BEAUTY IN WINTER

It was lovely to go out for a drive today, after a few weeks of being confined indoors and we really enjoyed our outing after church - we were originally going out to look for some dereliction, but I’m going to save what I found for a later date.

Mr. HCB had already planned where we would go and hoped that he would see some birds, but sadly there didn’t seem to be many around today.  However, we were blessed to see some large drifts of beautiful snowdrops along the verges, in various woodland areas and outside this lovely house.  

We stopped to look at the beautiful trees that had been trained along the front of the property and when we saw someone working pruning the laurel bushes in the side garden, we waved and he then came over to chat to us.  We thought he was the owner of the house, but he said that he was the gardener so I asked if he did that for a living;  he explained that he was actually a doctor, but liked to get outside at the weekends and this suited him.  We complimented him on the trees in the middle photograph, when he explained that they were lime trees and told us that they had been trained like that for about 15 years and in the summer were like a high wall of leaves.  

We chatted for a while and after he had told us where to find more snowdrops, we went on our way, dereliction forgotten for the day.

On our way back, we saw several buzzards and I managed, with my long zoom to get a reasonable silhouette of one.

All in all a lovely drive in the countryside - it was just a shame that the sky was so grey, but the sight of the snowdrops certainly brightened our day.

“Our happiest moments always seem to come 
     when we stumble upon one thing 
          while in pursuit of something else.”
Lawrence Block