Friday 9 August 2013

Odds and Ends

Just a few 'odds and ends' this morning to clear up a few photos which have not fitted with anything else.
The first of these is a stately plant which is proving very common at the moment.  The Angelica plant (Angelica sylvestris) is a member of the large and diverse carrot family and as such displays large umbelliferous heads of flower on top of hollow, reddish coloured stems.  Most of the plant has been used in the past in a culinary context.  As a child we always moaned about the little, bright green bits of Angelica which, in their candied state, were used as decoration on top of trifles and the like.
Looking towards the garden and the recent spell of wetter weather has brought out the slugs and snails again.  Particularly worthy of note are the Large Red Slugs (Arion ater).  Properly named Large Black Slugs, this species is a strange one as individuals can be anything from completely black, to brown, red and even sometimes, white.
Also crawling around the garden are thousands of Woodlice.  This one is a very common species called Porcellio scaber or the Common Rough Woodlouse and is one of about 45 different woodlouse species in the UK.  Very useful at disposing of all the decaying organic matter in the garden.  All are members of the terrestrial crustacean Subphylum.

1 comment:

New Hampshire Gardener said...

I saw slugs last year that were a kind of fluorescent pink.