They are out to get me! Those orchids keep doing this - massive, pregnant buds that don't open for days, they just get larger and larger. Every time I look at them (so several times a day as they are by the loo) I imagine them shouting "feed me Seymour!" like in the Little Shop of Horrors.
I spend the morning Skyping with a client in Birmingham - she is not having an easy time of it, living in a nice maisonette, but without any real outside space. She is juggling work and writing up her PhD thesis. I really am quite lucky, not least as I spent the afternoon playing on TWO ride on mowers, making a property look very beautiful. A slight frustration is that only the ducks will admire what I have done, but hopefully they like it!
Reasons for mowing when people won't see what you've done? Well, left to itself, nature has some lovely flowers and insects and it has thugs with few natural predators. Those thugs will take over, and while after 50 years you might have an interesting ecosystem, in the meantime you develop a thatch of bramble, thistle, nettle, rush, horsetail and old man's beard which strangle the orchids, lords and ladies, milkmaids, stitchwort and other charming flowers of spring.
We sat out yesterday after work, enjoying the warmth, the bird song, and I would say the quiet, but there was all that bird song. The first swifts are turning up, but not enough yet to start the big screaming aerobatic displays. The swallows are frantically nest building. The starlings are very proud of the chicks they are raising in our eaves and makes a lot of noise about it - I think someone plays a lot of old school computer games around here, as that is what our starling sounds like! The cuckoo was also giving it some yesterday, while today where I was mowing, two were shouting at each other across the valley. The starling likes to perch on the apex of the roof to "sing" to the world - I think he has ambitions to be the god on top of a Thai palace!
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