Stachys

As I've been talking about the near drought conditions we've been suffering for the past few weeks, and the serious effects these have had on the countryside and on invertebrate life around the village, I can hardly complain that it rained - hard - for most of last night and much of today. And indeed, I'm not complaining. It's actually a great relief, though I'm somewhat embarrassed that I used the garden sprinkler at the beginning of the week; I'm going to have to frame that as a kind of rain-summoning ceremony, I think.

It was so wet overnight that none of our regular nocturnal visitors came out to play in the wild garden, and by this morning R needed to remove some water from the patio pond to prevent it overflowing. And apart from a damp few minutes when I went out to fill the feeders (because even in these conditions the local fledgling bird life was queuing up to check them for food, and I couldn't bear to leave the poor, wet, fluffy things hungry) I spent almost all of the day sitting at my desk. This isn't necessarily good for my mental health, because I end up reading articles and opinion pieces about the Government and wind up almost unhinged with rage, and it certainly doesn't make me any fitter; so it was lucky that the rain stopped around dinner time, allowing R and me to make a couple of brisk circuits of the village without needing waterproof trousers and umbrellas.

I was quite cross with myself the other day when I accidentally knocked this flower spike off one of my stachys plants, but it turned out to be relatively happy in water, and has been gracing the kitchen in an old beer bottle ever since. This afternoon, faced with the choice of photographing a wet something out of doors or a dry something inside, I decided to break out the light pad and immortalise it. I quite like the photos I took of it in its container, one of which I've posted to Facebook if you're interested, but R prefers this one because of the level of furry detail.