Why be a gardener when you can be a miner?

Yesterday afternoon I took my tools down to the bottom of my bank, near the roadside, to plant my big potted Arisaema griffithii, which I dug up from behind my house when I lived at Arduaine. I'd grown it from quite a small tuber and now it's pretty big. As I thought, the ground was more stones than soil and I put off the job until today.

I came back to it today and must have taken as much stone as soil out of the hole. Working beside the road takes longer than elsewhere, as today when a neighbour came by and we talked for half an hour! The finished job is the extra.

I saw this plant in a forest in Nepal. We had walked through it on the way to Makalu and passed hundreds of them filling up much of the ground space. When we returned a week later they had all been dug up and bits of bitten tuber lay everywhere - the work of Himalayan black bears  looking for food, according to our sirdar, Chheduk Man Lama. I (naughtily) wrapped a bitten tuber up and brought it home, but in spite of treating it with sulphur it rotted away very quickly. Toxic bear saliva, no doubt!

Quote of the Day:

Aaron Burr Jr - “Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow. Delay may give clearer light as to what is best to be done.”