Red and green

According to the Met Office, today is the first day of summer, but it didn't really feel like it - cool, grey and breezy again. Chris and I went to Stanground Wash to do some quadrats and only completed one before the rain set in. As the site is close to home we retreated, which proved to be a good move as the rain lasted for several hours.

Otherwise it was a pretty humdrum sort of day: a trip to Sainsbury's, washing and catching up with paperwork. By late afternoon the rain had passed and I took the camera out into the garden. There were quite a few bees about, but the light was too poor to get a sharp capture. I ended up deleting most of my photographs.

This was the best of a bad bunch, a photograph of the emerging buds of Knautia macedonica. Even so I wasn't really happy with it and decided to have a play in Photoshop, which proved to be fun and a distraction from all my other duties. I tried various filters and came up with two very different images, but this was my favourite - levels tweaked slightly, film grain filter applied and a border added (now that it's permitted!)

Freespiral reminded me that I still haven't chosen my book for Desert Island Discs. I have to admit that this is a bit of a conundrum. Without knowing where my desert island is located I can't actually come up with a title. I would like to take a really good flora of the biogeographical area so that I could spend my time identifying all the plants that I found. This would keep me absorbed during my enforced period of isolation, and could provide useful tips as to how the various plants I encounter might be used. As I write this I'm sitting next to a whole bookshelf of books about the British flora and it would be a real treat to have time to learn a whole new suite of plants!