It has started to get very cold overnight, but during the day it has been quite pleasant. Pleasant enough for the humming-bird hawk-moth to still be flying and finding flowers - in this case our amethyst lips salvia plant which survived the winter last year.

I took a week off this week to tidy up the garden. While trying to sort out the creeping cinquefoil in one of our beds, I saw this gall on the roots of one of the plants I'd pulled up. This is a gall wasp, Xestophanes potentillae. I've replanted this particular plant in the hope that the wasp will do some natural control of the plant.

I also found a lot of this Exidia recisa fungus on branches which had fallen from our willow trees. The wiki page of this fungus describes it as growing on dead, attached twigs of willow - which is absolutely what these were doing before the wind blew down the twigs.