Lee and Kath pushed briefly to the front of the
queue on Sun, 20 Jul 2003 10:51:52 +0100, and nailed this to the shed
door:

^ On Wed, 16 Jul 2003 12:02:36 +0100, "Aileen Howard" wrote:
^
^ Actually mine is quite a deep purple:-( I'm not sad because of the colour -
^ it's good - but it lacks butterflies.
^
^ Regards, Aileen
^ 'Our' butterfies pefer the flowers on the prvet hedge. If you don't cut it too often (for those who
^ like a slightly wilder garden) it flowers well and the bee love it too.
^ Incidently do Small Coppers migrate? We have dozens of them in the garden but they only appeared in
^ the last few days.

/Dozens/? Oooh, you lucky so-and-sos. I don't think I've seen that
many in my entire life - and they're one of my favourites. Tell you
what I /have/ seen just today, though - several Peacocks in the
garden. Big deal, you might say - well, yes, except they are the first
I have seen this year. And they were all rich and lustrous and
scale-perfect, so like your Small Coppers, I reckon my Peacocks must
be freshly-hatched. I wish I knew where from - I've never managed to
find Peacock caterpillars in the wild, despite over 30 years of
looking (not non-stop, you understand).

So fear not Aileen, your buddleia may yet produce the goods - it does
seem to have been a very late year for the species that really get off
on buddleia this year. And I still haven't seen a single Painted Lady
this year yet - weren't we supposed to have been inundated with them a
week or three ago?

Andy
--

"No, you claim the magpie is to blame for all the
worlds ills, based on your ignorance of magpies."
(4a7391c12e538ef306d33d71c9482221@TeraNews)