at the front of our house - this rose will carry on flowering until at least October, sometimes even December
These are the yellow ones I was keeping an eye on, until I forgot. It's a David Austin rose belonging to our neighbour, but we are lucky enough to share it. The white flowers are mock orange.
This rose is just outside the patio door, and is doing well.
These are our other neighbour's 'Frankenroses', he has grafted several different varieties onto just two or three original shrubs, so the dark red, pink and white ones are all growing from plant!
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The geese at the duck pond a few streets away from us have built their nest in the silliest place, on the grass at the edge of the pond closest to the bench and the bus stop and the road, and in the full glare of the sun. Some kind person has stuck a garden parasol into the ground by the nest to provide a little patch of shade. How they managed to achieve this without being marmelised by the swans is a mystery! I would have like a photograph, but couldn't manage it this time. Maybe next time we go past.
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For a couple of days now the coloured glass globes of the Galileo thermometer have been fighting for space at the bottom of the column... the temperature must be well over 26C then (!)
This feels the least pre-planned and and pre-organised one yet.
When do we swap? I'm not exactly sure...
How many are we swapping? That's not clear in my mind...
What is this collaboration called? I think it's 'Double Knitting', so presumably 'DK' for short...
The details I am clear about are...
4mm knitting needles, and dk from stash, and 6" squares.
We've each got a copy of this book
and are knitting squares in pairs (now that could be a collaboration title too!), one to keep and one to send. Each square is over about 33 stitches so they don't take very long, and with short knitting needles it makes a very portable project.
Izzy whizzy let's get busy! I was surprised at how much I was missing the collaborations when we took a short break.
The roses have all come out when I was looking the other way! It was too hot to take photographs earlier, and I'm too hot to go out now. Maybe tomorrow. Meanwhile, here's my May subscription posy;
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Mouse update... it won't be around any more. Nuff said...
I struggle to reconcile the Brambly Hedge mice
and Johnny Townmouse the with the reality. Their mice appear to be house trained, and beautifully dressed. The real ones leave a trail of poo pellets and urine behind them.
Ah well. That's what fiction is all about. After all. I've never heard of real wolf saying 'I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down!'.
In capital letters! BB saw it zoom across the dining room yesterday afternoon and excavated behind the curtains to no avail.
At breakfast time today he saw it whoosh across the dining room again...
This morning he walked into town and came back (look away now if you are a sensitive soul) catching contraptions, all right, traps and also a sonic device which is supposed to prevent it from going into the hall and upstairs.
This afternoon I have just, now, seen it, from the corner of my eye, whizz across the dining room and into the kitchen... did it go left or right? Into the kitchen or turn into the hall? It went so fast, as though it was attached to some stretched elastic and someone had just let go!
OH, how we wish we still had cats... although they would have probably brought it in themselves. This one must be an intrepip adventurer. BB has set one contraption under the dining room table, and tonight I expect there will be more in the hall and the kitchen.
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I really don't care for the phrase 'Mother Nature'. I see precious little of the 'Mother Love' side of Nature in the raw, more like 'Tough Love'. Some animal parents do spend time and energy in gentle and diligent nurturing, to be sure, but there are plenty of the darker sides too. It's why I won't watch wildlife programmes, not even our wonderful David Attenborough. Sooner or later something will attack and eat something else and I have to leave the room.
I have at last cleared my work table (at the expense of the dining room table - not so good) so this morning I was able to sit by the open patio door and look out over the garden as I wrote up my daily page-a-day review of the day before. You can see this beautiful postcard of a watercolour picture of wild flowers that I received yesterday. I'm keeping it handy as I thought I would try and copy it, to see how the artist, Honor Budden, created it.
I hope she wouldn't mind me putting it up; but as there are a lot of her pictures on instagram, which I don't use (nor facebook...) she obviously made her work public. Thank you, Elisabethd for sending it to me.
Do any of you use an app to identify plants on your phones? If so, which one? I recognise many of the plants in the postcard, but not all.
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It's SO HOT! Here's some suitably languorous music; Joshua Bell, soloist and conductor with the Academy of St Martin's in the Fields playing the slow movement from Spring; Vivaldi's Four Seasons.
The wind has moved from the northerly chills to softer, kinder, and more importantly as far as I am concerned, a warmer direction.
Somewhere I saw a cartoon of a woman, announcing that she was solar-powered. I get that, and I'd add temperature sensitive. Like the flying ants that suddenly appear after a couple of warm days in the summer, I tend to prefer lying low until sun, wind and temperature all combine to the right kind of weather.
It's ages since I reached for my pen and paints, but I saw a demo on the Internet a while back and thought it looked pretty straightforward...
I can always see what I could have done differently, but I'm still pleased with this very quick effort.
We were out on Tuesday taking a bundle of books to sell back to World of Books. It was a bit of a mission trying to find the tiny and well-disguised Morrisons Daily shop where the parcel had to be dropped off.
It was in a nearby overgrown village with the most labyrinthine mess and muddle of interlocking car parks and one-way systems that could possibly have been crammed into such a small space. After many dead ends, much reversing, and literally going round in circles we found it - job done.
I'm so behind on my New Year Resolution of '2 bags of stuff out of the house every month'. Two bags of shredding, three bags waiting for a charity shop run, and these books brings the total to six. For the year. So four more to go then to catch up!
(Don't tell BB but I'll only get the princely sum of £5.37 back, minus 90p for the parking, and fuel to drive there... next time I might just as well give the books to charity!)
However the ox-eye daisies were everywhere, brightening up what was otherwise a dull and damp afternoon, which reminded me to the daisy tutorial.
