Wild flowers moving towards Autumn

Our beautiful river, down by the bridge.  Today I walked back half-way from getting the paper (my good man dropped me off). Unfortunately my legs were feeling "feak and weeble" after climbing up the steepest part of the steep hill behind the house yesterday and really didn't enjoy today's walk. I am very unfit from not being able to walk in June/early July.  I took some wild flower photos, so here are a few:

Betony, which I've also found in white along another lane locally.

Common Cow Wheat, which grows on the bank, beside the Betony, beside the river . . .

On our journeys, this wild flower (Rosebay Willow Herb) more than any other shows the passage of time from Summer towards Autumn.  When I see the flowers being spent and turning to seed pods of cotton wool, so that only a few flowers remain at the tip, my heart sinks as I know summer is spent.  Into autumn the foliage changes to beautiful bronze, flame and Lucozade-orange tints.

Leucozona glaucia - a POSITIVE ID of a hoverfly - these seem to love Umbellifers.

Regular visitors will know that this walk is being shown in reverse!  Here's the view up-river - water levels quite low at the moment.

One of the Hawkweeds?)  The leaves have confused the ID . . . Might be Common or Leafy.

Looking back across the valley.  The farm is the one by our house (you can just see the yellow of our South-facing gable end).  On the ground, only a couple of old farm buildings are visible from the house, but the Google Earth image is not an encouraging one for potential buyers as I doubt they even get to the Street View . . .  Can you tell I am feeling despondent?

Above and below: Hemp Agrimony.

The start of my walk - looking across and up the valley.

Armageddon in a Welsh valley . . .

Death and destruction for the plants alongside what used to be a pathway through the woods on Next Door's farm. A few years ago he widened it into a four-berth cow highway. Then before Christmas he cut dunnamany trees down, mostly sickly ash and sycamore, but some decent specimens too. It all went for firewood. Now the big yellow JCB lumbers up and down, and having dragged out the stumps it is now digging away at the hillside and broadening the trackway so half the 250-cow milking herd will be able to walk abreast along it. The yellow boulder clay forms a base for the slate and shale bedrock which is dragged out next, although with that number of cows traipsing back and forwards twice a day in each direction when they're pastured over that side of the lane, the shale soon turns into mud.

The top of the track, as it was.

Blackthorn flowering.

Celendines (in our paddock, rather than along the trackway, although they were prolific there.)



Cow Parsley.

Yellow Archangel.

Red Campion.

I hate to hear the bellowing and shrieking of this citric yellow monster destroying the countryside - a trackway I know well from dog walking, horse riding, blackberrying. The flowers of this wilderness are now gone, mangled beneath tons of earth and shale. I shouldn't think the badgers are impressed either. The Elder trees which lined one side of it are ripped out and buried beneath the wider track. It will be years before the soil re-establishes itself from leaf-fall and the colonies of wild flowers make a proper comeback. No Foxgloves there this year. No Blackberries. No Celendines. No Red Campion. No carpet of Bluebells or embellishments of yellow Primroses deep into spring. No creamy mopheads of Elderflowers in May and June and no Elderberries come autumn. No Flowering Wood Rush, or Opposite-leaved Golden Saxifrage, and no Dog roses, for the beautiful arches on the bend which have been there as long as we have lived here, are now ripped out. Progress is it?