When we went down today we saw that the Cow Parsley had finally come out. The flowers were white and very small. They were about two metres high. Matthew Fleming got stung by nettles and when he put a dock leaf on it, it did not hurt him anymore. The Ribwort was seventy two and a half cm high and it had a few seeds on it. The harts tongue fern was forty seven and a half cm tall including the stem. It is a dark green with a black stem. The Ribwort is a member of the plantain family. We also saw a dragon fly on a Meadow sweet. There were numerous flies above the pond. The oak leaves were fully out and the ash leaves were big but there were still black buds on
it.

In May we took some nets down to the nature garden which made it easier to catch things from the two ponds. There were many creatures in the water, but the one we all wanted to find was the frog. Most of the frogs live in the smaller pond which is not lined with plastic. It is marshy there and I think the frogs prefer that. The frogs were hard to find because they all hide when they hear us coming. There are lots of reeds in the small pond and that's where they go.  I caught a very small frog which must have only just grown from being a tadpole. Dean caught a bigger frog - the one in the picture above - I think it might be a year old. There was a real mixture of big frogs, small frogs and fat tadpoles which were just about to grow some legs. I was surprised to see all the different stages of tadpoles growing into frogs  in the pond at the same time because the books make you think that you just get one stage at a time.                    By Dean and Annie

In the nature garden I stung myself on a nettle. Then I found a dock leaf and rubbed it on my leg where I got the sting and the sting went away a bit. There were a lot of flies on the pond and some Sticklebacks in it. There was a Hart's Tongue Fern in the garden that 47cm tall. The Cow Parsley had flowered and was spreading everywhere. We saw a dragonfly on some Meadowsweet, it's wings looked like nets. There were some Flag Iris and Lady's Smock there too. My Knapweed had grown a couple of inches more and had new fresh leaves.

The picture opposite shows a pond snail, a dragonfly nymph and in the right corner is a leech. The dragonfly nymph is really ugly, but soon it will crawl out of the pond, grow wings and turn into a beautiful dragonfly. The leech is very wriggly and would suck your blood if it had the chance. There were lots of things like this in the bigger pond, much more than in April. They were easy to catch with the nets.