We arrived early, finding not much life stirring, just the sound of the church bells in the distance. It was still warm, but with a brisk wind and thunder showers expected later.
Today’s draw was an exhibition of bird art in the Lady Lever Gallery, but we looked around the village on the way there. On the Bath Street green north of The Dell is this wonderfully strange Sphinx polar sundial, said to have originally been put up for the Relief of Mafeking in 1900 and restored for the Millennium in 2000.
We were hoping to get close enough to the flowers of the Tulip trees in the Dell to touch or smell them, but they were all out of reach. There were also quite a lot of buds of flowers yet to come, and also developing cones of earlier flowers that have gone over. It must flower sequentially, all through the summer, and leave bare winter trees full of hundreds of cones. If they all flowered simultaneously in the summer, wouldn’t that be a sight!
There are Lime tree avenues all over Port Sunlight, with their flowers and bracts hanging daintily below the branches.
Christ Church United Reform Church has some Interesting old trees in the churchyard. We had missed the flowering of the Indian Bean tree, sadly, but we lingered over the broken (but sprouting) trunk of a massive old Cherry tree. It was 202 cm in girth (79½ inches). The Cheshire champion native cherry trees (Prunus avium) are about 350 cm girth, at Cholmondeley Castle and Tatton Park, but this one is still quite large in comparison. The church was built 1902-4, so was this churchyard tree planted then and is it only 120 years old? Or was it there before the church was built?
A young Rowan tree was already showing its clusters of berries, although still only greeny-brown.
A Weeping Ash was looking very threadbare and sick. Does it have Ash dieback disease?
A shrub by the gate attracted our attention and we pondered over it, wondering of it was some kind of Elm. But the seeds weren’t right. Could it have been a Witch Hazel? We need to remember to check it on one of our winter visits.
After lunch we went to the bird art exhibition. There are about 50 paintings and drawings by Jim Moir, the TV comedian who performs as Vic Reeves. They were excellent, and all for sale. Most were ticketed at £3,300 (some more than that!) and about half were sold.
Public transport details: Train from Central at 10.00 (towards Ellesmere Port), arriving Port Sunlight at 10.17. Returned from Port Sunlight station at 2.09, arriving Liverpool Central at 2.35.
Next week we are going to Calderstones Park, meeting at Elliot Street at 10.00.