A lovely day out in my garden

Yesterday was our first sunny day for weeks, we didn't have any plans so were able to enjoy a relaxing day amongst the butterflies and bees in our garden, just pottering.
First lovely find of the day was this borage which has just appeared in our verge next to my comfrey, it certainly wasn't there last year, although I do keep trying to grow them. I have tried growing from seed and buying in pots and then planting out never with any success, so lets hope this isn't a one summer wonder!

We spent most of the morning sitting out just enjoying being outside, but of course sitting means looking and looking means finding things to do so every so often one of us would walk off to do a bit of weeding! The garden was alive with butterflies everywhere and so many bees humming, it was wonderful, I always kept my camera close by, and kept photographing the butterflies, took far too many and won't bore you with too many, just a couple of my favourites. like this one of my buddleia covered in peacock butterflies and a comma.

We also got daughters new sea kayak out so I could have a closer look at it! It's very nice, I like the colour!

and this I think is the first small copper I've photographed in my garden this year.

 

Small copper with a gatekeeper

In the afternoon Mr S went off to do his weekly butterfly count on the common, this is something he does for the Butterfly Conservation every year.

I'm amazed he saw any, I would have thought that they were all in our garden,

but no he saw plenty 14 different specied in fact, he didn't see one of these though, a Red Admiral, unlike all the other butterflies in our garden yesterday, this Red admiral prefered to stay on the red valarium rather than the marjorams and buddleias.

We also had a holly blue in the garden again which didn't make it onto his list although he did get a common blue instead.
It was really quite a warm day and returned with a very hot, tired and smelly dog, very smelly.

Time for a bath, We have enjoyed Megs company now for 7 years and believe it or not this is her first ever bath, partly because she is so heavy and partly because up until last summer we didn't have a bath for her. In the past I have just rubbed a few drops of tea tree oil over her if she has been unbareably smelly! She's a labrador and they love rolling in interesting things.
Anyway bath time.

I had to put camera down and help!
While Meg dried herself off we lifted the remaining bed of onions and placed them on a make shift wire rack set up in our garage.

Job well done, time for our pre dinner drink, interrupted by this visiting hornet,

hornet got bored, so we could return to our drink and watch these ants crawling out of one of my herb pots and then climbing up one of our granite posts before taking off.

later on we enjoyed dinner outside, camera went away for the meal, I knew I would regret it as we had a first humming bird hawk moth visit, our first sighting of the year! maybe it will return today!