Ray Roberts discovers the plants bringing colour to his daily walks despite the colder weather.....

I couldn’t help taking a picture of some tiny crab apples in one of the village gardens. This little fruit tree is planted purely for garden decoration with its red or sometimes yellow apples, but we never plant pear or plum trees for decoration, do we?

Growing on the hedges near the Trehunist fork were loads of common polypody ferns that have been abundant since early summer and I noticed there were several growing on the moss-covered trunks of a couple of oak trees. There must be some dirt or soil behind the moss to give the ferns something to grow on.

I took a walk across a couple of path-fields and noticed that several spear thistle plants with their leaves spread into a circles almost half a metre wide, are still growing. Hopefully the cold weather will not kill them and they will send up their thick stems and bloom in the spring.

As always, we make sure that the wild birds visiting our garden have plenty to eat. The finches, tits and sparrows go for sunflower seeds and grains of corn in the feeders. Pigeons and collared doves are content to circle beneath the feeders picking up any food that has been dropped.

Blackbirds join in this foraging and also pick away at dried mealworms on the small table. When I was out walking, I looked over the hedge into an orchard and noticed some blackbirds picking over the windfall apples, enjoying bites from those that had not yet rotted out.

Jackdaws like to eat bread that has been thrown out onto the lawn. The flock that lives down beside the village church seem to have a watcher in the nearby sycamore trees, because when we throw out some chunks of bread, white or brown, we hardly have time to get back indoors before they arrive in force.

They are very nervous birds and seem to be continuously looking around as they approach the bread and the slightest movement, inside the window, as we watch them, will frighten them off. They return, one by one, after several minutes, but close-up they seem to have a very angry look on their faces.

Fungi footnote. On the road near Quethiock I spotted a couple of small, orange-coloured mushrooms that were about 12mm to 15mm wide. They were growing on the dried stalk of a hogweed plant that was lying among the brambles. This year I seem to have noticed lots of different fungi but try as I might, I have not been able to put a name to this pair that were looking very pretty on the hedgerow.