My favourite hellebore

This is by way of being a bit of an emergency blip, as I'm still up to my fetlocks in eagle photographs. On the plus side, I have now marked over half of the 770 shots I took yesterday for deletion - though every time I revisit them I can feel myself wavering...

While I'm on the subject of, Skeena has pointed out that what I thought was a down feather in yesterday's blip may be a flying rod - an optical phenomenon most probably caused by the flight of a small insect. One page I looked at described these artefacts as the bane of the outdoor photographer's life, but I hadn't either seen or heard of them before - it seems that my ignorance knows no bounds!

Anyway, back to today: this is Helleborus orientalis 'Smokey Blue' - which I wouldn't personally describe as blue, but it is my favourite of the hellebores I've planted here. Being more subtle and less showy than some of the paler ones you can easily overlook it, but I'm always very happy to see it come through. I noticed today that it has seeded and that the seedling looks to be coming true, which is exciting - I'm not rigorous about stopping my hellebores seeding because I have so much planting space, but I don't usually expect the offspring to be high quality plants.

I'm way behind on journals, but I'm going to treat myself to some of your photos after Poldark - I probably won't have time to do much chatting, but I'm sure I'll be sprinkling some stardust about the place as I go. I can't believe it's nearly Monday again....sheesh!