Walking around the narrow roads in the parish I am sometimes surprised at what I see. For instance, last week I came across a clump of great willowherb, about 1.5m high, growing just inside an open field gate. Flowers have four notched pink petals around 25mm wide and are followed by long narrow fruits that are full of plumed seeds. They grow in sunny places where the soil is damp.

Something that will grow anywhere, including gardens, is hedge bindweed that has a thin, spindly climbing stems that wrap themselves around anything to gain height. The only things in this plant’s favour are its flowers which resemble large white trumpets that can be 60mm across and can be seen quite a distance away. As I have said previously in this column, gardeners hate this plant because it is so invasive and hardy.

I noticed a cranefly on the wing so I followed it along the road until it pitched on the hedge. Also known as daddy long-legs this large fly, up to 30mm in body length, is closely related to mosquitoes and although their size makes them look fearsome, they cannot bite.

Mountain ashes, also known as rowan trees, are showing their red fruits now and although several hunter-gatherers have tried different ways to consume these berries, they all eventually decided that as they contain a number of toxic compounds, they should leave them for the birds and small animals. The tree survives on poor and rocky soil so growing high up on mountains and moorland hills suits it.

Growing on some waste ground beside a field gateway, was a solitary musk mallow with a couple of lovely pink flowers on it. This plant favours well drained soil and is known as a cultivated flower, so I wondered how it came to be growing there but I think somebody probably decided to get rid of some garden flowers and dumped them on the waste ground where the mallow took root.

Among the wild birds that visit our garden is a blackbird with a lot of brown feathers. I think it is a large juvenile and it spends most of the day walking through all the vegetation picking up food, but always ends up beneath the feeding station where there is a lot of sunflower seeds and bits of peanuts dropped by the smaller birds as they feed.

I open the greenhouse door and roof window every morning and last week I notice a brownish coloured moth on one of the aluminium roof struts. I thought it might be an angle shades moth as I have seen them in the greenhouse before but after photographing it, I could identify it as a silver Y moth.

This is one of our most commonly seen day-flying moths, although they do visit flowers during early evening and this one must have been in the greenhouse when I closed up the previous night. They are brought on winds across the channel from Europe and sometimes a great number of them can be seen together on costal vegetation.