UP WITH THE LARK

Although I was quite late going to bed, this morning I was “up with the lark” as I thought our visitors were coming at 10.30 for coffee.  Then I looked on the calendar and realised they weren’t coming until 2.30 p.m. which meant that I had time to do some more dusting gardening.  

I swept the patio, cleaned off the table and chairs and then stopped to have my breakfast in our blue corner with Mr. HCB, who got up later than usual this morning because he was “cream-crackered” after his day yesterday.  He and Mike didn’t finish until after 3 p.m. but the man-shed is well on the way, with the roof on so just the finishing touches need doing, but Mike can do them on his own.  It was good to sit and chat in the cool of the day.

We both remarked how beautiful our “Blue Angel” clematis is looking and I stopped counting the flowers after I got to 200!  Whilst Mr. HCB went off to water in his greenhouse, I was looking at the flowers and saw this little hoverfly on one of them.  According to Google, "Hoverflies are totally harmless and are definitely a gardener's friend, as the larvae of several common species have a voracious appetite for aphids!"  There are plenty of aphids on our clematis, so after I dashed in to get my camera and took several shots, I left it to eat more of them!

I have used my PIP App to show the number of flowers and a close-up of the hoverfly - I do wonder how anything so beautiful can be called a “common hoverfly” - guess it’s just because there are a lot of them!

I’m now going to sit in the garden, having deadheaded lots of the wilting plants, to read some more of my book “Trauma” by Gordon Turnbull - a very interesting read about PTSD in relation to what happened at Lockerbie, Hungerford, the Gulf War and other places. 

"If all insects were to disappear 
     from the earth, 
          within fifty years 
               all life on earth would end. 
If all human beings disappeared 
     from the earth, 
          within fifty years 
               all forms of life would flourish."
Jonas Salk - 1914-1995
American medical researcher and virologist, 
who discovered and developed one of the 
first successful polio vaccines.