Berberis

Many thanks for your kind messages yesterday on the subject of Arthur Hound. Sadly the poor old chap had another accident overnight, though there was less of it, thank goodness. Apart from that the runes were mildly encouraging this morning - he was lying on the sofa in the family room rather than curled up in his basket, and every time I walked through the kitchen his head came up like a periscope, clearly checking whether it had occurred to anyone that hounds could probably do with some breakfast - but I still thought that I should run the situation past the vet.

Luckily it was one of the partners on the emergency phone line this morning, and having heard the whole story he was happy to prescribe without seeing Arfie - so I just had to pop down to Broadway to collect some pills, and then work out how to get them into him. I had permission to feed him 2 tablespoons of scrambled egg every 2 hours through the day, so I broke up the first pill into small pieces and mixed it in with the scrambled egg.... and watched with disbelief as he hoovered up the egg and then spat out most of the bits of pill. I did get the whole thing into him eventually, but it took quite a lot of egg to achieve it!

He has continued to improve through the day - I spent several hours in the garden, pruning and feeding all the roses, and he came out a few times to check on me and see if anything interesting was happening; and this evening he went for a short walk with CH and the terrier. He's had several lots of scrambled egg, and a mouthful of rice, and I managed to trick a second pill into him this evening without the palaver we had the first time - so I'm a lot less worried than I was.

While I was gardening I noticed that the Berberis darwinii I planted last spring is coming into flower, and I thought it could afford to sacrifice a small shoot (this is only about 3cm long) for the purposes of a Flower Friday blip. To be honest, I'm not very sure why I bought it: we already had quite a large one with yellow flowers in another part of the garden, and I really disliked it - CH took the chain saw to it at the end of the summer, and I was delighted to see the back of it. I think I fell for this vivid orange at a time when there wasn't too much warm colour in the garden - and I put it in a gloomy space between two huge laurels at the back of the rose bed, which certainly needed some cheering up. But every time I look at it now, I think "You're OK at the moment, but you're going to get quite big, aren't you...?", and remember just how much fun berberis is to prune. Oh well - if it gets above itself, there's always the chain saw!