A caterpillar as large as your finger, a flightless grasshopper and a plant to guard against witchcraft in this week’s informative nature walk with photographer Ray Roberts.....

There are several rowan or mountain ash trees in and around Quethiock including one in our garden and they all have bunches of orange berries on them, which birds enjoy. The rowan tree – Sorbus aucuparia – is related to the whitebeam and service trees and is no relation to our true ash tree – Fraxinus excelsior – but due to its feather-shaped leaves being similar and because the rowan can grow higher up our British mountains, the name, mountain ash stuck.

Nowadays the tree is planted to decorate streets and parks, but was once planted near farm buildings as a safeguard against witchcraft. In mythology the tree is associated with the mighty god Thor.

I came across a greater knapweed Centaurea scabiosa – plant that was out in bloom. It looks just like the common knapweed that has purple blooms about 35mm wide, but this greater one was about 55mm across. It is a plant that likes chalky ground and some years ago at Penlee Battery, near Rame Head, I photographed a greater knapweed flower that was 100mm wide. Now that flower had earned the name ‘greater’.

At this time of the year the female flowers of Lords and Ladies – Arum maculatum – will have developed into a stalk of shiny scarlet poisonous berries that, along with the red-berried bryony’s trailing runners, really brighten up the hedgerows.

Walking around the village playing field I found quite a few puff balls that were not quite ready to touch with my stick to make them erupt with a cloud of brown spores, but what was more interesting was a large green caterpillar of a poplar hawkmoth climbing up a trunk of a small tree. This one was nearly as big as my little finger and I thought it would be quite a meal for a bird.

I was on my knees on a path field trying to photograph a meadow grasshopper which for some reason, kept hopping away from me. This one is the only flightless grasshopper in Britain, even though it does have wings and I was following it, still on my knees, when we arrived at a piece of damp waste ground beside the hedge where I was delighted to see some yellow pimpernel – Lysimachia nemorum - flowers.

These flowers, about 8mm wide, are on sprawling stems that trail across the ground and have a collection of nick names such as ‘star flower’ and ‘Mary’s clover’ although a more common name is ‘wood loosestrife’ as the plant is a closer relative to loosestrifes than it is to the pimpernel family.