Photographer Ray Roberts captures a feathered couple in is garden - and butterflies on the wing - in this week’s Nature Watch feature.

We had a married couple in our garden last week, but they may have been a courting couple and they came for a feed. They were a male and a female siskin – the male was the more colourful of the two of course, just like several of our birds. They look a bit like greenfinches but their wings and heads contain more yellow, in fact there are around fifty times more greenfinch pairs than there are siskins.

There are a lot of butterflies on the wing now and I walked around Tilland, near Blunts and saw a couple of holly blues flying along the hedgerow. They have bright blue wings edged in black. Underwings are a pale blueish – white patterned with a scattering of dark dots. A second brood of these butterflies will be seen in the autumn.

I also spotted a couple of orange tips and one of them was a female that lacks the coloured wing tips, but has white wings with a short dark edge and a small black comma-like mark on the near centre of each wing. In fact, they have very similar markings to several of the white butterfly family.

On the hedge near the buildings that used to be Tilland Mill there were several common vetch – Vicia sativa – flowers in bloom. These pinkish purple flowers are very similar to those of the garden peas and the plants were once grown by farmers as a source of cattle fodder but I don’t think that happens nowadays as the only places I have seen common vetch in along roadsides and on waste ground.

White – dead nettle – Lamium album – is another plant that grows beside roads and on waste ground. I saw several patches of these plants on my walk and although they cannot be mistaken for the true stinging nettle when they are in flower the early leaves are similar to the stinger, but they are safe to touch – hence the name, dead.

I decided a walk down beside Golitha Falls was in order but when I got there the car park beside the bridge was completely full and there were traffic cones along both sides of the road, so there was nowhere for me to park. So, on the way back I drove in around Highwood to where the old Caradon Mineral Railway line crossed the road through what was a level crossing.

The woods however have been cleared of their mature trees so what was once a pleasant walk down to Moorswater along the old railway track has been devastated. I had a quick look around for flowers but could find none. However, alongside the road that I had taken from Draynes Bridge there was a large clump of honesty – Lunaria annua - growing on the hedge.

This flower is much prized by flower arrangers, not for its four petalled blooms that are reddish-purple or, in the case of the ones I found that were white, but for its flat circular translucent fruits about 30 – 40 mm wide that contain the seeds. In fact there are nearly always some stems of these decorative fruits in a vase in our home.