Hellebore

Today has been a very grey and (slightly) drizzly day...
BUT, it is Mother's Day, and I think (I hope) it has been suitably celebratory:
we had a good coffee morning (The Roastery on Wandsworth Road), and a cream tea this afternoon with scones, clotted cream and strawberry jam, accompanied by rose tea from Mariage Frères in Paris... Mmm.

My pictures today have all been of garden flowers: periwinkles (Vinca minor) on the wall of our neighbour's front garden (they're one of my favourites in spring time with their violet-purple, propeller-shaped flowers...), and hellebores in our garden. We have these deep purple hellebores, and paler (white) ones with purple spots; both varieties are beautiful and the (very dim) light glowed nicely through the petals of the paler flowers, but I like the brooding, dark look of these ones and it better represented my struggle with the bad light.

Oh, I also took one picture of a tiny pied wagtail on Clapham Common from the window of our car as we went for coffee in the morning; it did not turn out well...

p.s. The anatomy of hellebore flowers is actually quite interesting as they are atypical: what we might call the "petals" (purple here) are actually the sepals. Inside the sepals are the tubular nectaries (yellow-green here) which provide food for pollinators, and are the true petals of the plant, albeit highly modified. While the final structure is different, they are homologous to the petals of typical flowers as they have the same developmental origin.