Officially Summer is over & we are now into Autumn, though the weather we have had over this past couple of weeks you would think we have gone straight into Winter. Temperatures in the daytime that have gone above 10C have been very rare, many days of rain & strong winds & night time temperature going as low as 1C. It is no wonder the vast majority of Summer visiting birds have disappeared & gone off to Africa for a warm up. On one of the decent days I decided to go up on the moors & take the last of the wild flowers, most of which have now gone to seed. When on this rare occasion we had some sunshine I had great fun trying to get the sun behind the plants to capture the beauty of the external edges of the plants, plants that you would not normally class as “hairy”, but such fine detail really shows up in such light. So hopefully you will be able to see exactly what I mean in these few shots I managed to get.
The sun light brings these flowers to life, with not just the petals but bud & stem as well.
A shot just a bit closer of this seed head, hopefully if we get a decent day in this coming week I will be able to see if these type of buds have opened & spread their seeds.
As you can see this one is a bit more advanced & already turning brown, just love how the backlit sun shows up the hairs on all 3 above.
Just the last few flowers o this foxglove, giving bees their last chance for some pollen.
This one has lost all it’s flowers & setting seed, one good thing this summer has been the Foxgloves, in our garden & on the moors they have grown to some staggering heights.
So much colour within the plants still, just catches my photographers eye all the time.
Some wild plants just are not ready to give up on producing flowers, as this Purple Toad Flax shows, with seed heads below the flowers & buds still not out above it. Will it fully flower before the frost get’s it? Not sure.
Finally an unusual bird to our feeding stations, a Nuthatch, for the past 3 or 4 weeks this one has visited us everyday, so fast I can only grab a shot of it on the feeders , but very much a welcome visitor. Such well defined lines, a striking bird.