At the bottom of my garden we have a small field, only an acre which is enough to have a few grazing sheep to keep the grass down. I do not go in the field very often, it’s pretty much the only place on my property where neighbours could see me and the garden being overgrown and full of plants is more interesting.
I have been around the garden quite a few times, taking photos, looking for and collecting leaves to print with, and looking for signs of hedgehogs and setting up my camera. Then I thought about the field’s hedgerows, there are two quite grown sides so i thought it was worth a few minutes wander to see if there was anything interesting there.
So here you can see the two hedgerows with a variety of different shapes trees and leaves along it, and my new friends who decided to follow me!
I found a good range of plants, from the usual oak trees and shrubs, to the odd holly bush, a foxglove and some interesting looking leaves. I tried to capture all the photos like they could be a motif, so using the last few inches of a branch with the flowering ends to them that would look good as a motif.
I also found this mystery plant last week, growing out of a pit where we dump concrete waste until it gets covered over in the future, but I noticed this quite large and unusual plant growing out of it. It had a very thick stem in the middle with these large leaves coming off of it, and when I went to pull a leaf off of it to print with, I found out there were spikes on the underside of it. I send images of it to my nan, who is a long-time gardener and grower, she made a few suggestions but could not identify it easily. I send it to a groupchat of my friends last night and luckily one of their mothers works in the National Trust, and identified it as a teasel. Teasels usually grow thistle type flowers out of the top, so without this it is hard to identify. Teasels are good for feeding some small birds, such as goldfinches, when they do flower, so I think this is definitely worth keeping!
Tahlia Paige 