IT’S possible to walk in any direction from Quethiock village and travel around in a loop, coming back along a different stretch of road.

Recently I walked down to Hepwell Farm and then down the aptly-named Muddy Lane, returning to the village via Trehunsey Cross.

There are several places around the village where Alexander plants grow alongside the roads on the hedge creep and at the moment, they are spreading their leaves and going to produce flowers in a few weeks’ time.

However, on my walk I noticed that a few of the plants had yellow galls on their leaves.

This is the first time I have noticed these galls and I think they are fungus rust galls and not caused by insects.

For those readers who are unfamiliar with ‘hedge creep’, it is where soil, dirt and small stones covered with grass and various weeds creep out over the tarmacked road.

In this parish there are some places where this creep is more than a couple of feet wide.

On the tall, grassy bank near the farm there were hundreds of Common comfrey flowers out in bloom.

The roots of these plants were dug up in Medieval times and grated to a sludge which was packed around a broken arm or leg.

This sludge hardened much like the modern plaster that is used to heal broken bones today.

In fact, this practice was so well known back then the plant was called Knitbone.

There are several places around the village where Wild Daffodils are out in bloom.

In my opinion these are the most beautiful of all our daffodils and I sometimes wonder whether those that William Wordsworth saw and wrote the famous poem about were wild ones or cultivated ones that were growing on parkland where he was walking with his sister.

I spotted a small, leafless tree with what looked like white frost on its branches, it was a Blackthorn tree with lots of five petalled flowers on it.

Blackthorn trees flower well before their leaves and then produce purplish fruits that are known as sloes which are crushed and added to gin to produce sloe gin.

I concluded my walk by going through a couple of path fields and among the grass I almost stepped on a single Selfheal flower.

It hadn’t fully opened to produce a cluster of pink whorls so obviously I walked around in a couple of circles to see if there were more blooms, but found none.

I was surprised to find this one as they don’t usually come into flower until early June.

Looking into my greenhouse one morning I saw a visitor on the bench.

It was an oil beetle and looked as if it had a damaged wing cover.

A bit early in the year to see an insect like this and sometime after I had taken its photograph it disappeared.

Hopefully it has taken shelter in one of my sheds.