More Flowers from Mum's Garden

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Why Mum's garden again, I hear you ask. Well, she's the keen gardener, I'm just the flower photographer! My garden is very small and basic - mainly paved with one small border and a couple of shrubs on the other side for balance. The paving is a wildlife haven though - I have ants, woodlice, snails and loads of self-seeded 'weeds'. It takes me about an hour a week just to keep it relatively clear of growth but I do potter a bit occasionally. Anyway, without too much more waffle, here's a few beauties.

Does anyone else have formatting problems with their blog? It doesn't seem to matter whether I preview or just guess but I always have to edit and re-publish about 6 times to get it looking OK.

Happy Holiday, Rotten Weather

Well we left the UK in sweltering sunshine and arrived in Menorca to rain and more rain. We weren't too bothered though - we'd been there several times before and really just wanted a change of scenery and time to relax. On the other hand, we hadn't really counted on 4 days of rain and grey skies!


The wonderful thing about this holiday was the memory lane trip - we stayed at this exact hostel exactly 20 years ago on our very first holiday together, just 6 weeks into our relationship. We arrived to check-in and a lady came out to greet us - she took one look and started rabbiting on in rapid spanish. We recognised her easily from our first trip but it turns out - she remembered us too!

The sun did come out for the last 3 days though - we jumped on a local bus into Mahon the capital, not realising it was market day. What a lovely bonus that was. Spent a few hours wandering round the stalls but a lot of them were basic typical market stalls (not much interest for holidaymakers) and most of the others were pure tourist targetted. There were a few unique stalls in there but we ran out of time to really get down to serious shopping. Lucky really - I could easily have spent a months' wages on one stall in particular!

The following day, we hired a jeep-style vehicle and went exploring some of the smaller roads that we'd found on our last trip. This lighthouse was an old friend from 20 years ago when we were taken to a beach nearby (via a dried-up riverbed type track) but we'd not managed to find the actual lighthouse - until now. It was a wonderfully wild and desolate spot - shale/slate beds on one side of the headland and a sandstone sort of terraced/stepped landscape on the other.


We also found some lovely little beaches and coves - mostly deserted this early in the season and of course, the weather wasn't helping. I love empty beaches though so I was perfectly happy just to mooch along, take some photos and do a bit of beachcombing. This perfect little cove is near a place called Binidali and the water was this amazing blue - I'm not sure the camera has caught the vibrancy of the day but you get the idea :-)

Obviously, being a bit of a photo-nut, I've got quite a few more but I won't overdo it - I know how boring other peoples holiday photos can be (My mum often comes home with 1000+!!) so maybe I'll show you some more tomorrow. I did get some interesting abstact rock ones so if the are any rockhounds out there, maybe you can put me straight :-)

Snails, Snails and more Snails

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I missed last week 'cos I was away on holiday in Menorca and I don't have any new stuff from my own garden because I've been washing/drying and ironing for most of the last 2 days! But I did get some vaguely garden related piccies whilst I was on hols so I thought I'd post them.

I usually go on holidays around May time so often catch places in their spring colours. Cyprus was all yellow and white wild flowers with a teensy bit of pink. Menorca on the other hand, is pinks and purples with the odd splash of white (cow parsley) and some patches of red poppies. This piccy shows some pale pink convolulus and what looked like a clover but in lilac. There was another convolulus in many places which was a very deep bluey-purple and with really quite large flowers. It was all past its' prime by the time I got there though so no decent piccies.

The bane of my life with a garden full of hostas are snails - I can home to very lacy leaves so I have to get out there with the snail traps soon. Over in Menorca, I found this lovely little fella on a reed alongside a little boggy area. Never noticed them before but it looked a bit weird having this fat juicy snail on such a slender stem.

Further down the path, there was this huge number of snails on this grass like plant - this is only a small section of the plant but it was obviously very popular with the local snails!

More holiday photos to come soon but I wanted to get these ones up tonight. It seems like I always post late on a Sunday evening but that's just the way my weekends work out I think. Back to work tomorrow which I have to admit, I'm really, really not looking forward to. There's just so much stuff I want to be doing but it's work that pays the bills so I guess I'll have to drag myself out of bed anyway.

Green Thumb Sunday - More Auriculas

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Well, as promised last week, the sun came out gently again today (and yesterday) so off I went to Mum's garden to grab some more shots of her auriculas. Have to say I am really pleased with how these turned out so I will stop blathering on and just let the photos speak for themselves :)