Warm weather chaos

There are very strange things going on in the back garden at the moment...

A couple of days ago I found two caterpillars happily munching their way through some plants in the front garden. The plants die back over winter and grow new leaves in the spring, but they already have leaves growing, which is very fortunate for the caterpillars.

All sorts of spring or even summer flowers are currently in bloom, including night-scented stock, alpine strawberries, primroses, cowslips and rosemary. Even the creeping rosemary, which is much more susceptible to the cold than the regular rosemary, has buds on it.

Night-scented stock

Primrose

Rosemary

The rhubarb has started to grow already and the buddleia has leaves. At this rate we'll be eating rhubarb crumble at Christmas and the buddleia will flower in February before the butterflies appear (or perhaps they'll be around then too!)

The buddleia is covered in new leaves 

Rhubarb for Christmas

Out in the woods, the lords-and-ladies have started to grow, which is at least a month earlier than we saw last year.

Lords-and-ladies

We saw an orange ladybird  today and the Wildlife Trust website says you shouldn't see them after October.

We also found some White Saddle fungus growing along the edge of a path in the woods. It's a summer/autumn fungus, so is another thing you wouldn't really expect to see at this time of the year.

We've had such unseasonably mild weather recently that everything seems to be confused and it really doesn't feel like the middle of December! I'm sure we'll get a cold snap soon and mother nature will sort it all out, but it feels like everything is out of sync at the moment and just a little bit crazy!