tales of the foxglove tree

The hawthorn has come into full flower in the past couple of days.  Looking at our boundary hedge, I suddenly realised that David Hockney was right about hawthorn.  There were several paintings of it in his show at the RA a couple of years back, and at the time I found the heaviness of his great masses of white flowers too extreme.   However, this year our hedge is producing just such dense, clotted sprays.  A case of art teaching one to observe life, or simply that the hawthorn enjoyed the wet spring, and that in a typical year the thorn in Yorkshire grows more lavishly than that in north Essex?

All sorts of things are flowering, too many to mention them all.  Once again we have a display of foxglove tree flowers.  I grew the Paulownia from seed (I don't remember it being very difficult) intending to grow the resulting plants as stooled specimens in the rose bed.  If you cut Paulownia hard back, it responds by sending up vigorous vertical shoots that produce extraordinarily large, furry, almost heart shaped leaves.  I wanted them as a counter-balance to the small, bitty leaves of the roses.  However, one year I left the pruning until late, and a stem had reached the size where it was ready to flower.  Going to cut it down, I saw the buds and didn't have the heart to chop that stem down.  Thus, we now have a small flowering foxglove tree in the near rose bed, amid the stooled stems.  There is emphatically not room for a large tree.  It would shade the roses, block the view, and is altogether too close to the house.  I have begun to wonder, though, if I could manage it at around its existing size as a sort of pollard.  Given how well they tolerate hard pruning I don't see that it would mind, so it is more a question of whether I have the time and energy to wobble around with ladder and pole lopper maintaining another shrub.

It is fortunate that the Paulownia lies downhill from the house, as we look out from the veranda directly into its large, pendulous, bell shaped bluish-mauve flowers.  We see them against a background  of other foliage, against which they show up reasonably well.  Peering upwards to view them against a blue sky they tend to disappear.

Meanwhile, the starlings nesting in the roof at the front of the house have hatched out their clutch of eggs successfully.  We know this because when the babies are being fed, the sound of excited cheeping carries to the far side of the drive.  It seems an odd thing to do.  I know that each chick is trying to out-do its brothers and sisters, to attract the maximum share of whatever food the parents have brought back, but making that much racket they would be advertising themselves as targets to every magpie in the neighbourhood, if it weren't that they were nesting inside the security of the roof.  The parents fly in and out of a ventilation hole in the soffit board that's lost its protecting grille, and it's a wonderful thing to watch them dart vertically upwards through the opening, wings clapped against their bodies at the last moment.  A magpie couldn't get in there.