Pastel Perfect

I was surprised to see that I hadn't already blogged this picture, because I am quite fond of it! I love the colours of the hydrangea and the contrast with the little marmalade hoverfly (which looks like it's balancing on one leg in that picture).

Whilst I don't know the name of this kind of hydrangea (I would guess it's hydrangea macrophylla?), it's apparently a lacecap as opposed to a mophead - meaning that it has large, showy but sterile flowers around the outer edge of a number of much smaller fertile ones -you can see the two types in the picture. Mophead hydrangeas are the ones you immediately think of when someone leaps out from behind a wall and shouts "hydrangea!" - i.e., the ones with big round fluffy-looking flowerheads. The colour of your hydrangeas will be affected by the pH of the soil, which is rather interesting.

Dead Head Hoverfly

An insect I actually identified - this is a Dead Head Hoverfly, so called because allegedly the pattern on its thorax looks like a skull. And it's a hoverfly.

I don't see it myself, but I guess the 'Dead Head' hoverfly is a much cooler name than the 'Looks a Bit Like A Skull If You Squint At It, Maybe, In Poor Lighting Conditions' hoverfly. Scientific name myathropa florea, it's very common in Europe and North Africa.

I suppose humans have always had rather an obsession with seeing (and creating) skull patterns everywhere. One of my favourite paintings I saw for the first time last year in the National Gallery - The Ambassadors, by Hans Holbein. The painting itself is a vast canvas, larger even than life-size, which takes up most of a wall at the gallery. Standing directly in front of it you can see this long, thin, curiously distorted object at the bottom of the painting. It's only as you slowly walk to the right that the distortion corrects itself, and from exactly thge right angle resolves into a perfect image of a human skull. It's incredibly clever and rather disconcerting - it's a shame it's much less impressive online, because with the image shrunk, the skull shape is more obvious from the outset.

Om nom nom

Once again I must confess that, shamefully, I don't know the name of the insect or the flower. All I know is that it's pretty and excitingly orange. And it came from somewhere in Warwickshire.