Tag Archives: wild flowers

A Magazine Arrives

Obsessed with Pipework arrived today. It contains two of my poems, which seem to have taken ages to work their way through the system. That’s the trouble with print journals, compared to on-line journals they take a long time. However, the good thing is that  It’s nice to see them in print on an actual paper page. It’s much nicer than just seeing them on-line. Unfortunately I can’t, as a result, give you a link. I will post them at some time in the future.

I will, however, look out my poem from the last issue and post that. I’m going to have to stop for a moment now, as Julia just served tea and I have spilt rice on the keyboard. I bet Philip Larkin didn’t have this problem…

One of the things I noticed after lockdown was that my ability to navigate round town had almost disappeared. It’s back now, but I noticed another lack today – I’ve forgotten a lot of wild flower names. It’s never been a strong point but there are a lot about that I can’t name. I must start learning them again. There were a lot of blue flowered plants in a couple of p[laces as we went out for a drive today – they looked a bit like borage but the flowers seemed more upright. Julia said it wasn’t borage but couldn’t ID it. It isn’t green alkanet. I’m starting to worry that after lockdown and at 50mph I have lost the ability to identify borage. This will be very upsetting if it is true as borage is usually so easy.

I suppose if that’s the worst thing that happened today I can’t be doing badly. As the day also featured a lot of wild flowers, a happy wife (I took her to the garden centre) and KFC for lunch  (the doctor told me I should eat more chicken!) I haven’t done badly.

The photos are from May 2016.

Robin

Yesterday’s Photographs

Here are some photographs from yesterday.

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Glossy Ibis – not a great shot but the best I could get

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Bogbean

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Cream Tea – functional but not as elegant as Clumber’s offering

A Treasury of Flowers

I’ve been looking at other blogs with envy this year, particularly Derrick J Knight and Tootlepedal’s Blog.  They have a lot of things in common, including beautiful gardens, great photography and gardening partners – the Head Gardener and Mrs Tootlepedal.

It may be time for a little pep talk with Julia. Nothing major, just point her to a few relevant posts and leave an unspoken suggestion…

That way I hope to avoid being told to do it myself, as I already have lots to do. That TV won’t watch itself and blogging takes time.

Meanwhile, just to show we can grow plants (despite the state of our garden this year) here are a few things from last year at the farm.

 

In a queue to cue Kew

I’m not entirely sure what sort of day I have had. It started with a bacon baguette from Greggs (tasted great but did the diet n favours) and moved on to the previously described birdsong. After that is plunged, also as detailed in the last post. After that, with a migraine (fortunately not mine), unplanned visitors, post-it notes (don’t you just hate it when someone puts a snide post-it on something and leaves you to find it?), rain, wind and a variety of small but time consuming triviality, I just don’t know what happened to the day.

All I know was that after the first post it was lunchtime and then the taxi arrived.

We have managed to plant the new wildflower bed, which is now the subject of a diary under the Projects tab.

You might be able to get some idea of the wind from looking at the hair in the photos, after that it became even windier and we decided that it was time to see what happened when boiling water is poured on the dried leaves of camellia sinensis.