I can’t resist posting this pink cherry plum blossom today, mainly because it’s such a lovely harbinger of spring, but also because I’m always surprised, and just a bit pleased with myself, when I manage to get an entire spray of blossom in decent focus like this. A wider aperture would have softened the background some more, which would have been nice, but the flowers wouldn’t have been as sharp – so, swings and roundabouts.
The blossom was a clear choice from today’s menu of photos, but I’m offering a complementary dessert of some overwintered Shieldbugs. Although they look quite similar in their brown winter camouflage, there are actually two species here – the larger one on the left of the frame is a Green Shieldbug (Palomena prasina), and the slimmer, hairier one with the stripy antennae is a Hairy Shieldbug (Dolycoris baccarum). I spotted them in the big clump of sedge by the wildlife pond, together with a second Green, but that one was shy, and disappeared behind the leaf litter before I could add it to the group photo.
R looked a bit sceptical at lunch time, when I got out the power trimmers and said I was off to do some gardening. I don’t blame him really – it’s very much not like me to embark on something I don’t want to do before the need for it to happen moves into flashing blue light territory, so I was a bit sceptical myself. “Probably just twenty minutes,” I said. “Because twenty minutes is better than no minutes.” And off I went, into the front garden, where two hours and three barrow loads later, R found me scowling at the ragged lawn edge of an otherwise tidy set of borders. “Blimey,” he said. “I thought you were just doing twenty minutes. Do you want some tea?”
To be fair, it’s only tidy if you don’t look too hard, but I’ve decided that good enough is good enough: the bits of dead leaves and stems left behind by the trimmers will provide shelter for insects if the temperature should drop again, and they’ll soon rot down into the mulch on the surface of the beds. I’m going to have to do something about that lawn edge though – you have to have some standards.
R: L2, C5, D18.
