Old faithfuls ...

All this excitement, not to say obsession, about the new blue poppy in my garden has been a distraction recently from the things that have bloomed here for ages, so tonight's their turn in this composite. All three plants were here when we bought the house 44 years ago, and I've done nothing to encourage any of them, other than removing dead foliage (the yellow turk's cap lily), pruning savagely when it encroached on the path (the pink weigela) or cutting back sadly convinced it would never flower again (the wee climbing rose)

The lilies - the Stinking Lilies, to give them their full name chez nous - seem a tad early to me; I always associate them with the end of term and the philadelphus coming out beside them; I'd say the latter has another week at least before the blossom opens. The weigela was a mature shrub when I first sat on the grass of our wee back garden with my 16 month old firstborn and marvelled at our ownership of anything so grown-up as a house with a garden that had flowers in it, and the rose is blooming in a photo I have of that same child a year later  outside the front windows. I'm glad to see them all.

All this maundering on in a horticultural vein tells a tale of a day that held nothing extraordinary - despite its being Pentecost there were no sudden fires or tongues of flame, not outbursts of glossolalia or whatever. I did spend some time worrying about a misuse of a pronoun following a jussive subjunctive in a poem, but that's not exactly a visual thing ...

Time for bed, said Zebedee.