Midsummer Flowers at Shardlow

 I'm not sure how six months has passed since Christmas, but here we are at (just after) the longest day - it feels like time has flown by. The actual longest day was wet, so this trip out was a couple of days later.

 Shardlow is one of those places that it's easy to drive through without really paying attention, even though its main road is now classified as a 'B' road and most traffic whizzes past on the A50. My previous explorations have been along the Trent and Mersey canal but I'd recently seen a post about poppies in nearby fields and wanted to track them down.

Our route started at the car park on Wilne Lane, and followed the canal back towards the main road, walking between wild flowers at the canal's edge on one side and gardens on the other. 

  

At the main road we turned right (west), over the canal, and followed the pavement past the village church, to the junction with Aston Lane where we took a footpath heading more or less north, signposted for Great Wilne. 

After a short distance threading its way behind houses, the path led to suddenly open countryside which felt miles away from the bustle of the village. The cows were curious about us - and what we were doing taking photos - but fortunately were in another field :)

Shardlow lies between the Trent and Derwent rivers and the countryside is very flat, with the path actually raised up on a bank rather like an east coast sea defence bank.

 Soon we came across the first sighting of poppies, along with ox eye daisies and cornflowers. It wasn't possible to get really close because we were standing on the raised bank with a ditch and fence between the path and field, but the flowers were stunning, particularly at the edge of the field where the three flowers grew in blue, red and white stripes.

At this point I thought we'd maybe seen all the poppies - after all it's easy to make a few look like lots on a social media post, but as we continued we found another field with flowers growing at its edges. I guess most of these were deliberately sown rather than actually 'wild' but they look lovely and are excellent for bees.

Mixed in with them were small blue-flowered plants which I think are flax.

We'd now definitely walked past all the poppies, but as the path continued towards Great Wilne it turned through a field where flax was being grown as a crop.

You can already see a haze of blue above green stems but in a week or so I think it will be amazing, so I'm hoping to return

The path was now mostly following the edge of fields with wild roses and blackberry bushes flowering in the hedges, and grasses and wild wildflowers alongside them. 

This section seemed very popular with butterflies - I spotted a couple of  tortoiseshells, cabbage whites, a brown butterfly which darted away but which I'd guess to have been a speckled wood, and a cinnabar moth. Not back for a short section of path. 

I'm always unduly excited to find a brook or ditch with actual water that needs crossing by a bridge - so was delighted to find we had to do just that. It's childish no doubt but life's about  enjoying the simple things.

Walking alongside the brook took us to the road at Great Wilne, which led back to the car. As with the previous walk at Shardlow there's one aspect that's not visible in photos - traffic noise on the A50. It's not loud at this distance but it's definitely there as a rumble in the background. Also this day there seemed to be a lot of air traffic out of Castle Donnington - most of them taking off and turning straight towards us on the last section. A lot of places in this area suffer from noise from the A50 and airport, and while they aren't major disruptions but it's as well to expect them.

 

Chatsworth Flowers (and an ice cream)

When I got back from my most recent visit to Chatsworth gardens, I realised I hadn't taken photos of any of the 'hard' landscaping or water features - the huge fountain, the Cascade, the various ponds.

I just had masses of photos of flowers, and an ice cream :)

So here are the flowers. 

A lot of similar flowers appear throughout the garden, repeated from one area to another to give a sense of wholeness to such a large subdivided space (in total it's 105 acres). So I've arranged them more by type then by the part of the garden.

There are so many different shades and sizes of iris, all the blues and purples, plus yellow 'flags' here in the kitchen garden and alongside streams and ponds. The almost black is the most striking though best seen in contrast to others - I'm not sure I'd fill a garden with it

The peonies were so gorgeous and flamboyant, covering every shade from white to deepest pink.

A row of several different shades grows along the north-facing wall of the Maze, and more are to be found in the cutting garden.

My favourite area of the garden is Arcadia, the newly planted section that runs across the hillside. 

It's all carefully planted with the flowers here all in shades of white, pink, purple and even green, but feels like a wild meadow. 

It's exuberant yet at the same time calming - an excellent place to just sit for a while.

Further on there are wilder bits of garden - buttercups allowed to flower freely, and ox-eye daisies lining the Grotto pond, showing how wonderful even native wild flowers can be.