Red drops among the green

These lovely days give so many photos I'm stuck for what to use, but this one makes a change from distant views and blue sky as well as being rather arresting in its own way. It's an enormously tall and spindly rhododendron on the hillside in Benmore Gardens whose scarlet blooms immediately made me think - rather disturbingly, I admit - of drops of blood.  We'd just enjoyed a delightful encounter with a  red squirrel; I was making a video of the view to record a blackbird singing in the tree above us, when a sudden movement made me turn to see these big dark eyes looking straight into mine from the trunk of another tree. The squirrel then turned and scampered up the trunk, into the branches, right out onto the smaller twiggy ones, and then leapt across the path and into the tree where the blackbird was. 

The gardens are at their very best at closing time, when there's no-one else about, the birds are singing and - clearly - the squirrels come out to play. And I can't resist an extra photo of the pond, with the reflections of all the new colours of the season.