There are eight different members of the Willow-herb family, named after their long, willow-like leaves, but the prettiest, in my opinion, is the tall rosebay willow-herb – Epilobium angustifolium. Near St Ive there is a large group of these running along the top of the hedge with their pink/purple blooms and they look beautiful.

Their nickname is ‘fireweed’ and as well as growing on hedgerows they are quite happy to colonise waste ground. In fact in the years just after World War II they started appearing on the rubble of bombed houses and I can remember seeing these fireweed flowers on ruined houses in Saltash when I was a young boy.

I’d had a lift up to St Ive and on the walk back to Quethiock I saw lots of perforate St John’s wort – Hypericum perforatum – flowers on the hedges. They sport yellow five petalled flowers and the name perforate signifies the tiny translucent dots on the underside of their small leaves. In medieval times bunches of these flowers were hung in windows and around doorways to prevent Satan and his followers from entering the house.

I couldn’t help stopping near a bungalow to photograph some musk mallows – Malva moschata – that were growing beside the road. These five petalled pink flowered musk mallows have long been a cottage-garden plant but, as usual, they escaped into the wild where they decorate hedges and grassy banks.

The brilliant tiny red flowers of scarlet pimpernel – Anagallis arvensis – open only for a short period every day when the sun is shining. They are sometimes pink, blue or white and they grow on cultivated and on waste ground especially if the soil is a little stoney, such as in field gateways. The name Scarlet Pimpernel was chosen by Baroness Orczy in his novel of the French Revolution, as the undercover name for Sir Percy Blakeney as he went about rescuing aristocrats from the guillotine.

There were three meadow brown butterflies patrolling the hedges and I managed to snap one when it settled briefly. These butterflies live for four or five weeks and are always on the wing during sunny days and unlike many other butterflies they will fly on dull days and even in drizzle. I think their only enemies are wild birds will that catch and eat them.

On that nearly two mile walk I saw several butterflies, but when I walked around to the back of the house, I was surprised to find that one was following me. It looked a bit black and white and when it pitched on a flower stalk in the garden, I could see that it wasn’t a butterfly but a scarlet tiger moth, although the scarlet parts of its wings were rather ragged. First time I have seen one in our garden.