore sorts in my garden, and all strange and rare; there be in other places many more common, and yet yearly commeth to our hands others not before knowne."

Red Poppies

Known by several forenames including Common, Field, Corn and Flanders - every November they are worn in Commonwealth countries in memory of those who fell during the Great War - the particular colour of this poppy is only rivaled, but not matched, by one other British flower... the Scarlet Pimpernel. My ”Familiar Wild Flowers” (F. Edward Hulme - Cassel & Co. 1906) relates the impact of its colouring by saying... ”Though the Marsh Marigold flower is a perfectly pure and brilliant yellow; the White Campion, a white of spotless purity; the Borage as deep and unsullied a blue as could possibly be met with or imagined - these colours, beautiful as they are, must yield in brilliant strength and intensity to the scarlet of the Poppy.”
I love them as they appear in early morning light, back-lit by the rising sun, damp with dew, fragile petals from the newly emerged flowers rising above the nodding heads of those about to cast off their protective sepals.

Pyramidal Orchid

The Pyramidal Orchid is so common on the chalk downs of the Isle of Wight it has been declared their County flower. This attractive orchid takes years - working underground as a bulb and relying on the presence of a specific fungus in the soil - to produce leaves and its highly distinctive pyramidal shaped head, which is a densely packed cluster of up to one hundred pale-pink or reddish-purple flowers. At the southern tip of the Indre-et-Loire département (37) of France where I live the seasons are in advance of much of the UK by two to three weeks, so here the Pyramidal Orchid flowers throughout May and into June on the warm, chalky, lime-rich soil banks edging many roads I cycle along.

Evening Apple Blossom

Apple Blossom is beautiful in its own right at any time of the day... but on a warm Summer evening in France with the setting sun slowly sinking to a low horizon and back-lighting a single blossom flower, then the real beauty of the fruit tree's colourful display comes to life.

Red Poppies

Red Poppies are always a joy to see waving and bobbing about on a Summer breeze... these could almost be anywhere in the French countryside with fields and lanes throughout the land being bordered with swathes of this wild plants' bright, but delicately fragile, scarlet flowers.