Peony and Pieris

So we were in a bit of a hurry, and late, and isn't that just my secretary all over?  Friday was blogged with a Feature that had been prepared well in advance.  Creating a Feature that is also a Nature Friday was a challenge too far for my benighted secretary.  And the nature photos were meant to appear on Saturday (where we tend excuse ourselves by being 'Late by Nature').  Then Saturday was gone and we were into Sunday...

Rain dominated Saturday.  F plodded off to the Repair Café for half a day during which time the rain abated a bit.  On her return she gathered up a small occasional table and two reading lamps and headed back into the village to donate them to a charity.  Charity shops abound in our retail centre - 13 last count!  Not many of them take furniture however and one of the two that do was closed.  The other was a charity for a children's hospice, so F was pleased to drop the items there

Remember how everyone says I never drink water?  Well I drank water on Saturday.  There it was a nice big puddle of fresh rain water just asking to be drunk from and sat in, so I did.  That gives F a scare.  She thinks I only drink water when I am seriously ill.  I'm still eating, not being sick, still making corrugated cardboard artworks and tearing up stairs with a seriously fat tail, still regular 'in the bathroom', still following F around to see what she is doing, still napping by the fire in the evenings, and batting her on the face if she pretends to be asleep at breakfast times. 

Mr B was away sailing.

Thank you for all your comments on our collection of flowers and plants.  Grape hyacinths were so common in her childhood garden that F suspected them of being something of a weed.  She became aware of how much they meant to her Mum when her little brother (who possibly wasn't even walking when he did it) worked his way around the garden one Spring day and stripped all the little blue beads off the grape hyacinth flower heads.  No doubt he was having fun....

F preferred the plain white freesias that grew beside the shed and could sit in the shed doorway inhaling their scent for hours in the brief season that their flowers where there to enjoy.

Sunday and my allotment is a swamp.  F shut me in the greenhouse while she worked to flatten and spread the cubic metre of soil in the far corner.  She should be be vilified for doing so - it destroyed the habitat of dozens of slow worms.  None were harmed (in the sense that she wasn't stabbing at it with a shovel, rather was carefully pulling it apart), but several 'nests' of them were extracted from gaps in the soil, and relocated to two compost 'daleks' full of grass and weeds.  She has promised them that they will be undisturbed there for at least two years, but my guess is that they don't understand English and are now refugees looking for another overgrown allotment with a massive undisturbed spoil heap full of centipedes (that isn't currently occupied by several dozen other slow worms).