---- Tis now the season of two common flower favourites we’ve all grown up with - daisies and buttercups. Motorways and fast roadsides are brightened up by colonies of Ox-eye Daisy, the larger graceful cousin of the small Lawn Daisy that as kids we’ve all made into daisy necklace chains (even the boys!) Unfortunately I forgot to press the sport speed setting on the camera driving past these, hence the blurring - but you get the picture? I could go back and stand on the hard shoulder to ge a stationary shot, but then an image of a 60mph 40 tonne juggernaught four inches from my head crosses my mind.

---- These ox eye daisies I set up against a backdrop of the Bolton Wanderers premiership football stadium, they were growing on a stream/ditch bank between the footie ground and Tesco’s car park.

---- This is a soldier beetle on an Ox-eye daisy near the Bolton Wanderers stadium. The beetle’s are so named because their colours look like a soldier’s uniform - a common red one, different from this, we used to call a blood beetle and when it was picked up the liquid coming from its mouth we thought was human blood! On reflection it was probably vomiting in fright! The beetles are good for gardens and vegetable plots because they eat greenfly and caterpillars.

---- Here’s the smaller cousin, the Common Lawn Daisy of chain fame growing next to the Leeds Liverpool canal near Adlington. It sums up playing fields and June school sports day.

---- Two of the flowers summing up mid June, the Ox-eye daisy and Meadow Buttercup bringing splashes of white green and yellow to the landscape.

---- Although the Meadow Buttercup can be tall - this is an optical illusion. Nice picture of the dog though - even though it’s not a toy breed.

---- Here’s the smaller cousin of the graceful Meadow Buttercup - the squat Creeping Buttercup with its coarser larger leaves that invades gardens and vegetable plots, but is nice nevertheless, and for some strange reason as a child I remember my mum putting the flowers under my chin to see if there was a reflection - if there was I liked butter apparently. I think we did this at school too. How innocent - especially as it made us late for our A level exams! 

---- I’ve noticed that fields being grazed by horses are often full of buttercups - maybe their style of grazing encourages the plant, or the plant isn’t bothered by their hooves. I presume they can’t do the horses any harm as, unlike the Oxford Ragwort which is poisonous to them, they seem to be tolerated by the field owners. I also noticed that the occupants of the canal barge with its Welsh place name and country symbol are flying an English flag - very unusual and refreshing too, seeing that it just seems to be taken as read that all the ‘celtic’ nations, particularly the Scots, can’t abide the English or acknowledge anything positive about them. Or perhaps the flags just blown in from an England footie supporters car!

---- Back on my buttercup field horse grazing theory - here’s a field grown for a grass crop with buttercups just in the margins. I bet if they put a load of horses in there it’d soon become full of buttercups.

---- And round the corner alongside the canal a picture to complete my theory.