I've had a holiday!

So now I'm home with 1500+ photos to sort out, and a jungle in the veg patch. It's cold and drizzly and I've only gone and caught a cold so I'm not doing very much. Even sorting through photos is taking twice as long as my brain has turned to mush.

Here are some photos that sort of sum up my holiday. In good time I will post more, obviously, and probably put some into albums which I'll share. All in all we have had a fantastic time, could have done with a little less breeze/more warmth at times but having come home to about 12C, I am now thinking fondly of those 'cold' days in Spain when the temps dropped to about 17/18C!

Mandy goes bug hunting in SW France

Crosses the Pyrenees into Spain

Spanish bugs come hunting for Mandy (it's some kind of chafer beetle)

Mandy dips her toes into the Med and squeals with the cold

But does manage to have a dip in the hotel pool; first swim since 2000!!!

The Moorhen Lady meets her Spanish cousin, the Purple Gallinule (Porphyrio porphyrio)

Then visits a tropical bird and butterfly park and makes a new BFF

It really didn't want to get off me and pecked me and shrieked whenever I tried to get it
onto my fingers; I got snuggled for about 15 minutes before it finally had enough :-)

Unfortunately our car decided to play up and decided that, although it had crossed the Pyrenees at over 1600m, it would overheat every time we tried to climb a mini mountain after that. It had done this once before in the Basque Country 18 months ago, but after that holiday the garage could find no fault so we had forgotten about it, thinking it was one of those one-off things. Well it started again to the point that we could not trust it one bit, so had to do some hurried rearranging of the last 3 days of our holiday, as the two nights to be spent in a Casa Rurale up high in the mountains was not going to happen! So we stayed on longer in Roses on the coast and came home via the long and boring autoroute going from the Med coast to the Atlantic at Bordeaux then back up via a last night in La Rochelle.

The car is now history and we'll be looking for something more reliable. In the meantime, there are no mountains here, so it works fine....

I need a holiday!

Looking back over the last three months, I think we have achieved a fair bit in the garden! Between the two of us, plants have been lifted and divided, moved, planted out, the entire cultivated part of the garden has been weeded, edged, fertilised and mulched, or dug over and compost added, loads of trees have been pruned, shrubs tidied up, ivy and brambles have been ripped out, lawns mown (many times), compost and leaf mould turned and barrow loads of it used, seeds sown, onions and spuds planted.... probably lots more jobs done that I can't think of right now, so now it's time for a break.

So this will be my last post for a while as I'm off on a mostly birding holiday to Catalonia (northern Spain, on the Med) via a few days in the Pyrenees each way. Expect to see some of the photos on the blog when I return. Any potential burglars reading this, forget it, friends are coming to housesit!

This is a bit of a catch up post of some photos I have taken around the garden; some are actually 2 weeks old now, but with the weather turning cooler again it seems the second wave of daffodils are lasting almost as long as the first ones, and the tulips have been flowering for ages. There's plenty of colour in the garden now and a part of me hates to be away at this time of year as I just love spring flowers and blossom, but I also can't wait for a bit of warmth and both mountain and Mediterranean flora and fauna!

A recent photo of my Weeping Cherry by the pond,
which is absolutely dripping with blossom

Dwarf Forget Me Nots (Myosotis alpestris)
which are now self-seeding, just as I had hoped!

My front 'butterfly' bed a couple of weeks ago,
although the Euphorbias and Aubretia still look like this

Species Tulips growing through Euphorbia myrsinites.
They have flowered for ages and have just gone over now.

Armeria juniperifolia - Alpine Thrift

Second wave of daffodils opening up

We've been seeing more sun lately!

And with a bit of dew....

....it's amazing what reflections you can find

You have look deep inside tulips too, because they can be quite stunning!

A miniature woodland under my Rhododendron. I thought I'd lost
these Cowslips as I don't remember them flowering last year,
possibly because it was very dry. But now I see they have spread
and I have quite a few more plants than I remember!

Here are a few bugs I've found on my Euphorbias, which seem to be magnets for flies and other interesting little critters. I've managed to find time to take a few pics with my compact camera, hence not getting very close to the tinier creatures, but I've been too busy tending the garden this last week to photograph it much. :-)

Little Crab spider awaiting prey, or sunbathing.

I had wondered why I kept seeing these bugs on my Euphorbias, but a bit of research
tells me this is the Spurge Bug (Dicranocephalus medius),
and as Spurge is the common name for Euphorbias, it is not surprising!

A teeny weeny cricket!

Take care everyone and .... hasta la vista! Except, it's probably not that at all in Catalan. Nope, I was right, it's 'a reveure'. Far more like French then. Except (again) I've just discovered that Google Translate has a 'listen to' button, and no wonder they say Catalan is a difficult language to pronounce.... the pronounciation of 'a reveure' is nothing like you could imagine or possibly say if you've got an anglophone tongue. 

We'll stick to sign language then, pigeon Spanish and Franglais. We normally get by ;-)

I'll leave you with a freaky photo that came from my compact - after pointing up at the blue sky to capture my (edible) cherry blossoms, I then found the camera had turned everything else a weird blue cast, so the photos which followed were of psychedelic forget me nots and a purple pansy which had turned blue with blueish leaves! I worried I had killed my camera, but it appears to have recovered!

French Friday - Magnolia time at the Parc du Thabor, Rennes

I was in Rennes last week and went for a walk in my favourite park, taking my superzoom camera thinking I'd have a practice shooting birds, as they seem to be so much tamer in public parks than in the wild. As it happened, I was far more captivated by the sight of the magnificent Magnolia blooms and other tree blossoms, not to mention the formal spring bedding in the French garden which is reaching its peak now. I did capture a few birds which I've shown at the end of this post, but the flowers steal the show.

I hadn't actually intended to take photos for my blog; it wasn't until I downloaded the photos several days later that I realised I had taken so many! I wish now I'd taken a few more of the formal French garden, but if you'd like to see more pictures of, and info about, this park, and the beautiful buildings both within and surrounding it, I already featured it last year in this post which I made during Rhododendron season in May. In fact it is one of the most popular posts featured in the sidebar here.

This is such a beautiful park which is brimming with colour from April through to September. June will be the month that the early Roses start to bloom; the remontant varieties will continue all through to autumn and from high summer onwards there are the Dahlias too. Not to mention the botanical section and the formal bedding!

I won't caption these photos as I don't know the varieties of Magnolia and there seemed to be so many!

Below is a typical spring scene, with Magnolias at the top, the middle layer of colour are Pieris and I think Camelias, with Daffodils just flowering on and on in the foreground.

A couple of views of the formal French garden in front of the Orangerie.

An ornamental cherry of some sort!

This is one of my favourites, due to the different colours coming from the various stages of opening of the buds through to flowers. I'm pretty sure this is a Crab Apple. Now I wish I had one of these at home!

I did manage to capture a few birds, but these are fairly common birds.

Top: Left: Mr Chaffinch Right: Mrs Chaffinch looking coy
Middle: a Robin singing and looking a bit ruffled by the breeze
Bottom: Left: Jay and Right: Song Thrush 

You can click on these collaged photos (or indeed any of the images) to view larger.