St Ethelwold’s Garden – March 2024 – Happy Easter

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The wildflower garden at the bottom of St Ethelwold’s Garden is starting to bloom. The purple pyramids of flowers are Honesty.

There are honey bees and bumble bees in the garden and a good variety of flowers – far more than in February. This bumble bee is on a willow catkin taking pollen. It is not just the flowers that have pollen.

There are lots of grape hyacinths.

Fruit blossoms grow against a wall on an espalier.

There are hundreds of tulips coming up, and April will look magnificent with even more flowers. The volunteer gardeners have been busy.

At the bottom of the garden is Clematis ‘snowdrift’ with its drift of flowers. Its long narrow leaves are evergreen and leathery.

On one hedge, I saw a sparrow-like bird. The picture has a blurred 3-D quality. It may be a Dunnock, also known as a ‘hedge sparrow’ which is not really a sparrow.

Happy Easter!

Easter Eggstravaganza

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The sun was out today for The Easter Eggstravaganza, a free fun day held on Abingdon Market Place.  There were Easter crafts, as well as local food stalls, live music,

and performances by local dancers.

The Easter egg hunt trail was a free activity that took place around the town centre. The trail was also an egg-cellent egg-scuse to crack out some egg puns. Competitors had to write down the colours of the twelve eggs and the puns

and return to the BH&O stall in the Market Place to claim a chocolate egg prize.

Good Friday Procession

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Abingdon commemorated Good Friday with a Walk of Witness, drawing participants from the town’s churches. Organised by the Church in Abingdon, the event has become a tradition for decades, uniting the Christian community.

Despite the earlier rain, the skies cleared as the procession, led by a large wooden cross, made its way through the precinct. The symbolic walk ended in the Market Place, where a crowd gathered for a short message delivered by Pastor Ellie Ball of the Vineyard Church. Traditional Easter hymns were then sung on the day when Christians remember Jesus Christ being crucified.

How polluted is the River Ock?

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2023 was the worst year on record for stormwater pollution. Stormwater pollution occurs when rain washes pollutants into waterways. These can include litter, chemicals, and raw sewage from overflowing drains. It’s especially bad when treatment plants have insufficient capacity to handle the rainwater.

The Ock area had 747 spillages in 2023, compared to 155 in 2022. Some of those spillages came down the River Ock from places like Wantage(78) and Uffington(86), then went into the River Thames. Others went directly into the River Thames. The Abingdon treatment works had 38 spillages in 2023 and 0 in 2022.

The rivers in the north of England were the worst offenders.

Thanks to Newcomer for pointing out a Guardian article: Englands sewage crisis – How polluted is your local river?. It has a tool for analysing the number of spillages in a year by area. The picture is taken from that tool (all rights reserved).