Sonning - the Bear on a Boat.: Paws Around the Potteries

Ay up, everyone! It's me, Hanley Bear, with another Paws Around the Potteries post and this one is about visiting Trentham Gardens late in the summer.

Trentham Gardens is one of our favourite places for an adventure as there is so much to see and do, especially if you're a small bear who loves climbing and running and playing in leaves. We have most of our adventures in the woods around the lake, so today I thought I'd tell you about other fun things small bears can do at Trentham.

One of our favourite climbing trees is beside the River Trent and it's a big copper beech. When the leaves are on the tree in the summer, we can climb the branches and sit on the boughs in the shade, and no-one can see us, but we can watch the people on the path or the ducks on the river, which is a proper river rather than just a stream by the time it gets here.

There are big drifts of tall plants near our tree which grow in the spring and summer, flower in the summer and autumn and die down in the winter - Endon Bear says that makes them "perennials". They are great for bear adventures!

Because the flower stalks are quite strong and there are lots of them close together, and because we are quite light small bears, Endon and I found we could sit on top of them.

So we invented "flower surfing", where we slide across the top of a clump of flowers until there's a gap. which we fall into - like getting "wiped out" doing sea surfing, but much safer and without swallowing seawater or seaweed or getting sand or gravel in our fur.

Even the bigger bears could do it where the flowers were dense enough!

The perennial beds are also brilliant places to play hide-and-seek, although we have to be very careful not to get lost. That's where being bears and having a great sense of smell helps - we can always tell the right way to go to the cake and coffee shop!

On quiet days, we can also do flower surfing and hiding in the formal gardens, when there aren't too many other people about. There are interesting plants to see here all year. I like red and white flowers because those are my team's colours.

There are also the Trentham fairies to look out for. Every time we visit, there seems to be an extra one, and they are getting more elaborate. Some of them move in the breeze and a lot of them seem to like being near the water - there is even a mermaid fairy in one of the pools.

We love the woodland walks best as there are logs and stumps for climbing and sitting on, and flowers to see all year round in the woodland meadows - in fact, there are often more flowers when the leaves aren't on the trees.

The gardeners at Trentham usually leave trees than have fallen down or had to be cut down to decay naturally, to make homes for beetles and other creatures, although they might have to saw them into logs to make them safe.

This means there are always new stumps where we can try out our climbing skills or just sit in the sunshine.

Endon Bear likes to see what flowers are blooming in the woods, as he has a shady patch of our human guardian's front garden to look after and gets ideas of what they can grow from here.

One of my favourite places to explore is a willow tunnel that was part of a dragon sculpture. It's easily big enough for human cubs to run around inside but makes a great bear den when there aren't any humans around.

We always say hello to the stag beetle sculptures too. Real stag beetles are big, but not this big (fortunately), and we have never seen any, but there are supposed to be some in the woods here.

On warm days, Polar and Grizzly like to sit on the benches by the lake, and Grizzly sometimes has a nap. We can talk to the fairies that live around here and watch the ducks, geese, grebes and cormorants until we decide it's time to have cake, when we'll wake Grizzly up and ask him to see if the teashop is open.