Photographer Ray Roberts shows us just how much there is to see on a riverside walk in the woods....

Walking beside the River Lynher I could see lots of white starry ramson – allium ursinum – flowers growing beside the river and carpeting the floor of the adjoining woodland where there were still plenty of lesser celandines – they have been flowering since last November - and bluebells that have come out in bloom by the thousand. Ramsons, or wild garlic as it is known, is smelt as soon as you see it and, if you like garlic, the leaves can be used in cooking or in a salad dish.

Hawthorn trees are now showing their beautiful five petalled flowers that have pink anthers and these blooms, commonly called may flowers, are the subject of the old saying, never cast a clout till May is out. Meaning, never leave off a vest or pullover until may flowers are out which is probably during the month of May.

I managed to find a solitary early purple orchid – Orchis mascula – and as pretty as the flower is with its dark spotted leaves, the smell might remind the onlooker of the scent of an old tom cat. They sometimes grow among bluebells and when I was a boy when we found one among the bluebells, we called it a cuckoo. I remember at this time of the year whilst walking the mile to Landrake school the roadside bank would be covered in bluebells with two or three early purple orchids among them.

There were loads of lords and ladies - Arum maculatum – growing on the boggy ground and on the hedges. This unusual flower consists of a purple spadix that is cloaked with a yellowish hood called a spathe and during the middle ages the plant was connected with the act of making love giving it the name Adam and Eve. I have noticed that the majority of flowers open away from the sunshine, so they cannot be seen from the road, just as if they are very shy.

Walking as I do, slowly and quietly, I spotted a young grey squirrel curled up on the ground at the bottom of a tree sunbathing. However, the small animal saw me at the same time and as I raised my camera to photograph it and literally ran up the tree trunk. Despite the belief that our native red squirrels were eradicated by the greys after they arrived from America during the late 1870s, it was an epidemic disease that did not affect the greys that brought about their decline, leaving the greys to take over the reds’ feeding grounds.

I spotted another small creature taking in the sun with its tail still in the hole in the hedge where it presumably lived. This was a common lizard or to give it its correct name, a Viviparous lizard. Cold blooded as are snakes, tortoises, crocodiles and turtles, and they all spend most of the daylight hours warming themselves in the sun.