Climbing hydrangea

Dear Readers, I am so delighted with the climbing hydrangea this year – it is absolutely smothered in flowers. A few years ago, some ashy mining bees discovered it, and spent every day gathering the pollen, but I haven’t seen them for a while. Still, by the end of this week my exams will be over (as my long-suffering regular readers know) and I’ll be able to pay a bit more attention to who is visiting it. In the meantime, I am just enjoying it.

The sparrows have now discovered my buddleia, with its banquet of blackfly, and are becoming regular visitors. They cheer me up as I raise my head from my Mann-Whitney U test ( a statistical test of difference where you don’t know if the data is normally distributed just in case you, like me, had never heard of it).

And in a corner of the back garden the mock orange is in full flower and the smell is amazing. The bumblebees enjoy it too, but they still seem few and far between. We’re due some warm weather for the next few weeks, so let’s see if things improve.

And, with apologies to anyone who thinks that these are weeds, here are some teasels. I don’t know why I love them so much – they are prickly and definitely a bit on the thuggish side. But the bees will love the flowers, and the finches will (hopefully) like the seeds, and in the meantime they look like enthusiastic little green people, dancing around with their arms raised and their hair on end.

I make no apology for including my favourite meme of all time. I can’t look at a teasel without being reminded of it. Enjoy!